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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

#201

Post by Symbiote »

bla2 wrote: post #54
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?

I don't think there's anything wrong with þ either. It fell out of favor, so it went away. If ß falls out of favor one day that's fine, but at the moment it's part of the language and that's fine too.

Thorn wasn't in the printing presses (imported from Germany) so the letter wasn't used. "Y" was in the font, but wasn't much used in English, so for a while that was used instead. "Ye Olde Shop"

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

#202

Post by Symbiote »

Tomte wrote: post #156
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).

Except "café"

And naïve, and façade, and mediæval, and coöperate, which are either correct spellings, or a matter of editorial style.

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

#203

Post by Symbiote »

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.

th in English wouldn't be a ligature, it would be a letter (thorn or eth).

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

#204

Post by tom_mellior »

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…

Yeah, I guess you're right for German. My accents are different.

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

#205

Post by tempodox »

bitwize wrote: post #169
beders wrote: post #101

"straße".toUpperCase() is still "STRASSE", though. Wondering how any current i18n system will get out of this mess ;)

Hopefully this will motivate a libpango replacement written in Rust. :)

The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce is already gathering :)

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

#206

Post by gjjrfcbugxbhf »

emodendroket wrote: post #175
bitwize wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Le port and la port.

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

#207

Post by Zorlag »

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…

Also the dispute this generates! You wouldn't believe how many friendships are torn apart over the question of whether it is "die Nutella" oder "das Nutella". It is "die Nutella", just so we are clear!

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

#208

Post by harperlee »

untog wrote: post #194
emodendroket wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"el ordenador" vs. "la computadora" (both computers) would be a spanish example of a gender change for the same concept (former is more Spaniard, latter more Latin-American).

I would say that (at least in Spanish) gendered nouns mainly provide some redundancy that helps error-correct sentences, but apart from that and the occasional meaning subtleties that can carry, they are not very useful.

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

#209

Post by ivan_gammel »

emodendroket wrote: post #172
smsm42 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's not standard practice.

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

#210

Post by gciruelos »

1maginary wrote: post #28
zzleeper wrote: post #12

Interestingly, this is the opposite as what happened in Spanish [1] We had two extra letters, CH and LL that were just ligatures, so we dropped them and everyone is better off. [1] http://www.rae.es/consultas/exclusion-de-ch-y-ll-del-abeceda...

>La eliminación de los dígrafos ch y ll del inventario de letras del abecedario no supone, en modo alguno, que desaparezcan del sistema gráfico del español. Important distinction to make. They are still part of written Spanish. To be completely honest I didn't even know they were part of the alphabet before and I wouldn't know how that affects everyday life. The capital Eszett is a new letter that (almost literally)…

>and I wouldn't know how that affects everyday life.

It mostly affected lexicographic order. 'ch' was between 'c' and 'd'.

So for example, when 'ch' was a separate letter in the alphabet, 'chico' (little, boy) would come after 'cristal' (crystal) in the dictionary. Now it's the other way round.

Something similar happened with 'll'.

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