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.
Having French as mother tongue, I always find fascinating when the French and German official bodies go postal about such a topic. It’s like looking some parents complaining of the retro-influence of some common bastard children. :P
There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.
To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
Esperanto is still frustratingly complex with regard to phonemes for an international language. I think most speakers of many European languages don't realize just how complex their phonologies are on average. Slavic languages probably take the cake there with stuff like 5-consonant clusters that can even include sequences of plosives and affricates, but then you also have Germanic languages (and French!) with their insanely large vowel inventories. Compared to that, Esperanto is relatively simple, but when you look outside of Europe, having 3-consonant clusters or phonemic contrast between plosives and affricates at the same place of articulation (e.g. "t" vs "t͡s") is very unhelpful.
That said, it's still a massive improvement on English phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American varieties, the three-way æ/ɐ/ɑ distinction alone (as in bat vs but vs bar) is a huge WTF for anyone coming from a typical 5-vowel system. And then you have consonants like θ and ð that don't have clear 1:1 counterparts in most other languages, often not even as allophones of something else that you could point at.
Still, if you want to see what a more modern take on the concept might look like, I believe Globasa (https://www.globasa.net/eng) is the most active project along those lines. Of course, realistically, the likelihood of it actually being adopted as the universal language is effectively nil, but then that's also the case for Esperanto.
Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it. For Quebec this has always been a threat.
I live in Germany now. There are 10-15 times more German speakers in the DACH area than there are French speakers in Quebec. Even then, it’s weird that companies no longer bother translating their ads and slogans for the German-speaking market. It’s somewhat sad that every culture is slowly becoming a vaguely American, California-based culture.
Language and culture are intertwined. I feel that with the globalisation of both, something of value is lost. It’s only right to feel concerned about it.
English being an amalgamated language and thus uniquely flexible is part of its power. We have options in style choices many languages formally don’t permit, e.g. when to italicise or, if quoting, whether to “exclude punctuation”, or “include it.” (As well as comma use.)
As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)
But this is not even about language, it's about spelling. For some reason, people forget that these are entirely different things. We are currently communicating in a language where there's often times no relation between the written and spoken word at all.
I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;)
> There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.
> To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
Esperanto is not a "global international neutral language" either. While artificially constructed, it's functionally a Romance language, deriving over 80% of its vocabulary as well as the majority of its grammatical structure from Latin and/or Romance languages. The majority of the remainder comes from other European languages, primarily Germanic languages.
When I lived in Bordeaux I remember seeing billboards basically advising young people to not use "txt speak" and instead write "real French" to preserve the language.
It seems to me that today's French is not exactly the French of 50 years ago. Orally it does not look so different but when the same people write, the difference is apparent.
All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French.
For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune":
"plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."
> Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this.
While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo.
IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.
Living in Quebec, I see the perspective. It’s not that there is a particular hatred of english; there is simply an explicit exclusion of anything non-French. From such a perspective, it doesn’t matter if the One World Global Language is English or Cantonese or Esperanto, it must be fought against to preserve French
Aside: I used to assume the term referred to how French was once "the language of diplomacy", but it really comes from "Frankish", at a time when "Franks" was a broad term for peoples of what is now western Europe.
I don’t know but a very large and vocal portion of Americans would also flip out if something as basic as a new way to indicate possession was to be added to the English language. “Bending a knee to the _____________’s”
fun fact its English that is the bastard here...same way Creole was formed as language...i.e. borrowed from elsewhere in this case Danes(Anglo) and Saxon part of Germany...
and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...
> lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.
Being a linga-frinca has nothing to do with merits though.
Aside from "linga franca" being literally "French", it's a matter of which group of nations have a tremendously dominant position on the international scene. If China was to take hold of India and Russia and set the rules for the rest of the world, the defacto linga-frinca won't be English for long, however intricate people might feel about Chinese.
I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo.
At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising control.
Indeed, dictionaries and governments are just writing down what's already happening in the language.
In a way language is one of the only truly democratic institutions. We all vote for new words and new pronunciations by using them or not using them. The collective action of all these choices is the language.
France has a mechanism to try to stop this: the Académie Française [1] that publishes the official French dictionary. Rather than simply recording language as its used, they do actively try to steer it. They're most well known for trying to suppress anglicisms, e.g. in the early 2000s they pushed 'courriel' instead of 'email'. That one did not work out - email is much more common, and finally entered the dictionary in 2009 (to this day labelled 'anglicism' and discouraged over 'mél').
