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The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

typography.guru

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Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#71

Post by johannes1234321 »

chmars wrote: post #48
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?

It isn't, the Swiss easily live without ß and use ss – the meaning is usually apparent from the context.

Well, many things are clear from context and spelling could be simplified.

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.

The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

(Attributed to Mark Twain)

About Swiss and the as: I remember one funny occurrence I had while reading a Swiss paper. It took me two paragraphs in an article "Neue Busse für $company" till I understood this wasn't about busses, but a penalty fine (Buße) Both are pronounced differently and mean different things.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#72

Post by 4ad »

filmor wrote: post #24
zzleeper wrote: post #12

Interestingly, this is the opposite as what happened in Spanish [1] We had two extra letters, CH and LL that were just ligatures, so we dropped them and everyone is better off. [1] http://www.rae.es/consultas/exclusion-de-ch-y-ll-del-abeceda...

As other's have written already, ß is not simply a ligature. Since the orthography reform in the nineties it universally indicates that the preceding vowel is lengthened, dropping it would lead to a large amount of homophones. An example is Maße (measures) vs Masse (mass).

What a non-issue.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#73

Post by matt4077 »

faho wrote: post #5

As a german, I see this as a step in the wrong direction. The sharp S is a PITA to begin with, so I'd rather abolish it completely. Now there's a whole bunch of complications coming from this - how do I type this? To type lowercase "ß", I press the key above "p" (in the same position as with qwerty) and "ü" (to the right of it), which will do "?" when pressed together with shift. So do we move "?" somewhere else? QWE…

This really doesn't have much of any effect on anybody–as you noticed yourself. It's for use in ALL CAPS, which is mostly done in software these days (i. e. headlines formatted with CSS), so you actually don't have to type it.

It in fact simplifies lots of things, because the ß->SS capitalisation screws up all sorts of algorithms: It's unusual to replace a single lower caps letter with two capital letters. It's also not reversible, so you actually need a dictionary to do 'AUSSENTHEMPERATUR'.lowercase.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#74

Post by TulliusCicero »

pavlov wrote: post #68
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?

Annoyingly, English uses "th" for two rather different phonemes: þ ("thing") and ð ("this"). Icelandic maintains this useful distinction. I feel like English spelling would need at least half a dozen more letters to disambiguate. As it is, English is actually a not great choice for a global language because it's so unphonetic.

Every language has something dumb about it that makes it "not a great choice for a global language". English spelling is a nightmare, but the grammar isn't too bad, and most importantly, it has no gendered nouns.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#75

Post by TulliusCicero »

ainar-g wrote: post #46
faho wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This change fixes an internal inconsistency I agree that it does! "ß" turning into "SS" when uppercasing is awful. >It feels like replying to some bugfix in, say, Ruby with something like "I never liked Ruby anyhow". In this analogy, "Ruby" would be the German language. And in that case... yes, I can disagree with a bugfix if it makes matters more complicated! I can argue that something is a misfeature, like ß is. R…

>"ß" is not a defining feature of the German language. It is though. As a language-lover and German-learner, AFAIK, no other language uses this letter. "ß", along with less exclusive "ä", "ö", and "ü" are what distinguishes German orthography from other languages.

English seems to manage okay with no 'special' latin characters.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#76

Post by jacquesm »

bla2 wrote: post #6
faho wrote: post #5

As a german, I see this as a step in the wrong direction. The sharp S is a PITA to begin with, so I'd rather abolish it completely. Now there's a whole bunch of complications coming from this - how do I type this? To type lowercase "ß", I press the key above "p" (in the same position as with qwerty) and "ü" (to the right of it), which will do "?" when pressed together with shift. So do we move "?" somewhere else? QWE…

As a German, I disagree with you. German's not English, even though you might prefer if it was. Others don't. It's fine that it uses the letters it ended up with historically. This change fixes an internal inconsistency, your reply seems fairly irrelevant. It feels like replying to some bugfix in, say, Ruby with something like "I never liked Ruby anyhow".

As a European, I disagree with you. I don't have the German letters on my keyboard and I've yet to come across someone from Germany who took exception to my butchered German spelling. I do the same in my own language which has a compound letter for ij, which I wouldn't even know how to create and which is part of my name.

Communication is not about glyps, it's about getting meaning across from one person to another and whatever works is good enough.

Schoene gruesse :)

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#77

Post by _delirium »

pavlov wrote: post #68
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?

Annoyingly, English uses "th" for two rather different phonemes: þ ("thing") and ð ("this"). Icelandic maintains this useful distinction. I feel like English spelling would need at least half a dozen more letters to disambiguate. As it is, English is actually a not great choice for a global language because it's so unphonetic.

A number of other languages maintain that distinction as well. For example, θ versus δ in Greek, and th versus dd in Welsh. But when it comes to confusing aspects of English orthography, the list is much longer than that...

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#78

Post by mrkrab »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #74
pavlov wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annoyingly, English uses "th" for two rather different phonemes: þ ("thing") and ð ("this"). Icelandic maintains this useful distinction. I feel like English spelling would need at least half a dozen more letters to disambiguate. As it is, English is actually a not great choice for a global language because it's so unphonetic.

Every language has something dumb about it that makes it "not a great choice for a global language". English spelling is a nightmare, but the grammar isn't too bad, and most importantly, it has no gendered nouns .

What's so bad about gendered nouns? They are quite useful, especially when the language allows you to omit the noun and leave only a pronoun, or maybe the entire subject altogether.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#79

Post by jacquesm »

pishpash wrote: post #56
errata wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you meant it the other way 'round? long/short, I mean. Otherwise I totally agree, ß is important to distinguish phonetics.

It is important but you are marking the wrong thing, you could make it Māsse and Masse if you really cared.

Or Maesse, which is closer to what it sounds like anyway.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#80

Post by pygy_ »

faho wrote: post #5

As a german, I see this as a step in the wrong direction. The sharp S is a PITA to begin with, so I'd rather abolish it completely. Now there's a whole bunch of complications coming from this - how do I type this? To type lowercase "ß", I press the key above "p" (in the same position as with qwerty) and "ü" (to the right of it), which will do "?" when pressed together with shift. So do we move "?" somewhere else? QWE…

Belgian here, I grew up on AZERTY, but ended up learning QWERTY for coding.

Story time... My last laptop had a physical QWERTY keyboard, but it met a fateful end (I drove on it) and had to replace it immediately. Good luck finding a QWERTY MacBook in the stores of the corner of France I currently live in... So now I'm typing QWERTY on an AZERTY keyboard.

Not sure how it works on PCs, but OS X has a "US. International" keyboard mode, were ` ' " and ^ àré dëâd keys to type accented characters. You can toggle plain US and "US International" with a simple keyboard shortcut.

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