The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by clhodapp » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 12:52 AM UTC

faho wrote: post #110

_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…

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 neu…

The thing about this, though, is that it only works if you get lucky and none of your nouns share a gender. I feel like that undermines the argument at least a bit.

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

#142

Post by smsm42 » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 12:58 AM UTC

robin_reala wrote: post #136

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 .

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).

I think those is more like ram/ewe, just words to signify specific objects having gender. But words themselves don't have grammatical gender, not like in Russian and German, where every noun is gendered and all (well, most) adjectives/verbs/etc. have to be modified to fit the gender of the noun. Presents tons of problems for localization, because a) you have to have 3 separate ways of saying the same and b) you can not say something like "user has logged in" without knowing the gender of the user, at least not if you want to sound grammatical.

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

#143

Post by smsm42 » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 1:02 AM UTC

_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…

I speak two languages with gendered nouns, and I didn't find much specific usefulness for it. It's just something that is part of the package, so you go with it, and you can claim that provides more rich texture or such (though I'm not sure why knowing "table" is "male" and "government" is "female" really has any meaning, but maybe poets have one more tool to play with), but I'm not really sure it's that useful outside of using it for objects for which gender does make sense. But even then saying different word for "walked" depending on whether it was male or female walking doesn't really seem to me much of an advantage. It's just what it is.

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

#144

Post by clhodapp » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 1:08 AM UTC

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.

They make a language harder to learn and increase it's cognitive profile, especially for newer speakers.

I'll also make the contentious claim that they are clearly visible as being kinda sexist to progressively-oriented native speakers of languages that don't have them. Of course, if you honestly follow that train of thought, it doesn't stop at having gendered pronouns for inanimate objects. See https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...

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

#145

Post by inkyoto » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 1:13 AM UTC

faho wrote: post #110

_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…

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 neu…

The case of «das Mädchen» is a mere historical curiosity and doesn't require the memorisation as long as long the person in question is acquainted with basics of the German noun formation, i.e. the "-chen" suffix in German, when added to a noun of masculine or feminine gender, unequivocally results in the "neutralisation" of the noun gender, as well as the "umlautisation" of the stressed vowel of the noun being gender bent, eg. der Hund + "-chen" -> das Hündchen. It's a very simple rule, really.

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

#146

Post by gumby » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 1:18 AM UTC

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…

The use of ß permits consistency in the syllable splitting rule (split ,,ss'' but not ß).

It's a little weird that it looks and is pronounced like s-z but languages do evolve...and we no longer have need for the ch and tz fraztur letter/ligatures.

Would you always write ,,ue'' instead of ,,ü''?

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

#147

Post by gumby » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 1:22 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #77

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.

A number of other languages maintain that distinction as well. For example, θ versus δ in Greek, and th versus dd in Welsh. But when it comes to confusing aspects of English orthography, the list is much longer than that...

English spelling, especially for words of germanic or romance origin, is actually pretty consistent if you think of the spelling reflecting meaning rather than sound. As accents vary quite bit, not trying to be phonetic is a plus imho.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 1:57 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by carc1n0gen » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:00 AM UTC

johannes1234321 wrote: post #71

chmars wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't, the Swiss easily live without ß and use ss – the meaning is usually apparent from the context.

Well, many things are clear from context and spelling could be simplified. For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same…

I didn't even notice the changes in spelling until really far in. Blew my mind!

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

#150

Post by CrystalLangUser » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:15 AM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #126

codeflo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> tics or dots that are unique or very unusual

It's almost like a lot of languages have a shared ancestry. Differences may be unusual to you. Are ș, î, or ț unusual because they don't exist in English? Those phonemes aren't common in English which is why we don't have distinctions for them, but they're important in Romanian. Not unusual at all if you're Romanian.

By your logic, 대한민국 characters are weird and unusual also, and so on...