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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

#231

Post by dtech »

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.

Gendered nouns are incredibly difficult for non-native speakers (even if their native language contains gendered nouns) as they are completely arbitrary, just like the words themselves. So instead of remembering (word) a non-native now has to learn (gender, word) for every noun.

It's not the concept that is difficult, it's the extra piece of information that makes it more difficult.

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

#232

Post by tpm »

ivm wrote: post #196
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 .

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.

Yes, Spanish is mostly simple and consistent. It feels too verbose though. I think there are more (space or time) efficient languages.

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

#233

Post by dtech »

int_19h wrote: post #217
untog wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I speak Russian, which is gendered (masculine/feminine/neuter) as my native language. > what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns? None whatsoever. When speaking of things that don't have any meaningful gender, it makes things unnecessarily complicated. When speaking of things that do have physical gender, it often forces you to make assumptions about it even when it's completely irrelevant. > ow…

@xenadu02

Some languages (Dutch and Danish at least) still only have two genders: male+female and neuter.

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

#234

Post by vizeroth »

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.

I feel like I could come up with some examples if I had kept up with German after high school. I remember it being difficult for a year or two, then it seemed more helpful as we got into more complex language mechanics. In any case, German felt more consistent than English, and most of the words just felt right with one gender or another (and in speech you could usually get away with something between "the" and "duh" if you weren't sure about der/die/das).

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

#235

Post by didsomeonesay »

tptacek wrote: post #29
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".

How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?

In the German orthography reform of the 1990s the "ss" replaced the "ß" after short vowels. But after long vowels it is still used.

So with current spelling system, it's possible to distinguish words pronounced with long vowels from the ones with short vowels (e.g. by a German learner who sees a word for the first time). So it does have its advantages.

I guess this goes back to the origins of the ß - it can be interpreted as either a ligature of ſs=ss or ſz=sz (ſ is the "long s" which is no longer used).

Maybe we should go back to write the long vowel words with "sz". I am sure that would irritate everybody :D

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

#236

Post by pluma »

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…

As a German and Unicode nerd, I love this. It'll take forever to be standardized in keyboard layouts and to be fully supported in mainstream fonts but I love that this makes it officially blessed and gives it leverage when convincing type foundries and standard bodies to support it.

DON'T PANIC. You'll be fine to use "SS" when shouting at people online for the foreseeable future. But those of us who care about typography can now use the proper capitalization and maybe 5-10 years from now keyboard layouts will support this like they added support for the Euro symbol (although that was a bit easier).

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

#237

Post by allendoerfer »

CodeMage wrote: post #177
smsm42 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

German, too. He might accidentaly be onto something.

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

#238

Post by pluma »

Zorlag wrote: post #207
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…

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!

Every time an old lady orders "das Cola", I twitch a little.

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

#239

Post by int_19h »

Tomte wrote: post #167
kupiakos wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if it's an inherently bad thing. Different people have different passions, and assuming one's own interests are "more important" seems kind of ridiculous to me. Most people simply use their language to communicate, and nothing more.

Mother tongue isn't a hobby you choose. It's part of your identity and a core of your being. That's why we consider the Turks eradicating the Kurdish language a human rights violation, but don't say the same thing when, say, a swimming pool closes.

> Mother tongue isn't a hobby you choose. It's part of your identity and a core of your being.

How much it is a part of one's identity and a "core of one's being" is up to every specific person to decide, not for you to impose.

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

#240

Post by pluma »

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.

Not at all. It's often something some people feel quite strongly about and disagree with each other about.

The gender is often derived from synonyms or etymologically related words. I'm guessing the reason it's "Der Computer" for example is that "Computer" works similarly to e.g. "Trockner" (drier) or "Rechner" (calculator, in fact often the German synonym for "Computer") and these are all male (as generally words ending in -er tend to be).

OTOH it's "Das Steak" (maybe because "Das Fleisch" or "Das Kotlett"?) and "Das Shirt" (maybe because "Das Hemd"?). The fallback generally seems to be "das", i.e. neuter, not male.

An example of something with inconsistent use is "Der Laptop" vs "Das Laptop". Presumably this is because "Der Laptop" is derived from "Der Desktop", which in turn is likely simply a shorthand for "Der Desktop-Rechner", making it male. Even the Duden (the closest thing to a "standard" dictionary in Germany) lists it as "der; auch das Laptop" (i.e. "der" seems to be somewhat more common but both are in use).

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