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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

#191

Post by ygra »

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 there was a time where many typefaces actually included a capital sharp s and the letter was in somewhat common use, cf. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fes_%C3%9F, especially the second section. Limited availability of a glyph and no way of representing the letter in any digital text encoding probably meant it fell out of use and was more or less forgotten.

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

#192

Post by pgeorgi »

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…

"Personally I'd rather use composing"

Then use a keyboard with a compose key: compose-s-s for ß is already typical, set up compose-S-s for the few cases you need ẞ.

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

#193

Post by greglindahl »

john61 wrote: post #188
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…

A language should not be optimized for easy keyboard typing. The power of German comes through it's richness and beauty of expression, including ß. Downgrading this for easy typing would be the wrong direction.

Humans downgrade for easy typing all of the time. It's a nightmare for search engines.

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

#194

Post by untog »

emodendroket wrote: post #171
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 .

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.

As an ignorant English speaker who has learned enough German to get by, I wonder:

- what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?

- (more immediate to my experience) how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?

- how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.

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

#195

Post by bitwize »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #180
bitwize wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I got it from this video, which attributes it to Quintilian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enn7NIo-S0

And I seem to have swapped 'c' and 'k'; Quintilian wished to eliminate 'k' in favor of 'c', which is probably why you think there is no Latin letter 'k'.

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

#196

Post by ivm »

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 .

Spanish would be a much better global language than English or French due to simple phonetics and overall consistency.

Gendered nouns are really simple. I'd say the hardest part is the subjunctive case but it's not critical for communicating.

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

#197

Post by thaumasiotes »

bitwize wrote: post #195
thaumasiotes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I got it from this video, which attributes it to Quintilian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enn7NIo-S0 And I seem to have swapped 'c' and 'k'; Quintilian wished to eliminate 'k' in favor of 'c', which is probably why you think there is no Latin letter 'k'.

If you look at the qualifier Quintilian adds (the video translates it as "the letter C keeps its strength before all the vowels"), you can see why K was in use at the time -- the sound change familiar from modern Romance languages, where C "softens" to [s] or [tʃ] before front vowels, made indicating [k] before front vowels difficult.

That is an innovation to deal with language change. It is not a part of classical or old Latin. Quintilian isn't proposing dropping K because C makes it unnecessary; he's proposing retroactively not adopting K in the first place because the change that prompted people to use it is wrong.

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

#198

Post by interfixus »

emodendroket wrote: post #171
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 .

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.

No, that's silly. Gendered nouns are no hassle whatsoever in your native language, but a major stumbling block in one you wish to learn later on, believe me.

Danish is my primary language. We are blessed with only two genders, not three as in German. As closely related as the two languages are, I really cannot make a useful gender mapping from one to the other. That's one - not the only, but definitely one - reason I shall never speak German with anything like the ease with which I've mastered English, even though being exposed to the former at a much younger age.

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

#199

Post by thaumasiotes »

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).

It actually seems fairly intuitive to view Ä as a cheap knockoff of A whereas U and W are independent forms.

That would be wrong -- as the name suggests, W derives from U, similarly to how G, J, R, and U derive from C, I, P, and V. But it shouldn't be hard to see the intuition behind the idea that s is a "natural" letter and š is an unnatural modification.

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

#200

Post by Symbiote »

fkistner wrote: post #127
dctoedt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

English can do compound words, except with spaces between the words. This is better: is clear where the boundaries are. When the word combination is used frequently, it may become a single word, like pushchair.

My pushchair wheel lock mechanism is broken.

Or my pushchairwheellockmechanism is broken.

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