Earlier quoted context omitted.
English seems to manage okay with no 'special' latin characters.
You haven't seen Old English then. https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.g...
Yes, but that's not modern English.
The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
271–280 of 377 posts
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant that at least AFAIK all the English characters exist in several languages. No special tics or dots that are unique or very unusual.
> tics or dots that are unique or very unusual It's almost like a lot of languages have a shared ancestry. Differences may be unusual to you . Are ș, î, or ț unusual because they don't exist in English? Those phonemes aren't common in English which is why we don't have distinctions for them, but they're important in Romanian. Not unusual at all if you're Romanian. By your logic, 대한민국 characters are weird and unusual…
Yes, hangul is unusual, because there's only one language that uses it. Duh. Latin characters are less unusual because tons of languages use them. I'm not sure why this is difficult to grasp.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#273The article and comments are a bit misleading. The actual official document is a bit clearer:
> E3: Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben schreibt man SS. Daneben ist auch die Verwendung des Großbuchstabens ẞ möglich. Beispiel: Straße – STRASSE – STRAẞE.
http://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/rfdr_Regeln_2017.pdf (page numbered 29, page 27 of the PDF)
Roughly translated:
> When writing in uppercase one writes SS. Additionally the use of the uppercase ẞ is also possible. Example: Straße – STRASSE – STRAẞE.
In other words, it's an officially blessed variant spelling. The new standard actually defines several variant spellings for cases that have been debated since the last reform, e.g. Delfin ("new") vs Delphin ("old"). It's a lot more forgiving, standardizing a lot of existing usage rather than making up arbitrary rules.
It's far more descriptive than the previous spelling reform some fellow Germans still like to bitch and moan about. The reason the capital sharp S is singled out as being newsworthy is mostly that it's one of the few additions; almost everything else is just establishing widespread non-standard variants as permissible.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory (standard language), ss and ß mark differences in pronunciation. That's why some words are written with ß. In practice, the differences are pronounced differently in different regions, which is why some German speaking people don't know the difference.
Really ? As someone who speaks natively German, can you give me an example or a source for this ? ß is after a long vocal, ss is after a short vocal. I don't know any regional problems with that (and I come from a region with a VERY different language than most of the German speaking people)
The op claimed it makes no difference if you write words with ss or ß. I simply claimed it makes a difference in standard language but certain dialects differ from that so that many people don't know/hear/speak certain words correctly and thus don't understand the difference. For some words, both forms are said to be correct (e.g. Geschoss and Geschoß) but not for all.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#275Earlier 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 .
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).
Yeah I meant gender in articles, not words where it indicates actual gender of a person/animal (although too many of those can be annoying too, here in Germany I see signs where it has to say "Lehrer oder Lehrerin" or the equivalent everywhere because way more professions/nouns have gendered forms than in English).
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And it's the exact opposite in French and presumably all (most?) other Romance languages as well: female table, male government.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#277Earlier 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.
Grammatical genders are nonsensical and almost completely arbitrary. For example "girl" is an "it" in German.
Languages also differ significantly in terms of which grammatical gender they assign to things.
It's worse than useless.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#278Earlier 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.
Disclaimer: I'm a Spanish newb.
While there are good things about Spanish, speaking as a native English speaker there are annoyances too. One big on compared to English is that English is seemingly more economical with syllables than Spanish for many common words e.g. Demasiado, todavia, many adverbs like recientemente.
Spanish does seem to be one if the better languages for gender of nouns in that fairly simple rules seem to correctly classify many but still not having a gender for table or chair is imho inherently better from a cognitive load standpoint. Likewise the agreement of article, gender and number is much simpler than, say, German.
English also wins with much simpler verb conjugation. The forms in Spanish are distinct enough that pronoun subjects are often dropped. I prefer "I speak" and "we speak" to "[yo] hablo" and "[nosotros/nosotras] hablamos". Again English is far more economical with syllables here.
Spanish object pronouns are a PITA because they're ambiguous to the point that you gave to add "a ella" to things.
I also find the number of accents used to be incredibly tedious but at least they don't seem to be critical and are consistent with the pronunciation.
Modern English also has only one second person form. Spanish has 3 or 4 (tu, usted, ustedes and Latin American Spanish doesn't seem to use the vosotros form that Spain does).
I also find the ordering of pronouns common in mainland European languages a PITA meaning objection pronouns before the verb, non-pronoun objects after.
English actually front weights important information pretty darn well from a linguistic standpoint but at least Spanish doesn't have anything silly like German's separable verbs or putting the verb last in Nebensatzen.
The interesting thing about English was that it lost a lot of the linguistic bullshit (basically) during the centuries wheer it wasn't the official language of England (French was), this being the transition from Old English (essentially a foreign language at this point) to Middle English (mostly comprehensible to Modern English speakers).
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They make a language harder to learn and increase it's cognitive profile, especially for newer speakers. I'll also make the contentious claim that they are clearly visible as being kinda sexist to progressively-oriented native speakers of languages that don't have them. Of course, if you honestly follow that train of thought, it doesn't stop at having gendered pronouns for inanimate objects. See https://www.cs.virgin…
If they appear to be sexist to progressively oriented speakers of languages without gender, the problem isn’t the language, but the ignorance of the progressively oriented speakers of languages without gender.
The masculinity or femininity of a table ought not be controversional except among those who are eager for things about which to be offended. It would seem there are certain groups of people that seem to derive pleasure from being offended. It might also seem, to speakers of languages with gender, that these so-called progressives are being regressive by imposing their linguistic ideology upon others.
Of course I support sex equality for humans, but really sometimes so-called progressives venture into Newspeak territory or at the very least, absurdity. “Womyn” is another example of similar nonsense.
Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was speaking about gendered nouns. They help me resolve pronouns.