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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

#131

Post by kuschku »

fs111 wrote: post #65
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)

as somebody else already said in this thread: this argument is irrelevant, it works just fine w/o the ß in Switzerland.

By that argument, PHP works just fine. I still prefer haskell, or even Java.

And I’ll prefer a natural language that tries to be as unambigous as possible, and with as little exceptions as possible, while being as expressive as possible.

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

#132

Post by kuschku »

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'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).

Actually, German has the Council of the German Language, which is what did this standardization effort of the new ẞ

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

#133

Post by VikingIV »

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.

Interestingly, it's an easy language & script to learn. In terms of what someone referred to as a "good global language" for universal ease of learning, it provides a great base.

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

#134

Post by kuschku »

tom_mellior wrote: post #93
fkistner wrote: post #86

Earlier 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…

That’s actually the worst thing you can do. That actually violates the relevant DIN standards for transcription.

You have to replace Ä with AE, Ö with OE, Ü with UE.

You won’t find a person named Müller under Muller in any database, especially not digital databases.

For electronic forms, always use äöüß, or, if the system happens to be an American one (the only form I’ve ever had to fill where I couldn’t use äöüß was a US DoD export declaration), use ae oe ue ss. Although be aware that some US software will have an issue with that, too, and just remove ß and assume äöü to be aou.

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

#135

Post by VikingIV »

tom_mellior wrote: post #111
geff82 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@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.

There certainly are. To their point, quite a few of the languages on that list with no grammatical gender are of a similar ancestor language as Persian.

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

#136

Post by robin_reala »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #74
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.

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 .

Blond/blonde and fiancé/fiancée would like to disagree with you (yes yes, loan words and you’re probably talking about gender in articles anyway).

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

#137

Post by kuschku »

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.

Is w then still a ligature of vv, and should vve remove it?

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

#138

Post by kuschku »

vacri wrote: post #51
legulere wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It started out as a ligature of ſ and ʒ, forms of s and z that don't exist anymore today in German. And it became a letter like æ did. Also this happened at a time where z was pronounced differently from how it is pronounced today.

I can't speak for other languages, but in English æ isn't really a letter in the modern tongue. It's just used when someone wants to be 'fancy'. You'll see athenaeum far more than you see athenæum, for example.

He might be referring to danish, where æ is a standard letter used all over the language.

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

#139

Post by carey »

gpvos wrote: post #107
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…

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.

It's probably for round-tripping with old single byte character sets. In this case, with Dutch VT220 character encodings.

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

#140

Post by mzs »

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.

For us Poles it's a toss-up whether MICHAŁ is interpreted as MICHAL or MICHAK at borders.
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