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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't mention it, but am I right in assuming this basically comes from McDonald's? There are a lot of places around the world that copy the "'s" where it doesn't exist natively, but only for restaurant names or similar -- like "Bob's" is the McDonald's clone in Brazil [1].

I'm mostly curious whether "Rosi's" and "Kati's" in the article are seen by Germans as intentionally trying to look "foreign", rather than the apostrophe "invading" German.

Like, if I go to a Sausage Haus, I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House". Nor would I ever call it the "idiot's house" because that would be crazy insulting and perjorative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s

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I would say "Kati's Ecke" (urks) should look modern (and fails at that, looks like cargo cult to me) or is an unintentional error of the owner because they don't know better (maybe obligatory English lessons in school compromised the actual rules of German). I am sure it doesn't look exotic to most Germans. We actually use the apostrophe in cases where adding the possessive s is problematic. E.g. "Felix' Ecke"

There is a very ugly mix of German and English we call Denglish in German.

And there are many "English sounding" things that are not English or also a horrible mix up for marketing purposes.

E.g. Handy for smartphone. It doesn't look exotic, but English which is usually considered to be something modern.

And then there is a similar concept as the Idiotenapostroph which is the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between combined words that are usually and famously not separated by space in correct German.

All those things are usually used in amateurish marketing and look just like that to the average German grammar enthusiast.

On the other hand especially in many professional fields English conquers the professional slang with gusto of the participants. A very hilarious take on such Denglish for software developers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c2V4bOL1jgM

> the Deppenleerzeichen which is a space between combined words that are usually and famously not separated by space in correct German.

We feel you over here in Sweden. Särskrivning (roughly “word splitting”) is a “problem” far greater than the apostrophes for us. Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.

> Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two.

This is how language evolves nowadays. :/

Or degrades, depending on how you see it. dagw explains how splitting or not splitting carries meaning[1]. I actually think it's a nice construct.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796834

can you explain the mechanism by which a swedish language keyboard becomes Americentric?

If they train the predictive text function on swedish text, I don't know why it would do English-y things, and if they didn't train it on Swedish how does it work at all?

It's very surprising, and interesting, to me that this category of problem, in this particular context, is even possible

I also split incorrectly German compounds because it makes autocomplete simply much more usable. IMHO a soft break +backspace key would be needed on the android keyboard to make predictions usable in compound languages.

Yeah the same in Dutch. Though we don't really care so much about mixing English customs with Dutch. In Germany the language purity seems to be a much hotter topic. In Holland we're pretty pragmatic about it. If it works, go for it.

Personally I think our "language culture" is overrated and I wouldn't care if Dutch just disappeared completely in favour of English.

It’s autocomplete being based on words. It knows computer and it knows keyboard and so in English it is trivial to type computer keyboard.

In German it also knows Computer and Tastatur, but I can’t use autocomplete to type Computertastatur.

Actually I just learned I can. Apparently this word is in the dictionary. But there are just so many compound nouns, it’s impossible for them all to be in the dictionary.

To make it work in such a language it has to understand about constructing compound nouns.

The core model seems to have a lot learned behaviour that it applies to all (latin) languages. One is that people sometimes fail to hit space between words and when that happens, in most cases, people actually wanted to insert a space between the two distinct words, and this behaviour has carried over to other languages.

Also In Swedish splitting the words is many cases not incorrect, but just changes the meaning.

For example is Swedish an "English teacher" (Engelsk lärare) would be a teacher that is from England, while an "Englishteacher" is a teacher the teaches the subject English.

So "He is an English teacher" and "He is an Englishteacher" would both be valid sentences in Swedish, but the predictive text model seems to assume you wanted the first one.

“He is an English Englishteacher” gives me a chuckle.

Yes. Is there ANY way good to type combined words using the default Android keyboard? I keep manually removing spaces, and then the spellchecker of course incorrectly marks the combined word as being incorrect.

> E.g. Handy for smartphone

For clarity, we already called them Handy when they were phones but not smart.

That's right, and I think Smartphone is actually competing with the good old word Handy, at least in the marketing department. I guess "Ich suche mein Smartphone." sounds somehow too snobbish in most casual contexts.

