"straße".toUpperCase() is still "STRASSE", though.
Wondering how any current i18n system will get out of this mess ;)
The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
101–110 of 377 posts
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
And there are double-s words in German (like "Amtssicherheit", off the top of my head) that don't use a sharp S - it's not a ligature.
It's actually a ligature for "sz" - at least it used to be. You probably won't find many german words that have an actual "sz" in them.
Yes, historically it's a ligature.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#103Earlier 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?
It's rather like using the ^ symbol for exponentiation: it's a commonly accepted workaround when you're limited to ASCII, but it's not the proper notation.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#104Earlier 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.
> As it is, English is actually a not great choice for a global language because it's so unphonetic.
English would be a more-useful global language — in that it'd be easier for non-native speakers to learn and use it — if we pedants who secretly look down on anything less than "proper" spelling and grammar (and I'm embarrassed to be one of them) would get over ourselves and accept simpler, easier forms as they naturally arise.
EXAMPLE: Less vs. fewer — it's disconcerting to read or hear, e.g., less and less people when the supposedly-correct form is fewer and fewer people; there's no logical reason that the former shouldn't do double duty, as it does in math.
EXAMPLE: Who vs. whom.
EXAMPLE: It's vs. its.
EXAMPLE: Different forms for the subjunctive — e.g., if I was a carpenter (supposedly-incorrect) vs. if I were a carpenter.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#105Earlier 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…
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 wor…
> German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure.
For Germans, maybe. And maybe for Germans it is a bit harder to read an English text where only proper names and the first word of a sentence is capitalized. But I routinely forget to capitalize even proper names (especially with companies, days of the week, names of months and such), and I've never felt that having upper case for the first letter of each noun made German any easier to parse, I'm mostly blind to 'case' and have to really remind myself that 'I' in English is with a capital letter.
In Dutch this is even stronger, we do not capitalize most of those except for proper names and the first letter of a sentence.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
I see your point. But wouldn't this problem be better addressed with an additional field on one's passport, which states the name in a standardized alphabet, e.g. ASCII?
Asian passports seem to include something like this.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#107Earlier 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…
I've seen Greek, Russian and even Arabic written with Latin letters on the internet for convenience. So ss for ß or the other way round is only a minor inconvenience, if even that. By the way, typing ij as two letters is the official way to do it; only in handwriting and occasional signage will you see it written as one glyph. I have no idea why the ij digraph/ligature ended up in Unicode, really.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 statem…
I translate Italian 16th century dance manuals into English. There are many pronouns in dance descriptions, and having gender as an extra clue is very helpful when I'm trying to figure out what pronouns refer to.
Now, in English, the author might have used fewer pronouns if they were ambiguous... but I've seen a lot of ambiguous pronouns in English writing.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#109As 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…
> how do I type this?
On Linux, capslock then ß works. No idea how to do that on Windows, though.
> so the only reason to use it is to write a word in ALL CAPS.
Yep, it was only added for ALL CAPS. It was actually added to Unicode back in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E
IMO it makes sense that it exists. ß -> SS -> ss is a lossy transformation.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 statem…
I'd imagine the use is that it sometimes makes pronouns more useful.
Substituting "he" and "she" for gendered articles:
"I have he keyboard and she rock. He is large and she is grey"
Without that, I'd have to repeat the "keyboard" and "rock".
The question of course is whether this is worth all that rote memorization (since no language I know is fully logical here - german's "Das Mädchen" - girls are apparently of neutral gender - being a particularly egregious example).