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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

#111

Post by tom_mellior »

geff82 wrote: post #82
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.

@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.

> the only true genderless language is Persian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... begs to differ. There are whole language families without genders.

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

#112

Post by germanier »

kazinator wrote: post #92
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…

The idea for a capital ß is pretty old and goes back to the 19th century. One edition of the DDR Duden had a capital ß on its cover. German ID cards only use capital letters and need to distinguish ß and ss. It has nothing to do with millenials.

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

#113

Post by fkistner »

jacquesm wrote: post #100
matt4077 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fre…

I have never understood the idea of protecting a language against foreign words. I think languages naturally strive to be as expressive as possible and will adopt words accordingly.

However, I think it is important to note that the ẞ is not a letter they just made up. Heck, even the picture in the article shows an old book cover, which uses this never standardized letter. To me this is just correcting a previous oversight and formally allowing (not forcing) people to use the 'capital sharp s', for example in print, where they want to typeset a title in capitals.

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

#114

Post by user5994461 »

pygy_ wrote: post #80
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…

You can find almost any laptop parts on eBay.

The Mac parts are usually 2 or 3 times as expensive as the similar PC parts.

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

#115

Post by mrkrab »

_kst_ wrote: post #94
mrkrab wrote: post #78

Earlier 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…

It's really easy, because "keyboard" is "teclado" which ends with o (so it's masculine) while "rock" is "roca" which ends with a (so it's feminine). :)

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

#116

Post by tom_mellior »

kazinator wrote: post #92
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…

This article: https://typography.guru/journal/capital-sharp-s-designs/ (linked from the featured article) shows some designs with corners and stuff. Some of them look less ugly than others. But in all examples except the Backstein one the letter still stands out like an ugly thing that doesn't go well with the rest of the font. More work is needed.

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

#117

Post by germanier »

fkistner wrote: post #106
tom_mellior wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The passports contain such a field in the machine readable zone. It has created some confusion in the past, as the transformations ß -> ss and ä -> ae are pretty surprising if you never heard of that.

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

#118

Post by bane »

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.

English would probably be 50% improved if we'd just get over things and add a "ə" vowel.

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

#119

Post by freehunter »

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.

English lets you omit the noun and only use a pronoun. Colloquial English lets you omit the subject sometimes, too. And it doesn't have official gendered pronouns.

This sentence is short. It is short.

"What did you do today?"

"Rode bike"

Sometimes we even use genders for nouns even though it's not official:

The ship sank. She sank.

Compared to German:

The dog jumped on the table and bit the man.

Aww shit there are three "the"s in there... if I'm speaking, I can just slur through it and say "d'Hund" or "d'Tisch" but that doesn't work when I'm writing... okay let's try to get through this.

Der Hund sprang auf... Hmm, well "the table" is Der Tisch, but hang on, I have to figure out what case this is... ah, accusative! den Tisch und biss Ah fuck, "the man" is "der Mann" but what case is this... I don't even care anymore... d'Mann. Nailed it.

It's not like anyone is going to say "he jumped on him and bit him", so the genders serve absolutely no purpose.

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

#120

Post by germanier »

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.

It is already standard (and always was) to use the ß in passports as this is the only correct way, problems abroad notwithstanding. However, if you can prove that it creates hardship abroad this is one of very few permissible reasons to change your name in Germany.
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