A handy means something entirely different in the US

An English chap once asked a US friend of mine for a cigarette, or as he innocently put it, "Can I bum a fag?"

As someone who knows English and is learning German, the words "Handy" for smartphone, or "Beamer" for overhead projector, or "Oldtimer" for classic car all sound very out of place. Even hearing "das Baby" for a nursing-age baby (instead of the German "Säugling") sounds a bit weird.

I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.

> "Kati's Ecke" (urks)

The worst I ever saw was an advertisement on a bar telling prospective patrons about the availability of "snacks´s". This is so wrong I can't even figure out how many distinct errors were made. (And yes, that's an acute accent, not an apostrophe.)

Using an apostrophe to mark a plural is often called a grocer’s apostrophe - https://www.grammar-monster.com/punctuation/using_apostrophe...

In English I’m actually ok with it for single letters or abbreviations- “your writing uses a lot of x’s and y’s”, “Can you pack away the CD’s and DVD’s”, but this is a personal quirk and definitely non-standard usage.

> It doesn't look exotic, but English which is usually considered to be something modern.

It might have looked 'modern' (or rather progressive) seventy years ago (or thirty years ago in the east); these days using proper German seems rather backward, dated or borderline fascist.

It got pretty absurd over the last decades though. My parents were complaining about the bill they got from Telekom -- why in the world were 'Ferngespräche' listed there as 'long distance calls' in a text otherwise (near) German?

Now, I would love to see more English being used in Germany, particularly in official communication as there are plenty of people here who's first language isn't German. But why not both? It's not that much more work. Denglish however belongs strictly banned into the realm of comedy (recently I've seen a gas station advertizing its "Power Sauger" :))

There was a funny guide circulating a few years ago about "Euro-English" used in the European Union and it's institutions, that was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.

> There was a funny guide circulating a few years ago about "Euro-English" used in the European Union and it's institutions, that was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker.

A lot of it is just (1) use of French loanwords to refer to EU-specific concepts (acquis is arguably the most famous), (2) use of genuine but rare English words – for example "subsidiarity", a word few English-speakers know, but the EU loves – but it isn't exclusive to the EU, Catholic theologians love it too (there is a whole section devoted to it in the Catholic Catechism), (3) the kind of common linguistic errors (false cognates, etc) which French speakers (and to a lesser degree, speakers of other EU languages) make when speaking English.

There are also some cases where it is hard to say if what is happening is (1) or (3), for example the use of the word "cabinet" (pronounced the French way) to refer to the office staff of a senior official

> The article doesn't mention it, but am I right in assuming this basically comes from McDonald's? There are a lot of places around the world that copy the "'s" where it doesn't exist natively, but only for restaurant names or similar -- like "Bob's" is the McDonald's clone in Brazil [1].

For whatever reason, it drives me crazy when I hear people refer to Pizzeria Uno as "Uno's". I've had conversations about it multiple times with different people in my family. There's no one named "Uno", it's a number! I try not to be a prescriptivist but for whatever reason this bothers me to an irrational degree, and I can't understand why nobody else notices.

I love Uno's.

The establishments are owned by a corporate person named "Uno Restaurant Holdings Corporation".

So calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website, for example.

> calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website

No, calling it "Uno Corp's pizzeria" would be the equivalent. Nobody says they're "Going down to Walmart's" or "doing some research on Google's."

My grandmother would indeed refer to shopping at “WalMart’s” or “Penney’s”. Maybe a regional thing (she was from central PA)?

Same in Iowa. I grew up talking about going to Penny's (as in JC Penny) or Sernett's or Gibson's (local department stores).

Midwesterner here.

My family always used "Penny's" to refer to JC Penny. They also continued to refer to Macy's as Dayton's for years after they had changed their name because the locations were all the same, just the name had changed.

Its funny because I too always felt saying "Penny's" was a regional thing, but more of Midwestern thing.

I'm from northern Ohio (Cleveland area) and it's only reading this thread that I'm learning/realizing that the name "JCPenny" isn't plural or possessive. My family always called it "Penny's" too.