FWIW the German equivalent is much less prescriptive, it only weighs in on grammar / punctuation.
If you want to maintain mutual intelligibility of a nation you need a standardised set of rules to teach kids at school.
If you just let it "develop organically" without any governing body you get a wide range of dialects that will drift further apart from another and it will be very difficult to read any text that is 50 years old.
This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and are intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions).
True they adapt the standard over time following common usage, but the standard is the primary source of truth and many things are decided unilaterally regardless of common usage.
Maintaining correctness of language is not inherently a limitation of freedom. You are free to be incorrect in a free society. No one is entitled to respect for being incorrect in a free society. It IS possible to abuse authority over language to exert unfair control, but they are not always the same thing.
I think this is a naive view. Language does not develop “organically,” unless your definition of organic includes media corporations, university boards, and hundreds of other institutions which use their wealth to influence society. The idea that individual speakers of a language just independently start using specific words or phrases (or pushing the ideas behind those words) without any input or influence is simply not true.
Lots of people try to police English as well. It wasn't that long ago whenever any use of "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" would get plenty of reaction from the prescriptivists. Fortunately, that war seems to have ended.
I knew of a building named Water's Edge, but spelled "Waters Edge". The absence of a possessive apostrophe was bothersome but I realised there's a case for sacrificing correctness for things like ease of communication and how the words look.
An insight from Oscar Wilde:
> Mr. Noel, in one of his essays, speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to sense in poetry. No doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do. But he himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton's music. In the modernised version he provides of the wonderful Songe to Ælla, he mars the poem's metrical beauty with his corrections, ruins the rhymes, and robs the music of its echo. [1]
(^^ that's from a short but wonderful essay, worth reading!)
Reading this, I come away with the impression that European languages today are evolving due to the influence of "Vulgar English" (the lowest common denominator of English spoken by the most people worldwide), analogously to how Romance languages like Spanish and French evolved in the past due to the influence of "Vulgar Latin."[a]
We anticipated that the British or Americans would try to sneakily introduce their words about computers so we appointed a group of 70-something-years-old literature experts to create the proper words to use for computer stuff.
They came up with novel words that made us the laughingstock of the Western world and that nobody wanted to use. The state organizations were forced to, so for some time nobody understood anybody (this is a slightly romanced version but it was a mess).
Some of the words made sense, most did not. They were published by an important organization in France as a dictionary.
We did a lot of great things in computer science - this dictionary was not one of them.
In spirit, this kinda reminds me of the Czech chemical nomenclature – large parts of it (including original names for many elements) were designed pretty much single-handledly by natural scientist Jan Svatopluk Presl.
This was part of the Czech National Revival: a huge movement in the 1800s to prevent Czech language and culture to die out under the German/Austrian influence. During that time, the vocabulary saw a boom of new, original words (including ridiculous ones) to combat Germanisms at all cost.
And so to this day, a portion of the Czech periodic table has unique naming of elements, completely unrelated to their Latin counterparts.
For those interested, I highly recommend "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher, in which he describes how languages evolve over time, to the great annoyance of purists, but without either losing or gaining sophistication in the long run. It's a very entertaining read and has considerably reduced my irritation at "incorrect" use of language.
Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, lists “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as usable alternatives, though “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”) remains incorrect.
Why is 'Eva's Brille incorrect', but 'Eva's Blumenladen' ok?
I read somewhere that the apostrophe in English was only used to show elision, but that in Old English the genitive form changed the word ending to 'es', so the apostrophe was just indicating the 'e' had been removed.
For example 'hund' (dog) becomes "hundes" in the genitive form and was written "hund's" when the 'e' was elided.
‘If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.’ - The Crown of Life (1896)
Speaking of the English language influencing German, I want my Erdbeermarmelade back. I don't care that english marmalde cannot be made of strawberries.
Maybe English/Globish should go in the opposite direction. Apostrophes, at least for the genitive case, are awfully annoying: curly/non-curly, extra character, not pronounced, uncouth... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Criticism
I lived in Germany on two occasions and regularly consume German media. English words are all over the German vernacular, to the point that it's really, really annoying.
