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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

#301

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

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…

Why do they need all these orthography reforms anyway? Like with the reform of 1996 - it was supposed to simplify things, instead they tend to introduce a huge set of rules and a bunch of exceptions to these rules; as a result it gets to be more complicated than before...

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

#302

Post by voidz »

bane wrote: post #118
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.

English would probably be 50% improved if we'd just get over things and add a "ə" vowel.

What's this?

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

#303

Post by Freak_NL »

jacquesm wrote: post #105
fkistner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, languages are about communication. As long as the other person understands what you are trying to get across, you're probably fine. However, orthography does serve an important part in getting your point across. German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure. The Umlauts serve a similar purpose to make it easier to differentiate wor…

> German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure. For Germans, maybe. And maybe for Germans it is a bit harder to read an English text where only proper names and the first word of a sentence is capitalized. But I routinely forget to capitalize even proper names (especially with companies, days of the week, names of months and such), and…

> and the first letter of a sentence.

Except for digraph IJ, which needs both I and J capitalised, e.g., IJsselmeer.

> I'm mostly blind to 'case' […]

Most people aren't though. Leaving out capital letters where they should be jars the reader's flow. Let each language have its idiosyncrasies; it makes life more interesting.

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

#304

Post by maze-le »

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?

A double letter signifies a short vowel beforehand. So the word "Stoß" (impact, jolt) should be written with "ß", because it is pronounced with a long 'o'. If you were to write it as "Stoss" the 'o' should be pronounced short, wich is inconsistent.

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

#305

Post by Tepix »

So, I've read a few articles now but I'm left wondering: How do I enter the new character "ẞ" on a german keyboard? Pressing the key for "ß" + shift obviously doesn't work (it yields a questionmark).

(I used cut + paste to get the ẞ into this post)

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

#306

Post by emodendroket »

interfixus wrote: post #198
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.

No, that's silly. Gendered nouns are no hassle whatsoever in your native language, but a major stumbling block in one you wish to learn later on, believe me. Danish is my primary language. We are blessed with only two genders, not three as in German. As closely related as the two languages are, I really cannot make a useful gender mapping from one to the other. That's one - not the only, but definitely one - reason I…

My native language is English.

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

#307

Post by Tepix »

cronjobber wrote: post #224
thaumasiotes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G, J, K, U, W, Y, and Z are all characters that aren't used in Latin (in the case of G, J, U, and W, because they didn't exist; in the case of Y, it is used in Greek words but doesn't represent a sound that's possible in Latin; I'm not sure if Z was used in Greek words or not. K is just a Greek letter -- since it represents the sound written with C in Latin, it is never used at all).

Sure about the G?

Hardly.

See https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Iulius_Caesar

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

#308

Post by Tepix »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #272
CrystalLangUser wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Tons of languages use é, ø, and other accents so they are "normal" by your definition.

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

#309

Post by emodendroket »

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

My wife is Korean and often asks me questions and, while you aren't wrong, the rules are way more complicated than that.

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

#310

Post by Tepix »

das_keyboard wrote: post #288
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…

We are German. We have rules for everything. DIN 2137 declares that the upper case ß should be typed with 'ALTGR + H'. On most Linux distributions you can type it by activating CAPS-LOCK and type a normal ß. I also think that this is the best solution for this problem.

Thanks. Do you know how to fix this on Linux (Ubuntu in particular)? When I press ALTGR+H I get ħ, not ẞ.
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