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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

#261

Post by pluma »

virtualritz wrote: post #67

What a typographic disaster. Making an uppercase version of a lowercase ligature was bad idea from the get go. I suggest to type designers who want to add this symbol to do an SZ or SS ligature. Caveat: I studied typography in another life.

It's not a ligature. It's not even a variant anymore. Yes, in orthography it's defined in contrast to "ss" but it is not acceptable to substitute "ss" for "ß" in names. Mesner, Messner, Meßner and Meszner are different names.

Typography is not just about making pretty shapes that work nice alongside each other.

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

#262

Post by pygy_ »

user5994461 wrote: post #114
pygy_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Belgian here, I grew up on AZERTY, but ended up learning QWERTY for coding. Story time... My last laptop had a physical QWERTY keyboard, but it met a fateful end (I drove on it) and had to replace it immediately. Good luck finding a QWERTY MacBook in the stores of the corner of France I currently live in... So now I'm typing QWERTY on an AZERTY keyboard. Not sure how it works on PCs, but OS X has a "US. International…

You can find almost any laptop parts on eBay. The Mac parts are usually 2 or 3 times as expensive as the similar PC parts.

Oh, yes, I know. I usually source Mac parts from iFixit though, they provide a warranty and are a known quantity.

I'm used to repairing my computers, but the broken one was wrecked (it still booted, but the case was bent around the battery, and the screen was broken).

Changing the keyboard of the new one would void the warranty, and having it changed by Apple staff would cost half a new notebook.

So I type QWERTY on an AZERTY keyboard. The only issue I have is the closing paren, ( + in QWERTY) is next to the corresponding key in AZERTY ( in QWERTY), so I end up sometimes typing underscores ( + ) when I want to close parentheses.

I touch-type for the most part, but that key is too far from the home row for me to hit reliably, so I end up looking and mistyping anyway :-)

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

#263

Post by sjy »

qznc wrote: post #255
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?

There is ambiguity. For example, "Masse" and "Maße" are two different words meaning "mass" and "measures". There is a difference, if you drink beer "in Maßen" or "in Massen" (in moderation or en masse).

I was confused by the idea that 'in measures' could mean 'en masse,' but it looks like you've switched the two terms by accident and 'in Maßen' corresponds to 'measuredly.'

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

#264

Post by Raz2 »

mkesper wrote: post #182

First of all, it's not a 'sharp' s, as one can see compairing 'Maße' and 'Masse'. I doubt this will be used in practice. Many people nowadays are confused by last orthography rules and even write 'Straße' wrongly with double-s.

Some street signs in the town where I live (Weingarten) are written with double-s. It is really confusing.

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

#265

Post by Freak_NL »

tomatsu wrote: post #109
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…

> how do I type this? On Linux, capslock then ß works. No idea how to do that on Windows, though. > so the only reason to use it is to write a word in ALL CAPS. Yep, it was only added for ALL CAPS. It was actually added to Unicode back in 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E IMO it makes sense that it exists. ß -> SS -> ss is a lossy transformation.

I love the compose key on Linux and other -nix-like OS'es. I'm Dutch, and use a standard US-layout keyboard. I can type every diacritic and special character I need — including these em-dashes — just by hitting the compose key (most people use right-alt for this), and a logical sequence of keys.

For ë, this is (compose key) " e. For the em-dash; (compose key) - - - (for en-dash, it is - - .). I.e., it all makes sense.

So when I write in German, I can enter the ß by hitting (compose key) s s. Makes sense right? So reading this article I wondered: could I compose the upper-case ß?

Sure: ẞ. (compose key) S S. Totally guessable. Someone must have submitted a patch for it sometime these past few years, and another person submitted the glyph to a couple of fonts.

It's such a shame the compose key never took off on Windows or Mac OS. I cringe every time I see a colleague enter a memorized alt-code on Windows, or just forego diacritics and non-ASCII characters in general; even in people's names.

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

#266

Post by pluma »

Tomte wrote: post #155

Again, an unelected body decides on my mother tongue (the orthography reform of 1996 was the same, but more catastrophic). The Rechtschreibrat is tasked with codifying existing changes to the language, not inventing something new. Capital ß does not exist and never did. Before a few years ago when Unicode accepted it and a handful of designers played with it, there was exactly one documented occurence in hundreds of…

Do I see a hint of a Reichsbürger in that rant?

If you don't like the official orthography, you're free to ignore it. Just don't complain if you get reprimanded when doing so in situations where standard orthography is required (e.g. written exams in school and university).

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

#267

Post by obituary_latte »

emodendroket wrote: post #174
lbebber wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a simple way of putting it (as a native non-bilingual English speaker) would be to think of it as "a" -> non-specific and "the" -> specific.

Example:

A basket is in the car -> some kind of basket of unknown shape or color.

The basket is in the car -> a specific, known basket.

HTH

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

#268

Post by germanier »

odiroot wrote: post #241
mzs wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interestingly, the German government has defined their own subset of Unicode for use on documents: http://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/PERS/Themen/Vorh...

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

#269

Post by pjmlp »

qznc wrote: post #255
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?

There is ambiguity. For example, "Masse" and "Maße" are two different words meaning "mass" and "measures". There is a difference, if you drink beer "in Maßen" or "in Massen" (in moderation or en masse).

They happen to be both "Masse" in that little country with lots of cheese and mountains. :)

However I fully understand the problem, given that one of the "clever" ideas of the latest Portuguese revision was to get rid of a few accents.

So "para" (going, giving to some one) and "pára" (stop doing something) are both "para".

Same for "côr" (color) and "cór" (know something by heart), which are "cor" now.

Or "fato" (suit) and "facto" (fact about something), which became "fato".

Oh and in spite of having been reduced to the same spelling, they kept the original pronunciation when spoken, which adds more fun for the foreigners learning the language.

There are lots of other examples, the goal was to make all Portuguese spelling variants more consistent, but made the language much more context dependent.

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

#270

Post by germanier »

yorwba wrote: post #184
ferongr wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people outside Germany even care about DIN standards?

The machine-readable part of the German passport uses this DIN standard, so to avoid having to explain German orthography to some suspicious border guard, you'd better make sure you use it.

But when you get a US visa, the name in both the visual and machine redeable part is written with ä replaced by a, so you end up with three different spellings in your passport. And then you get a Russian visa, where they use a pretty strange transliteration into the Cyrillic alphabet (not the one I would use) and then transform that back to ASCII in the machine readable zone for variant 5. And so on.
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