The Australian English thing to do is to drop the apostrophe, use an optional creative contraction to make the phrase even shorter, and thereby turn the entire thing into a noun :)

I.e. Maccas vs McDonald's

Of course, the official website https://mcdonalds.com.au/about-maccas/maccas-story uses an apostrophe which is now making me have the same reaction as the Germans :( and makes me think it was run through some international filter :p outrageous!

I've also heard people saying "Aldi's" in the US.

The stores really were called Penneys (no idiot apostrophe present) until being gradually rebranded in the 70s and 80s.

some examples:

80s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Seattle_Pen...

70s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FW_Woolworth,_Penney...

60s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penneys,_Eastland_Ma...

50s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StateLibQld_1_46896_...

40s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seattle_-_Second_Ave...

Penney's was founded by James Cash Penney. The store was his store, that is, it was Penney's store. I think the omission of the apostrophe was kind of artistic license, but I'm only addressing the silliness of adding the "S," with or without an apostrophe, to something that isn't a person's name.

I can understand Penney's or Dayton's since those were people who founded eponymous stores. I suppose we have our answer -- people established a habit of the "S" when that type of naming was so common, and extended it instinctively to all stores even though there was never a Mr. Kmart or a Mr. Circuit City.

Fun tangent: I learned pretty recently that the southern California grocery chain is named after a man with the last name "Ralphs," so it never had an apostrophe and indeed shouldn't have one (in any language).

To be honest, even when going to the original Pizzeria Uno (or Due) I’ll probably still call it “Uno’s” ‘cause it’s a weird part of the Chicago dialect. We do the same thing for the grocery store Jewel-Osco, calling it “da Jewels”

Fellow Chicagoan here. It's funny you say that. My wife calls Jewel-Osco "Jewels" lol. I am just starting to realize that not everyone talks this way haha.

This sounds very Midwestern to me. Where I come from that would happen a lot. It wasn't necessarily that people didn't know the real name of the place. It functioned more like an inflection that helps to distinguish between the company, and a specific storefront operated by that company. Compare it to the distinction between "Alice" and "Alice's". Alice is the person, and Alice's is her house.

For example, you you'd say "JCPenney stock is up by 32 cents this week," but you'd also say, "I bought this shirt at Penney's."

My family is all from either New England or New York, so it might not just be a Midwestern thing anymore!

I've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries at "Jewels"

That in turn sounds a lot like the latin locative case [1], which was a case next to dative, accusative etc. to indicate place.

[1] https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program...

Is this not restricted to company names deriving from personal names (or words that are perceived as such), though? For example, would you say “I bought this shirt at Target’s”?

In general, yeah, but this is sneaking into the area of language where it's all ad-hoc conventions and there aren't actually any reliable rules. I suspect, for example, that there's a sandhi component that helps predict which store names do and do not get the S added.

People call Safeway "Safeway's" all the time. This one kinda drives me crazy.

Fred Meyer is also not "Fred Meyer's" but at least I can see why that would happen.

Then you have Vons, which used to be "Von's Grocery Company." I guess you go in there now and there's just more than one guy named Von in the store.

Ralphs also dropped the apostrophe.

Albertson's is now "Albertsons."

Kinda funny it seems like Americans are dropping the apostrophes. The exact opposite of what the article is talking about.

At least nobody is saying "Let's go to Costco's."

Also in the PNW, everybody called it "Penny's" for as long as I can remember.

I’m definitely saying “Costco’s” from now on; that’s hilarious to me.

I come from Michigan, and have found that the two fastest ways people identify me are 1) calling fizzy soft drinks "pop" and 2) that I add an "s", e.g. King Sooper's or Meijer's.

...it drives me crazy when I hear people refer to Pizzeria Uno as "Uno's"

Pedant Alert! The chain's name is "Uno Pizzeria & Grill".

You're not wrong, but the actual ordering of the name makes it less clear to a casual observer that there is no person named "Uno".

And the domain the company uses is "unos.com", so at the corporate entity has accepted the name.

> And the domain the company uses is "unos.com", so at the corporate entity has accepted the name.

Yeah, I've heard servers there say "welcome to Uno's", so I know I've already lost the battle. Like I said, it's not a rational annoyance though, so that doesn't make me feel any better when I hear it.