While I personally dislike this for "aesthetic" reasons, I do recognise that languages change and that's fine. It used to be that very few people would read and write, but with the advent of the internet, text messaging, etc., written language is also evolving more "democratically", similar to spoken language. There are also technological forces at work: I've mostly given up on writing compound words the proper way on mobile phones, because it just doesn't work well with autocompletion, for example.
That said, I really dislike how "bureaucratic" German spelling rules are, including this recent addition. Instead of blanket allowing the use of an apostrophe for the genitive (at least for personal names), the new rule allows it only in very specific circumstances. I'm of the opinion that nobody should have to consult a complicated rulebook in order to write well (in fact, the best way is to just simply read a lot and then mimic what you read).
Then again, most people don't need to care about what is or isn't considered proper spelling. In theory it should matter for official documents etc., but that doesn't mean that those never contain errors (quite the contrary, in my experience).
UNICODE and ASCII apostrophes are a bit absurd. For KeenQuotes[1], my library to automatically curl straight quotes, there's an Apostrophe type that defines variations on how to convert a straight apostrophe to a curled one. The main issue is that most suggestions are to use ’, which isn't semantically correct[2], and at one point Michael Everson noted, "the alphabetic property should be restored to U+02BC"[3]. I've bucked the x27, U+2019, and rsquo trend with:
/** No conversion is performed. */
CONVERT_REGULAR( "'", "regular" ),
/** Apostrophes become MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE ({@code ʼ}). */
CONVERT_MODIFIER( "ʼ", "modifier" ),
/** Apostrophes become APOSTROPHE ({@code '}). */
CONVERT_APOS_HEX( "'", "hex" ),
/** Apostrophes become XML APOSTROPHE ({@code '}). */
CONVERT_APOS_ENTITY( "'", "entity" );
[+] [-] crazygringo|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] psychoslave|1 year ago|reply
Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_languages
There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.
To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
Fun fact, Germany has a city where street names and many other things are translated in Esperanto: https://uea.facila.org/artikoloj/movado/la-esperanto-urbo-r3...
[+] [-] int_19h|1 year ago|reply
That said, it's still a massive improvement on English phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American varieties, the three-way æ/ɐ/ɑ distinction alone (as in bat vs but vs bar) is a huge WTF for anyone coming from a typical 5-vowel system. And then you have consonants like θ and ð that don't have clear 1:1 counterparts in most other languages, often not even as allophones of something else that you could point at.
Still, if you want to see what a more modern take on the concept might look like, I believe Globasa (https://www.globasa.net/eng) is the most active project along those lines. Of course, realistically, the likelihood of it actually being adopted as the universal language is effectively nil, but then that's also the case for Esperanto.
[+] [-] nicbou|1 year ago|reply
I live in Germany now. There are 10-15 times more German speakers in the DACH area than there are French speakers in Quebec. Even then, it’s weird that companies no longer bother translating their ads and slogans for the German-speaking market. It’s somewhat sad that every culture is slowly becoming a vaguely American, California-based culture.
Language and culture are intertwined. I feel that with the globalisation of both, something of value is lost. It’s only right to feel concerned about it.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|1 year ago|reply
As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)
[+] [-] deng|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ktosobcy|1 year ago|reply
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...)
[+] [-] chimeracoder|1 year ago|reply
> To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
Esperanto is not a "global international neutral language" either. While artificially constructed, it's functionally a Romance language, deriving over 80% of its vocabulary as well as the majority of its grammatical structure from Latin and/or Romance languages. The majority of the remainder comes from other European languages, primarily Germanic languages.
[+] [-] sjm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JPLeRouzic|1 year ago|reply
All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French.
For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune":
"plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."
[+] [-] 1-more|1 year ago|reply
While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo.
IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.
[+] [-] Muromec|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] freeone3000|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Terr_|1 year ago|reply
Aside: I used to assume the term referred to how French was once "the language of diplomacy", but it really comes from "Frankish", at a time when "Franks" was a broad term for peoples of what is now western Europe.
[+] [-] EasyMark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fredgrott|1 year ago|reply
and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...
[+] [-] makeitdouble|1 year ago|reply
Being a linga-frinca has nothing to do with merits though.
Aside from "linga franca" being literally "French", it's a matter of which group of nations have a tremendously dominant position on the international scene. If China was to take hold of India and Russia and set the rules for the rest of the world, the defacto linga-frinca won't be English for long, however intricate people might feel about Chinese.
