4 ms·

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" w

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

eleveriven 2y ago
You're onto something interesting here! The possessive style.
saghm 2y ago
> 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.
- complianceowl 2y ago
  I love Uno's.
- aiforecastthway 2y ago
  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.
  - xp84 2y ago
    > 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."
    - sgerenser 2y ago
      My grandmother would indeed refer to shopping at “WalMart’s” or “Penney’s”. Maybe a regional thing (she was from central PA)?
      - slobiwan 2y ago
        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).
      - burningChrome 2y ago
        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.
      - delecti 2y ago
        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.
      - ACow_Adonis 2y ago
        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 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!
- bradhanson 2y ago
  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”
  - complianceowl 2y ago
    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.
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  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."
  - saghm 2y ago
    My family is all from either New England or New York, so it might not just be a Midwestern thing anymore!
  - vidanay 2y ago
    I've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries at "Jewels"
  - kbrkbr 2y ago
    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/Grammar/Cases/latin-case https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program...
  - foldr 2y ago
    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”?
    - bunderbunder 2y ago
      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.
  - 2y ago
- alistairSH 2y ago
  ...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.
  - saghm 2y ago
    > 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.
- tim333 2y ago
  It also appears in their German website https://pizzeriaunoffm.de/ https://pizzeriaunoffm.de/ "Uno's Pizza Explore Our Delicious Pizza" and USA https://restaurants.unos.com/locations/NY/New_York 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.
  - saghm 2y ago
    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.
- TinkersW 2y ago
  Uno isn't a number in english though, and you wouldn't capitalize a number, so treating it as a name seems reasonable.
int_19h 2y ago
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.
iforgotpassword 2y ago
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.
locallost 2y ago
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.
- ygra 2y ago
  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.
DonHopkins 2y ago
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.
- ASUfool 2y ago
  You could be like Doug Hopkins here in Arizona and start a firm to buy hauses. https://www.doughopkins.com/ https://www.doughopkins.com/
- kps 2y ago
  Belongs to members of your family? Nickname yourself ‘Hop’, and it's Hops' kins'.
- FroshKiller 2y ago
  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."
  - tim333 2y ago
    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".
    - bagful 2y ago
      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.
colechristensen 2y ago
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.
- normie3000 2y ago
  > 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?
- thoroughburro 2y ago
  > 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_English_origin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...
chromanoid 2y ago
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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c2V4bOL1jgM
- mikae1 2y ago
  > 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.
  - chromanoid 2y ago
    > Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two. This is how language evolves nowadays. :/
    - mikae1 2y ago
      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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796834
anonCoffee 2y ago
Oh no not the heckin' pejoratives
trgn 2y ago
In the sausage haus they'll spell it bleu cheese on the menu, and it's there and then that reality starts to fray.

eleveriven 2y ago

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

saghm 2y ago

> 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.

complianceowl 2y ago
I love Uno's.
aiforecastthway 2y ago
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.
- xp84 2y ago
  > 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."
  - sgerenser 2y ago
    My grandmother would indeed refer to shopping at “WalMart’s” or “Penney’s”. Maybe a regional thing (she was from central PA)?
    - slobiwan 2y ago
      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).
    - burningChrome 2y ago
      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.
    - delecti 2y ago
      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.
    - ACow_Adonis 2y ago
      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 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!
bradhanson 2y ago
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”
- complianceowl 2y ago
  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.
bunderbunder 2y ago
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."
- saghm 2y ago
  My family is all from either New England or New York, so it might not just be a Midwestern thing anymore!
- vidanay 2y ago
  I've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries at "Jewels"
- kbrkbr 2y ago
  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/Grammar/Cases/latin-case https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program...
- foldr 2y ago
  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”?
  - bunderbunder 2y ago
    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.
- 2y ago
alistairSH 2y ago
...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.
- saghm 2y ago
  > 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.
tim333 2y ago
It also appears in their German website https://pizzeriaunoffm.de/ https://pizzeriaunoffm.de/ "Uno's Pizza Explore Our Delicious Pizza" and USA https://restaurants.unos.com/locations/NY/New_York 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.
- saghm 2y ago
  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.
TinkersW 2y ago
Uno isn't a number in english though, and you wouldn't capitalize a number, so treating it as a name seems reasonable.

int_19h 2y ago

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.

iforgotpassword 2y ago

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.

locallost 2y ago

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.

ygra 2y ago
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.

DonHopkins 2y ago

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.

ASUfool 2y ago
You could be like Doug Hopkins here in Arizona and start a firm to buy hauses. https://www.doughopkins.com/ https://www.doughopkins.com/
kps 2y ago
Belongs to members of your family? Nickname yourself ‘Hop’, and it's Hops' kins'.
FroshKiller 2y ago
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."
- tim333 2y ago
  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".
  - bagful 2y ago
    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.

colechristensen 2y ago

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.

normie3000 2y ago
> 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?
thoroughburro 2y ago
> 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_English_origin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...

chromanoid 2y ago

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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c2V4bOL1jgM

mikae1 2y ago
> 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.
- chromanoid 2y ago
  > Americentric Swedish Android keyboards are terrible offenders that happily splits words in two. This is how language evolves nowadays. :/
  - mikae1 2y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796834

anonCoffee 2y ago

Oh no not the heckin' pejoratives

trgn 2y ago

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