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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

#171

Post by emodendroket »

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 .

That's silly. Gendered nouns seem difficult to you, as an English speaker, because you speak a language that doesn't have them, and not because they're inherently harder than any other language feature.

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

#172

Post by emodendroket »

smsm42 wrote: post #142
robin_reala wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I assume Russian and German are like French and Spanish, where the standard practice is just to use the masculine version if the gender is unknown.

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

#173

Post by emodendroket »

clhodapp wrote: post #141
faho wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are other possibilities, but trying to apply logical rules seems pointless; the whole point of language -- what actually makes something a language -- is a completely arbitrary set of rules.

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

#174

Post by emodendroket »

lbebber wrote: post #124
_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…

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.

What you find hard is mostly a function of what other language or languages you speak. People who speak languages without articles find articles extremely confusing in English and honestly I have a hard time articulating rules for when "the" or "a" would be appropriate.

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

#175

Post by emodendroket »

bitwize wrote: post #162
tremendo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It gets worse in French: un livre (book), une livre (pound, in France equal to 0.5 kg). They're even pronounced the same.

Yes, yes, but this example is so well trod that it immediately popped into your mind, and, what's more, try to think of a sentence where you might honestly be confused about whether "pound" or "book" was meant.

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

#176

Post by thaumasiotes »

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.

"Rather different" phonemes? There is no room for them to be more similar to each other without coinciding. And they contrast in only a single minimal pair, one element of which is incredibly rare.

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

#177

Post by CodeMage »

smsm42 wrote: post #143
_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 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 outsi…

Just out of curiosity, which language are your examples from? I'm asking because my native language is Serbian and it also features "male" tables and "female" government.

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

#178

Post by emodendroket »

noarchy wrote: post #166
microcolonel wrote: post #34

Languages with priesthoods make me chuckle.

>Languages with priesthoods make me chuckle. You'll likely be downvoted by the way you made your point, but there is a point to be made here. Native English-speakers, for instance, probably couldn't fathom there being an official body that makes decisions like this about the language. It just so happens that some of these official bodies make a point to stave off the influence of English on their respective languages…

Right, we don't have an academy of English. Instead we have several competing organizations publishing dictionaries and style guides to the same purpose.

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

#179

Post by thaumasiotes »

VikingIV wrote: post #135
tom_mellior wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

English, German, French, etc are also "of a similar ancestor language as Persian".

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

#180

Post by thaumasiotes »

bitwize wrote: post #168
johannes1234321 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the ways in which we know how classical Latin was pronounced, is the recovered writings of a Roman scholar who seriously proposed dropping the letter 'k' as redundant and replacing it with 'c' anywhere it is used. Should give you a hint as to the actual pronunciation of "veni, vidi, vici". EDIT: Erroneously swapped 'c' and 'k'.

> the recovered writings of a Roman scholar who seriously proposed dropping the letter 'c' as redundant and replacing it with 'k' anywhere it is used

Can you source this? It doesn't make a lot of sense -- the Latin letter C wasn't redundant, because there is no Latin letter K.

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