[+] [-] wolframhempel|1 year ago|reply
At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising control.
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|1 year ago|reply
In a way language is one of the only truly democratic institutions. We all vote for new words and new pronunciations by using them or not using them. The collective action of all these choices is the language.
[+] [-] sweezyjeezy|1 year ago|reply
FWIW the German equivalent is much less prescriptive, it only weighs in on grammar / punctuation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
[+] [-] BlindEyeHalo|1 year ago|reply
If you just let it "develop organically" without any governing body you get a wide range of dialects that will drift further apart from another and it will be very difficult to read any text that is 50 years old.
[+] [-] oersted|1 year ago|reply
True they adapt the standard over time following common usage, but the standard is the primary source of truth and many things are decided unilaterally regardless of common usage.
[+] [-] jrootabega|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] diego_moita|1 year ago|reply
As much as we need someone to define what is http, TCP/IP or Posix we also need someone to define what is English, Spanish or any language.
If you don't believe it then try to understand whatever language a Venezuelan or Dominican speaks. That blabber is anything but Spanish.
[+] [-] criddell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moffkalast|1 year ago|reply
France is bacon.
[+] [-] nomilk|1 year ago|reply
An insight from Oscar Wilde:
> Mr. Noel, in one of his essays, speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to sense in poetry. No doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do. But he himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton's music. In the modernised version he provides of the wonderful Songe to Ælla, he mars the poem's metrical beauty with his corrections, ruins the rhymes, and robs the music of its echo. [1]
(^^ that's from a short but wonderful essay, worth reading!)
[1] https://ia800203.us.archive.org/23/items/collectedworksau12w...
[+] [-] cs702|1 year ago|reply
---
[a] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Romance-languages
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|1 year ago|reply
We anticipated that the British or Americans would try to sneakily introduce their words about computers so we appointed a group of 70-something-years-old literature experts to create the proper words to use for computer stuff.
They came up with novel words that made us the laughingstock of the Western world and that nobody wanted to use. The state organizations were forced to, so for some time nobody understood anybody (this is a slightly romanced version but it was a mess).
Some of the words made sense, most did not. They were published by an important organization in France as a dictionary.
We did a lot of great things in computer science - this dictionary was not one of them.
[+] [-] isametry|1 year ago|reply
This was part of the Czech National Revival: a huge movement in the 1800s to prevent Czech language and culture to die out under the German/Austrian influence. During that time, the vocabulary saw a boom of new, original words (including ridiculous ones) to combat Germanisms at all cost.
And so to this day, a portion of the Czech periodic table has unique naming of elements, completely unrelated to their Latin counterparts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_chemical_nomenclature
[+] [-] mattmaroon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] waterproof|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] forinti|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Tepix|1 year ago|reply
For example "Photo's".
[+] [-] mppm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bmulholland|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] OptionOfT|1 year ago|reply
Why is 'Eva's Brille incorrect', but 'Eva's Blumenladen' ok?
[+] [-] oniony|1 year ago|reply
For example 'hund' (dog) becomes "hundes" in the genitive form and was written "hund's" when the 'e' was elided.
[+] [-] em-bee|1 year ago|reply
is there any other non-foreign use of ' that is not such a replacement?
[+] [-] randomtoast|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] almostnormal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Tabular-Iceberg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mlinksva|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gerikson|1 year ago|reply
But the worst thing is usually the acute accent is used instead of a real apostrophe, which just makes it stand out even more.
[+] [-] Tainnor|1 year ago|reply
That said, I really dislike how "bureaucratic" German spelling rules are, including this recent addition. Instead of blanket allowing the use of an apostrophe for the genitive (at least for personal names), the new rule allows it only in very specific circumstances. I'm of the opinion that nobody should have to consult a complicated rulebook in order to write well (in fact, the best way is to just simply read a lot and then mimic what you read).
Then again, most people don't need to care about what is or isn't considered proper spelling. In theory it should matter for official documents etc., but that doesn't mean that those never contain errors (quite the contrary, in my experience).
[+] [-] thangalin|1 year ago|reply
[1]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/
[2]: https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-cha...
[3]: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/n2043.pdf
[+] [-] mglz|1 year ago|reply