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

Post by germanier » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 1:34 PM UTC

Freak_NL wrote: post #298

germanier wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by ttepasse » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 1:45 PM UTC

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…

Post by germanier » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:14 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #292

germanier wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by ivm » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #278

ivm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rule…

Post by mantas » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 3:09 PM UTC

obituary_latte wrote: post #315

mantas wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... :)

But it is easy once you understand :-) A == non-specific The == specific 'A dog' could be any old dog. 'The dog' is a specific dog we know. Thus A == any The == thing Perhaps I'm not clear where with this understanding it would trip you up. Can you think of an example?