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

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

#81

Post by tom_mellior »

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…

> I see this as a step in the wrong direction.

Agreed. The council's press release mentions that this will enable the use of the character in passports. The horror for the poor people who have this in their name! I hope for their sake they will have a say in this. Otherwise, filling in any form abroad will become a headache.

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

#82

Post by geff82 »

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.

@TulliusCicero: the only true genderless language is Persian. There is no he, she, it even. There is no way to hear if someone is man or woman without a precise context or asking "Man or Women?", which I often hear Iranians ask in Conversations.

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

#83

Post by matt4077 »

tptacek wrote: post #29
bla2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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

The rules of spelling and pronunciation have evolved over time, and include all sorts of nonlinear effects: the 'ss' indicates short vowels around it (as all double consonants do), and a sharp, voiceless 's'. For 's' it's the other way around. So ß fills a somewhat required place.

That's not to say people wouldn't get around it, or get used to it. But trying to change the rules of languages top-down are like trying to change biology top-down: it makes a lot of sense, and yes, cells are the worst sort side-effect spaghetti-code, ever. But it won't make life easier.

It's very much comparable to eliminating some random letter from the english alphabet. Life would definitely go on, but it would seem to be a net-negative suggestion to do so now. Hey, keyboards would be so much easier if we switched to binary.

There's obviously the other side of that argument, saying that an alphabet of 80 letters is probably not the best idea. But having studied biology, I've seen too many examples of a messy long-term process arriving at something approaching an optimism, and of people taking a long time to grasp the elegance of some of these solutions, to be willing to entrust this domain to top-down decision making,

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

#84

Post by roywiggins »

champagnepapi wrote: post #49

ASK HN: Why is this at the top of HN?

Because it was up voted.

HN likes linguistic things, and typographical things, and Unicode things, and this is all three. And the weird .toUpper behavior required by ß->SS is an old example of string-handling pitfalls that non-German programmers probably remember (and obviously German ones know about the issue!)

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

#85

Post by twiss »

mrkrab wrote: post #78
TulliusCicero wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They may be useful, but they make a language much harder to learn to speak correctly, which is a downside for a lingua franca.

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

#86

Post by fkistner »

tom_mellior wrote: post #81
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…

> I see this as a step in the wrong direction. Agreed. The council's press release mentions that this will enable the use of the character in passports. The horror for the poor people who have this in their name! I hope for their sake they will have a say in this. Otherwise, filling in any form abroad will become a headache.

How is this different from names that contain an umlaut (ÄÖÜ)?

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

#87

Post by faho »

matt4077 wrote: post #69
pishpash wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think speakers of the language that invented Worcester Sauce are in a position to give prescriptive logical advice to other languages. Languages are the products of a sort of evolutionary processes. Rarely do the conventions appear to be the best possible solution at first sight. But it isn't uncommon for convincing arguments to appear later, showing that some seemingly arbitrary rules are almost beautifully…

> I don't think speakers of the language that invented Worcester Sauce are in a position to give prescriptive logical advice to other languages.

Of course they are. They didn't invent it, and even if they did they could still be right on _this_ argument.

>Not only do common words tend to be shorter than uncommon ones; I've also seen examples of word pairs that would be dangerous to confuse to be further apart in spelling and pronunciation than statistics would suggest

And there's a whole bunch of counter-examples for that. One is the german "zwei" (the number 2) and "drei" (3). The german military commonly uses "zwo" for 2 because those two are so easily confused.

It's not like our languages are willfully poorly designed, but there's still a bunch of bad decisions in there, and we might be in a position to fix it, especially when it comes to things like spelling (which is mostly decreed from on high, since what schools teach matters most).

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

#88

Post by qu4z-2 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #75
ainar-g wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

What a coincidence that English manages fine with just the letters in ASCII.

Seriously though, what definition of "special Latin characters" are you using? Italian does just fine with fewer...

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

#89

Post by matt4077 »

jacquesm wrote: post #76
bla2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Of course nobody is going to fault you for succumbing to such practicalities, and it's perfectly fine to use substitutions when necessary.

But there's something to be said for preserving a few aspects of the diversity of cultures, as each one acts as its own preserve of centuries of wisdom. Hey, it's the German language that gave you Uber (the name). Which should actually be Über, but I digress. (and it'll be Over soon enough, anyway).

We've come a long way with making unicode universally available, and there's really no reason to give up now when it's almost done. It's not a big issue for German, but cultures with non-latin script would rightfully be offended if forced to abandon it for ASCII, in the same way that the world would be poorer if all restaurants were replaced by McDonald's.

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

#90

Post by codeflo »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #75
ainar-g wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

What do you mean by "special"? If you mean "can be encoded in US-ASCII", then that's a bit circular, because that character set was obviously designed to encode the English language. In a parallel universe where the ancient Romans had designed a character set, it would be the English language that would require all those weird unicode characters like "J" and "U" (which didn't exist in the Roman alphabet).
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