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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

#241

Post by odiroot »

mzs wrote: post #140
tom_mellior wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see this as a step in the wrong direction. Agreed. The council's press release mentions that this will enable the use of the character in passports. The horror for the poor people who have this in their name! I hope for their sake they will have a say in this. Otherwise, filling in any form abroad will become a headache.

For us Poles it's a toss-up whether MICHAŁ is interpreted as MICHAL or MICHAK at borders.

Actually, funnily enough German government agencies properly write Ł on all my papers. I needed to settle for L anyway because banks, telcos etc. have a huge problem with it.

On the other hand in some other countries it ends up being some random crap. Eg.: Micha%b

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

#242

Post by pluma »

tomerv wrote: post #190
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.

At least the "th" has close function in "thing" and "this". A non-native speaker wouldn't even notice the difference. But don't expect a non-native speaker to pronounce "pothole" correctly...

I actually don't think the distinction between "thing" and "this" was pointed out when I learned English in elementary school in Germany.

They were just ambiguously referred to as the English "Tee Aitch", which doesn't help anyone.

Note they did point out the different pronunciations for each word but it was pretty much along the lines "they're the same thing but sometimes sound differently".

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

#243

Post by rimliu »

jacquesm wrote: post #76
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".

As a European, I disagree with you. I don't have the German letters on my keyboard and I've yet to come across someone from Germany who took exception to my butchered German spelling. I do the same in my own language which has a compound letter for ij, which I wouldn't even know how to create and which is part of my name. Communication is not about glyps, it's about getting meaning across from one person to another a…

In my language omitting diacritics can change the meaning a lot. "Ji ilgėjosi savo sūnų" vs. "Ji ilgėjosi savo šunų". Many lazy compatriots of mine would write "Ji ilgėjosi savo sunu“. It may be obvious from the contexts, but without it you could interpret it either as the first one ("She was missing her sons") or as the other one ("She was missing her dogs").

This lazy way of writing had some valid technical reasons in the past (like phones not supporting diacritics), but these have long been solved.

P.S: if you think gendered nouns are hard, try language where almost everything is gendered: nouns, verbs, adjectives. In English: "I saw a nice boy walking"/"I saw a nice girl walking". In Lithuanian: "Mačiau gražų vaikiną einantį"/"Mačiau gražią merginą einančią".

And then there is this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/51/91/e2/5191...

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

#244

Post by nicky0 »

mrkrab wrote: post #78
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 .

What's so bad about gendered nouns? They are quite useful, especially when the language allows you to omit the noun and leave only a pronoun, or maybe the entire subject altogether.

> What's so bad about gendered nouns?

Gendered nouns are a significant barrier to learning a new language.

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

#245

Post by ygra »

dukoid wrote: post #33
Vivtek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are double-s words in German (like "Amtssicherheit", off the top of my head) that don't use a sharp S - it's not a ligature.

There are words where the difference is actually significant, e.g. "Masse" (=mass) vs "Maße" (=dimensions) It's also not a ligature for sz ("Amtszeit"), although it has developed from one (of the long s and the tailed z, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F ) I like that the information loss in toUpperCase() is gone now in this case, so I am all for it O:)

Amtszeit is a bad example, though, as German never uses ligatures for letter sequences spanning syllables. And I think there are no examples of sz appearing within a syllable.

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

#246

Post by germanier »

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.

It is not one singular example. Speakers of German have used that letter occasionally for the last 120 years or so and there was a debate to introduce it the whole time.

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

#247

Post by pluma »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #75
ainar-g wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"ß" is not a defining feature of the German language. It is though. As a language-lover and German-learner, AFAIK, no other language uses this letter. "ß", along with less exclusive "ä", "ö", and "ü" are what distinguishes German orthography from other languages.

English seems to manage okay with no 'special' latin characters.

When I think "weird special English letter" I think Œ, as in fœtus. Granted, in American English it has been eliminated almost completely and even in British English it's now often seen as a bit archæic (pardon the pun) but it's still there and to me signifies "English" just as ß signifies "German", ø signifies "Nordic", ı signifies "Turkish" and é signifies "French".

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

#248

Post by nicky0 »

greglindahl wrote: post #108
_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 translate Italian 16th century dance manuals into English. There are many pronouns in dance descriptions, and having gender as an extra clue is very helpful when I'm trying to figure out what pronouns refer to. Now, in English, the author might have used fewer pronouns if they were ambiguous... but I've seen a lot of ambiguous pronouns in English writing.

I don't think anyone is objecting to gendered pronouns (he, she, him, her) but rather gendered nouns in general. For example in french "night" and "baguette" are female whereas "book" and "chair" are male. It seems arbitrary and makes learning the language more difficult.

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

#249

Post by pluma »

int_19h wrote: post #227
john61 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A language should be optimized for what its speakers want it to be optimized. Of late, this has always been easy keyboard typing.

It's trivial to support ẞ in smartphone virtual keyboards. Physical keyboards may follow.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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