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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

#321

Post by fkistner »

Symbiote wrote: post #200
fkistner wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is a given that languages naturally evolve to become simpler and only narrow-minded people are holding them back. Languages evolve to suit the needs of their speakers. If people find themselves without words to describe something succinctly, languages will evolve to become more expressive. I think compound nouns (as used in German) are a good example of this. They make the language more complex and h…

English can do compound words, except with spaces between the words. This is better: is clear where the boundaries are. When the word combination is used frequently, it may become a single word, like pushchair. My pushchair wheel lock mechanism is broken. Or my pushchairwheellockmechanism is broken.

Let's be careful on proclaiming what's better.

Yes, the spaces make it easier to distinguish the individual components, but on the flip side it makes it much harder to figure out where the compound group ends. Even your examples illustrate that.

Different languages have evolved according to different, sometimes diametrical opposite goals. As a consequence, somethings are easier to express in some languages than in others. That's the beauty.

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

#322

Post by Loic »

pluma wrote: post #236
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…

As a German and Unicode nerd, I love this. It'll take forever to be standardized in keyboard layouts and to be fully supported in mainstream fonts but I love that this makes it officially blessed and gives it leverage when convincing type foundries and standard bodies to support it. DON'T PANIC. You'll be fine to use "SS" when shouting at people online for the foreseeable future. But those of us who care about typogr…

As a French living in Germany I love it too. Restricting the wonderful differences between languages just because of the artificial "keyboard entry issue" is a lowest common denominator approach which has no sense at all.

Can you imagine restricting Chinese to just the ideograms you can type on a keyboard?

So, thank you for all the ß in German, the ø in Norwegian, the œ in French and all these small variations which are making my lectures a bit more tasty.

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

#323

Post by fkistner »

twiss wrote: post #85
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.

They may be useful, but they make a language much harder to learn to speak correctly, which is a downside for a lingua franca.

But so do inconsistent spellings. There is a reason, most languages apart from English have no use for spelling bees. [1]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/30/spell...

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

#324

Post by emodendroket »

bitwize wrote: post #319
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.

I can certainly imagine a French learner being confused about which gender goes with which noun. Before you say that this is ingrained in French speakers, so are unphonetic English orthography, Chinese tones and ideographs, and other linguistic sticking points ingrained in the native speakers of those languages. French has quite a few words that break the apparent gender rules: un musée, un lycée, un mille (meaning "…

Well my whole point is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about whether one language is or isn't appropriate as an international one because the idea that one is just objectively harder than another doesn't really hold.

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

#325

Post by emodendroket »

pluma wrote: post #240
emodendroket wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Russian and German are like French and Spanish, where the standard practice is just to use the masculine version if the gender is unknown.

Not at all. It's often something some people feel quite strongly about and disagree with each other about. The gender is often derived from synonyms or etymologically related words. I'm guessing the reason it's "Der Computer" for example is that "Computer" works similarly to e.g. "Trockner" (drier) or "Rechner" (calculator, in fact often the German synonym for "Computer") and these are all male (as generally words en…

Oh. Well romance languages don't generally have a neuter gender so that's not an option.

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

#326

Post by [deleted] »

int_19h wrote: post #213
emodendroket wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Russian and German are like French and Spanish, where the standard practice is just to use the masculine version if the gender is unknown.

In Russian, at least, the grammatical gender would correspond to that of the word user - which is always masculine.

[deleted]

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

#327

Post by emodendroket »

int_19h wrote: post #213
emodendroket wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Russian and German are like French and Spanish, where the standard practice is just to use the masculine version if the gender is unknown.

In Russian, at least, the grammatical gender would correspond to that of the word user - which is always masculine.

In Spanish there's usuario and usuaria depending on the gender of the user.

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

#328

Post by das_keyboard »

Tepix wrote: post #310
das_keyboard wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK the official keyboard driver for the DIN 2137 T2 layout is avaiable only for Windows. I think you have to rebind the keys manually...

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

#329

Post by wvh »

faho wrote: post #110
_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'd imagine the use is that it sometimes makes pronouns more useful. Substituting "he" and "she" for gendered articles: "I have he keyboard and she rock. He is large and she is grey" Without that, I'd have to repeat the "keyboard" and "rock". The question of course is whether this is worth all that rote memorization (since no language I know is fully logical here - german's "Das Mädchen" - girls are apparently of neu…

German isn't my mother tongue, but I think it's a form of diminutive, which often becomes neuter in Germanic languages, as for instance in Dutch.

I agree it feels silly to learn the gender of "sexless" words; but this case and the rule behind it are quite clear in the respective languages this occurs in. I guess it's not unlike English using neuter for animal pronouns, which feels strange to speakers of most Germanic languages.

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

#330

Post by kwhitefoot »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #152
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.

There have been many, many failed attempts at introducing phonetic/phonemic/simplified spelling systems for English. It’s a surprisingly hard problem both technically and socially. For starters, we probably can’t split “th” into “þ” and “ð” because of words like “with”, where “wiþ” and “wið” are in free variation; even words like “thank”, which you might expect to be uniformly “þank”, show up as “ðank” in some dialec…

I think that the fact that English uses a small alphabet and no diacritical marks (except for a few loan words) and hence cannot closely specify pronunciation is a strength not a weakness. It makes English inclusive and usable by people with widely (or wildly) varying accents and dialects.
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