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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Interesting. In German typography we used to use lower quotation marks at the beginning of a quote and lower quotation marks at the end of a quote, both in handwriting and print:

    „Amazing“

    But the lower version isn’t found on the default QWERTZ keyboard layout so in personal digital communication (instant messages, emails, etc) especially you find double upper ones a lot:

    “Amazing” or ‘Amazing’

    The formal spelling rules haven’t been updated and you may still find the lower-upper vision in professional publications where the software adjusts the quotation marks according to a global setting. But most anything that is typed directly by a user will use the lazy lower-lower version.


  • sonnenzeit@feddit.detoMemes@lemmy.mlEnglish Language Problems
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    1 year ago

    Well at least it consistently unlogical. But wait: it actually depends on the grammatical case for example:

    die Mädchen = the girls das Haus der Mädchen = the house of the girls // the girls’ house

    So depending on context male, female, neutral articles are all used (der Mädchen, die Mädchen, das Mädchen) 🤷‍♂️




  • sonnenzeit@feddit.detoMemes@lemmy.mlEnglish Language Problems
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    1 year ago

    No idea why lol.

    This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it’s because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one’s grammar defaulted to a neutral case.

    As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix “s” to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there’s plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.