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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

#151

Post by CrystalLangUser »

Swizec wrote: post #91
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…

> QWERTZ is already bad for e.g. programming with all its punctuation (typing "]" means holding altgr and pressing 9), so that would make it even worse. This is why I switched to a US layout a few years ago. Mac in particular makes US layout pleasant to use with European languages. Want a funny S? Hold S, pick what you want. All these are one longpress, and one num key, away: ß ś š

I personally think the bubble takes way too long to pop up. There are hotkey alternatives to a lot of the common characters. alt+u makes the next character have an umlaut (¨). alt+e -> ´. alt+s -> ß. alt+c -> ç, etc.

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

#152

Post by evincarofautumn »

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.

There have been many, many failed attempts at introducing phonetic/phonemic/simplified spelling systems for English. It’s a surprisingly hard problem both technically and socially.

For starters, we probably can’t split “th” into “þ” and “ð” because of words like “with”, where “wiþ” and “wið” are in free variation; even words like “thank”, which you might expect to be uniformly “þank”, show up as “ðank” in some dialects, sometimes also in free variation.

English consonants are pretty consistent across dialects, with a few rare exceptions (like [x] in Scottish “loch”), but the vowels are all over the place phonetically. Even attempts to represent them phonemically (e.g. the 24 Standard Lexical Sets[1]) aren’t perfect across dialects because of the presence of different vowel mergers & splits, as well as one-off exceptions.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set

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

#153

Post by jankassens »

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 !

See "read" with a different pronunciation depending on tense (/riːd/ vs. /red/).

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

#154

Post by ferongr »

kuschku wrote: post #134
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…

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…

Do people outside Germany even care about DIN standards?

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

#155

Post by Tomte »

Again, an unelected body decides on my mother tongue (the orthography reform of 1996 was the same, but more catastrophic).

The Rechtschreibrat is tasked with codifying existing changes to the language, not inventing something new.

Capital ß does not exist and never did. Before a few years ago when Unicode accepted it and a handful of designers played with it, there was exactly one documented occurence in hundreds of years of the language: the title page of one singular run of an orthography book in the GDR. The runs before and after that had SS.

I think there should have been an uprising (violent, if necessary) in 1996, but the ship has sailed. Very few people care about their language. Heck, most people get the simplest parts of orthography wrong and imitate English patterns (even the famous contatenative property is dying, people are just writing constituent words serially, with space in between).

Never forgive, never forget.

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

#156

Post by Tomte »

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).

Except "café"

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

#157

Post by Tomte »

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.

The idea is old, yes. But except from the one singular example, noone ever used it. It has no place in the language.

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

#158

Post by dcposch »

Tomte wrote: post #155

Again, an unelected body decides on my mother tongue (the orthography reform of 1996 was the same, but more catastrophic). The Rechtschreibrat is tasked with codifying existing changes to the language, not inventing something new. Capital ß does not exist and never did. Before a few years ago when Unicode accepted it and a handful of designers played with it, there was exactly one documented occurence in hundreds of…

> I think there should have been an uprising (violent, if necessary) in 1996, but the ship has sailed.

Lol you want a popular revolution over the Rechtschriebereform?

Strong contender for First World Problem hall of fame here.

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

#159

Post by Tomte »

dcposch wrote: post #158
Tomte wrote: post #155

Again, an unelected body decides on my mother tongue (the orthography reform of 1996 was the same, but more catastrophic). The Rechtschreibrat is tasked with codifying existing changes to the language, not inventing something new. Capital ß does not exist and never did. Before a few years ago when Unicode accepted it and a handful of designers played with it, there was exactly one documented occurence in hundreds of…

> I think there should have been an uprising (violent, if necessary) in 1996, but the ship has sailed. Lol you want a popular revolution over the Rechtschriebereform? Strong contender for First World Problem hall of fame here.

You're a prime example of what I've talked about: people without any love for or sense of their language (whichever one in your case).

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

#160

Post by 3131s »

Tomte wrote: post #157
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.

The idea is old, yes. But except from the one singular example, noone ever used it. It has no place in the language.

That can be said about every feature of every language at some point in time.
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