It also appears in their German website https://pizzeriaunoffm.de/ "Uno's Pizza Explore Our Delicious Pizza" and USA https://restaurants.unos.com/locations/NY/New_York

I don't think there's a particular rule that a number can't act as a name like 007's movies. Or that the thing possessing has to be a person, eg. England's weather.

I'd argue this is less akin to calling Casino Royale "007's movie" but rather if you referred to the sequel to the Godfather as "Part II's movie". I suppose this is a bit of a philosophical question of whether the index of something is the same as the thing itself, but I think I fall in the camp that things exist distinct from the way we identify them, and names are just labels rather than some inherent part of the thing itself.

Uno isn't a number in english though, and you wouldn't capitalize a number, so treating it as a name seems reasonable.

Words "creeping into English" is like what the entire language is all about.

If you take away the words brought in by immigrants and invaders there is very little recognizable left.

>I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House"

It's literally already the same word, we just spell it "wrong", likely out of French/Norman influence.

> we just spell it "wrong", likely out of French/Norman influence

Could it be that we spell it differently because the word was adopted before spelling was standardised in either language?

> If you take away the words brought in by immigrants and invaders there is very little recognizable left.

This is not true at all. Most of the core vocabulary is derived from Old English. We’ve borrowed a ton of vocabulary to expand new concepts, but the core has remained relatively stable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...

In Russian, the name of the restaurant did include the final "s", but without the apostrophe, so I don't think that's consistent.

Note though that in German, "-s" is also a genitive suffix, it's just the spelling that's different here.

This is gonna sound a little pejorative, but I've seen it at barber shops and little stores where my bet would be on ignorance rather than intentionally trying to imply anything. The guy next door did it too so it must be right.

I never liked Hopkins', but Hopkins's is even worse, and Hopkin's is horrible. But how are you supposed to spell something that belongs to several Hopkinses's? This is why I never tried to start a restaurant chain.

You could be like Doug Hopkins here in Arizona and start a firm to buy hauses.

https://www.doughopkins.com/

Belongs to members of your family? Nickname yourself ‘Hop’, and it's Hops' kins'.

The plural would regularly be Hopkinses in English. If I invited your family over, I would say the Hopkinses are coming. If I was going to your family's house, I would say I'm going to the Hopkinses' house. If you specifically were giving me a ride in your car, I'd say we're taking Don Hopkins's car.

It's not a big mystery or even particularly complicated, all regular rules of pluralization and the possessive case. I think people get tripped up in school because they see a specific affectation of dropping the S from possessive forms of the names of some historical personages, e.g. "in Jesus' name."

In practice there seems to be some variation in how people write it. Wikipedia has "List of Anthony Hopkins performances" Guardian has "Anthony Hopkins' 20 best film performances – ranked!". The s's seems rarer but the Irish Times has "Anthony Hopkins's new prestige".

In the former case it is a list of performances characterized by including Anthony Hopkins; in the middle, it is a list of performances belonging to Hopkins. The latter reads incorrectly to me as an American but as a possessive nonetheless.

Seeing "Hopkins's" is very weird to me. I was taught that the possessive of a noun ending in "s" just got a trailing apostrophe. Is that no longer the norm?

Edit: As a partially related aside, I have a friend who's right about the same age as me that's incredulous that I was taught to use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun when the subject's gender was unknown (or you desired not convey a gender) back in the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe it's just a regional difference in teaching or something. He's from the UP of Michigan, I'm from Florida. So maybe the same thing is true with possessive nouns

In the sausage haus they'll spell it bleu cheese on the menu, and it's there and then that reality starts to fray.

They're not trying to seem foreign, it's what happens when a foreign culture starts spreading. In that sense McDonald's has certainly played its part, but mostly because a lot of people use rules like these somewhat subconsciously.

E.g. this

> The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English greengrocer’s apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an ‘s’ is mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun (“a kilo of potato’s”)

This also happens in German these days even though in this context it makes almost no sense. And nobody is trying to copy McDonald's here.

It happens with other plural endings too ... the worst I've seen was Zwiebel’n. I'm not entirely sure how that one came into existence.

You're onto something interesting here! The possessive style.

Oh no not the heckin' pejoratives

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