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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

#91

Post by Swizec »

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…

> QWERTZ is already bad for e.g. programming with all its punctuation (typing "]" means holding altgr and pressing 9), so that would make it even worse.

This is why I switched to a US layout a few years ago. Mac in particular makes US layout pleasant to use with European languages. Want a funny S? Hold S, pick what you want. All these are one longpress, and one num key, away: ß ś š

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

#92

Post by kazinator »

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…

German millennials must have something to do with this; it didn't bother anyone throughout the 20th century.

The strange thing is that it looks indistinguishable from the lower case one.

It's as though they have taken the lower ß and tweaked its font metrics to make an capital version, and not actually invented a proper upper case character.

For all we know, the examples shown could just be a of a lower ß taken from a different font.

They should have changed something substantial in the glyph, like added a corner, or loop or whatever; some feature that the lower case one doesn't have.

How about borrowing a Chinese radical: ⻏ ?

That's can't be, of course; this whole thing is part of some initiative to save Germany from cultural invasion.

GRÜ⻏ GおTT!

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

#93

Post by tom_mellior »

fkistner wrote: post #86
tom_mellior wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

Foreign officials ignore the umlaut when looking at your passport or when transcribing what you scribbled onto a paper form. It's (rightly) viewed as a modifier of a letter they know. (In contrast, the sharp S is a letter they don't know. Many people think it's a B.) When filling in electronic forms, you're typically better off leaving off umlauts.

Source: A lifetime of experience with funky accents in my name, not living in the place where the name comes from.

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

#94

Post by _kst_ »

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.

How are gendered nouns useful? (I'm referring specifically to assigning genders to nouns that refer to objects that aren't intrinsically gendered.)

My native language is English, and I never have to remember whether a "keyboard" or a "rock" is masculine or feminine. I've studied a few other languages (French, German, Spanish) that do expect me to remember such things.

To be clear, I'm not trying to refute your statement that they're useful, just asking how. I'm interested in learning about a different perspective.

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

#95

Post by malz »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #61
detaro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are some – e.g. Auszeit . And at the same time, we use ß in locations where it'd otherwise be ss. While it started as a ligature, its current usage doesn't fit that.

That doesn't mean it's not a ligature. If English still had a "th" ligature, the word "outhouse" wouldn't use it.

Interesting claim ... a similar compound word with a present-day ligature is "halfling." TextEdit renders that with an "fl" ligature, but should it not?

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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".

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by WalterBright »

matt4077 wrote: post #83
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?

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 t…

> eliminating a random letter

Reminds me of the scifi short story "Xong of Xuxan" by Ray Russell about a girl with a typewriter that didn't have the letter 's'.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?68165

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

#98

Post by fkistner »

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…

Sure, languages are about communication. As long as the other person understands what you are trying to get across, you're probably fine.

However, orthography does serve an important part in getting your point across. German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure. The Umlauts serve a similar purpose to make it easier to differentiate words.

For instant messaging this probably does not matter too much, but what about books, technical reports, etc.? What's to gain from not using "proper" orthography in them, which might give the reader more hints about the sentence structure and hence its meaning?

Schöne Grüße ;)

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #61
detaro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are some – e.g. Auszeit . And at the same time, we use ß in locations where it'd otherwise be ss. While it started as a ligature, its current usage doesn't fit that.

That doesn't mean it's not a ligature. If English still had a "th" ligature, the word "outhouse" wouldn't use it.

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by jacquesm »

matt4077 wrote: post #89
jacquesm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Agreed on that, but culture to me goes a lot further than exchanging messages on the net.

I'm thinking of France here, which has something called the 'Academie Francaise' (apologies for butchering the c-cedille in this context, the accent aigu 'e' in cedille and acedemie). The only effect this seems to have had is some token re-inforcement of French as a 'world language', but in practice it became a 'come up with French words for words where we already have a perfectly good one that everybody the world over understands but which isn't French'.

If that's culture then I'd much more concentrate on the content than on the form and remove these artificial barriers. Which of course will lead to more and bloodier wars ;)

Unicode is great, it made all languages equal. But I don't see the point of artificially making the problem worse by introducing new glyphs, that's the wrong message to send. We should aim for simplification within limits (not to go down to carricature) and if German got by so far without the 'capital sharp S' I see absolutely no reason to introduce it in the modern age. It's a step back, a small one, but still.

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