Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 October 23

= October 23 =

O'zapft or ozapft?
I just translated the article O'zapft is! from German. However, the apostrophe looks out of place, considering "o'zapft" is supposed to be a Bavarian form of "angezapft", where "o" corresponds to "an". I don't speak German natively, and Bavarian even less, so I don't know a definite answer myself. There is also discussion on the German Wikipedia at de:Diskussion:O’zapft is! about whether there should be an apostrophe or not. Does anyone who speaks German or Bavarian better than me know? J I P &#124; Talk 15:35, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I always assumed it stood for the omitted "ge" syllable. Apparently it isn't considered necessary and even wrong by some. (Conceivably it represents the silent "n" in "an-", however.) See also bar:Ozapft is.173.49.228.131 (talk) 15:50, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
 * There is no accepted orthographic standard for Bavarian, so every author can make up their own rules. But I see no strong argument for the viewpoint that a letter or syllable has been "elided" or "omitted". Where standard High German has Angabe, Bavarian has Ogob, since the prefix o- corresponds to German an-. I don't know the general rules for the formation of past participles in all Bavarian dialects, but German An ge batzter becomes , and zapft seems to be the past participle of zapfen in at least some dialect: A Beisl hod normal a große Schank, in dea wos Wein küht und Bia zapft wiad, ... (from the Wikipedia article ); Aus dem Brunnen is bis zum Bau vo da Hochquönwossaleitung aa Trinkwossa fian Hof zapft wuan. (from the Wikipedia article ). --Lambiam 20:48, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Your examples are Austrian dialects – these are bairisch (they belong to the Bavarian dialect group) but not bayrisch (they're spoken outside of Bavaria). For the discussion here, one should look at the Munich dialect. I agree that the notion of elision here comes from taking standard German as a reference, which is not really appropriate. The conclusion of the discussion on de-WP to keep the apostrophe came from a reference that displayed some "official" usage. Unfortunately that web page doesn't seem to exist any more. The bar-WP article bar:Ozapft is (written in the Munich dialect) is without apostrophe in its title, but uses the apostrophe in the text. So: who knows... --Wrongfilter (talk) 21:52, 23 October 2021 (UTC)