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

Post by Symbiote » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 3:47 PM UTC

fkistner wrote: post #321

Symbiote wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ot…

Post by throwaway91111 » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 3:57 PM UTC

wvh wrote: post #329

faho wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

Tepix wrote: post #307

cronjobber wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure about the G?

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

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

mantas wrote: post #340

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the last 20 years or so, the consensus has grown in Indo-European linguistics that Proto-Indo-European had only the animate/inanimate distinction mentioned above. After the Anatolian branch and possibly Tocharian split off from the other Indo-European languages, the remaining core of IE languages developed the three genders masculine, feminine, and neuter. The idea that Lithuanian is extremely conservative from…

What is interesting, neither Lithuanian, nor Latvian has neuter gender. While slavic languages, like Russian or Polish, do have. To be fair, old Prussian seem to have had neuter gender. But given Germanic influence, they likely adapted in later days. It'd be weird if IE had developed 3rd gender, then Baltic languages dropped it while other languages around them did keep it. Got any links or literature on how that evo…

Post by dang » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 6:04 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #266

Tomte wrote: post #155

Again, an unelected body decides on my mother tongue (the orthography reform of 1996 was the same, but more catastrophic). The Rechtschreibrat is tasked with codifying existing changes to the language, not inventing something new. Capital ß does not exist and never did. Before a few years ago when Unicode accepted it and a handful of designers played with it, there was exactly one documented occurence in hundreds of…

Do I see a hint of a Reichsbürger in that rant? If you don't like the official orthography, you're free to ignore it. Just don't complain if you get reprimanded when doing so in situations where standard orthography is required (e.g. written exams in school and university).