The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by TulliusCicero » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 10:44 AM UTC

yehi wrote: post #163

freehunter wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English lets you omit the noun and only use a pronoun. Colloquial English lets you omit the subject sometimes, too. And it doesn't have official gendered pronouns. This sentence is short. It is short. "What did you do today?" "Rode bike" Sometimes we even use genders for nouns even though it's not official: The ship sank. She sank. Compared to German: The dog jumped on the table and bit the man . Aww shit there are t…

the benefit of languages with cases is that you can switch the order of the sentence without changing the meaning. In those languages I can say "the dog bit the person" and "the (accusative) person bit the (nominative) dog" and it would not change the meaning of the sentence but it would allow me to emphasize one object more.

You can still do that in English though: the dog bit the person, the person was bit by the dog

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

#292

Post by Tomte » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 10:45 AM UTC

germanier wrote: post #246

Tomte wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Show an example of more than ten years ago, please.

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

#293

Post by mantas » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 10:52 AM UTC

obituary_latte wrote: post #267

emodendroket wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Having a simple way to put it doesn't mean it's easy to do right.

My native language don't have anything like articles. I frequently misuse a/the in borderline cases. Or just omit the article completely..

Yet gender is super easy in my language! Each noun has gendered suffix. Once you know the word, you know it's gender. Or once you know the gender, you know the suffix... :)

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

#294

Post by mantas » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 10:55 AM UTC

nicky0 wrote: post #244

mrkrab wrote: post #78

Earlier 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.

> What's so bad about gendered nouns? Gendered nouns are a significant barrier to learning a new language.

Differences make learning difficult. More at 11...

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

#295

Post by Grue3 » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 10:59 AM UTC

I don't like it, it looks too much like B. At least lower-case version stands out among its lower-case peers, but the big one is the same size as B.

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

#296

Post by mantas » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 11:01 AM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #230

int_19h wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My understanding is that proto-IndioEuropean had two genders: animate and inanimate which would have served a purpose. Later animate split into masculine/feminine. Some languages preserved all three, others dropped the inanimate (or it morphed into "neuter"). Much like English spelling it's all a mess now.

My native tongue is Lithuanian. There was never a inanimate/neuter gender and we got masculine/feminine ingrained deeply in the language.

Some people say Lithuanian has kept most of proto-Indo European features. If that's true, inanimate/neuter had to evolve later than gender split.

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

#297

Post by tom_mellior » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 11:01 AM UTC

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…

> how are new genders decided?

Many new nouns are nouned forms of verbs. In German there are a bunch of fixed suffixes for turning verbs into nouns, and they have their own fixed genders: "-er" (masculine), "-ion", "-ung", "-age" (feminine), "-en" (neutral).

For other words, speakers, over time, sort of converge on a consensus, which may only be regional. For example, in some regions "Cola" (the drink) is "die Cola" (female), in others it's "das Cola" (neutral).

Others... not sure. "Mobile phone" is "das Handy" (neutral), I guess from "das Telefon". I'm fairly sure "das Internet" came by analogy from "das Netz", which is the German word for "net".

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

#298

Post by Freak_NL » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 11:05 AM UTC

germanier wrote: post #125

jacquesm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see a lot of trouble coming from this. Sort order for one. If a language this old didn't need a glyph up to 2017 it can be done without, especially if the use case is limited to all caps words. But I guess in that case you could convert its occurrence to SS first and then do the sort.

Actually I was a bit surprised when I learned that Unicode only added a codepoint for it in 2008 (and even rejected an earlier proposal). While the spelling rules have said for some time to replace it with "SS" the glyph was used quite often, including official documents such as passports. For sorting there is standard (DIN 5007). Replacing ß with ss is correct (even in the lower case variant). The other letters are…

> Probably not something international software is aware of.

Collation rules that vary by locale exist for this reason, and all major programming languages and OS'es support this. Of course whether the software you use does this or not depends on the developers writing the software.

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

#299

Post by seszett » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 11:07 AM UTC

gjjrfcbugxbhf wrote: post #206

emodendroket wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Port is always masculine though, it only means port/harbour.

But it's not that important, gender does add some redundancy and some error-correction to a language. It's not necessary (as shown by English) but it has some use.

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

#300

Post by voidz » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 11:08 AM UTC

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?

I love different characters, so if þ and ð were to be reintroduced, I would fully embrace it. I don't þink it would happen ðough, because it does read really weird to ðe untrained mind. Kind of like a 'b' and a 'd'.

I wonder if I even used them right.