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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

#121

Post by tremendo »

mrkrab wrote: post #115
_kst_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). :)

And there are, of course, counter-examples: el águila, el ala. I believe the rule should just be "it sounds right", as to say "la águila" is well, a third 'a' in there, two or them consecutive, and is just harder to even pronounce.

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

#122

Post by jacquesm »

fkistner wrote: post #113
jacquesm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 over…

I can see a lot of trouble coming from this. Sort order for one. If a language this old didn't need a glyph up to 2017 it can be done without, especially if the use case is limited to all caps words. But I guess in that case you could convert its occurrence to SS first and then do the sort.

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

#123

Post by mrkrab »

tremendo wrote: post #121
mrkrab wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). :)

And there are, of course, counter-examples: el águila, el ala. I believe the rule should just be "it sounds right", as to say "la águila" is well, a third 'a' in there, two or them consecutive, and is just harder to even pronounce.

That only happens with a handful of words: those that 1) are feminine and 2) their first syllable begins with an "a" and 3) their first syllable is stressed.

It's similar to English which uses "an" instead of "a", but it happens very very very rarely.

(Needless to say, "águila" and "ala" ARE feminine nouns, what's changing here is the determiner so the two a's don't clash, not the gender of the nouns)

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

#124

Post by lbebber »

_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…

If it's your native language, or if you're at a good level of fluency, you don't have to "remember" it, it comes naturally.

I agree it's harder for students though.

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

#125

Post by germanier »

jacquesm wrote: post #122
fkistner wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 over…

I can see a lot of trouble coming from this. Sort order for one. If a language this old didn't need a glyph up to 2017 it can be done without, especially if the use case is limited to all caps words. But I guess in that case you could convert its occurrence to SS first and then do the sort.

Actually I was a bit surprised when I learned that Unicode only added a codepoint for it in 2008 (and even rejected an earlier proposal). While the spelling rules have said for some time to replace it with "SS" the glyph was used quite often, including official documents such as passports.

For sorting there is standard (DIN 5007). Replacing ß with ss is correct (even in the lower case variant). The other letters are more fun: ä is replaced with a for sorting, except if you sort a list of names. In that case you need to replace it by ae. Probably not something international software is aware of. The Austrian sorting of names is different and other languages that have the same glyph (e.g. Swedish) also have other rules (e.g. by placing ä at the very end of the alphabet).

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

#126

Post by TulliusCicero »

codeflo wrote: post #90
TulliusCicero wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I meant that at least AFAIK all the English characters exist in several languages. No special tics or dots that are unique or very unusual.

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

#127

Post by fkistner »

dctoedt wrote: post #104
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.

> 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 natura…

I don't think it is a given that languages naturally evolve to become simpler and only narrow-minded people are holding them back.

Languages evolve to suit the needs of their speakers. If people find themselves without words to describe something succinctly, languages will evolve to become more expressive.

I think compound nouns (as used in German) are a good example of this. They make the language more complex and harder to learn, but allow speakers to capture what exactly an object is or how it relates to others by slapping multiple nouns onto each other.

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

#128

Post by kazinator »

germanier wrote: post #112
kazinator wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> goes back to the 19th century

Yes, and so that indicates people are reviving a problem that their great grandparents didn't bother with.

> German ID cards only use capital letters and need to distinguish ß and ss

Are these newly introduced? If not, why hasn't it been a problem so far? If they are newly introduced, why do they only use capital letters?

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

#129

Post by kuschku »

Karellen wrote: post #44
kuschku wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the words Maße (measurements, sizes) and Masse (weight, mass). There’s hundreds more of such examples. ß and ss have a different effect on surrounding letters (the a in Maße is short, the one in Masse is long)

You're right! It's a good job there are no words in English where one spelling encompasses many meanings, of which some could even be contradictory, which would have to be inferred from context. That would be so bad !

So, you’re saying we should actually make German a worse language just for your own convenience? No thanks.

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

#130

Post by germanier »

kazinator wrote: post #128
germanier wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> goes back to the 19th century Yes, and so that indicates people are reviving a problem that their great grandparents didn't bother with. > German ID cards only use capital letters and need to distinguish ß and ss Are these newly introduced? If not, why hasn't it been a problem so far? If they are newly introduced, why do they only use capital letters?

The 1988 passports had capital letters and used ß as well, not sure what was used before. International standards (namely ICAO Doc 9303, starting in 1980) strongly recommend capital letters but I don't know the reasoning.
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