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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

#351

Post by bane »

voidz wrote: post #302
bane wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's this?

Bizarrely, in English, the most common vowel sound has no single glyph to represent that sound. Among the many variations of sounds that vowels can make, all of them can be pronounced as 'ə' (schwa) in certain circumstances. This is part of what makes English orthography a nightmare and then pronunciation of written words difficult.

As an example: "banana" has two different vowel sounds, 'ə' and 'æ' (in American English at least). If English allowed for 'ə' it could be spelled bənanə.

Other words with schwa:

amazing - əmazing

tenacious - tənacious

replicate - repləcate

percolate - percəlate

supply - səpply

Not all spoken Englishes might agree with all of these, but every English variant uses the sound.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/06/05/schwa_t...

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

#352

Post by clhodapp »

vizeroth wrote: post #234
clhodapp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about this, though, is that it only works if you get lucky and none of your nouns share a gender. I feel like that undermines the argument at least a bit.

I feel like I could come up with some examples if I had kept up with German after high school. I remember it being difficult for a year or two, then it seemed more helpful as we got into more complex language mechanics. In any case, German felt more consistent than English, and most of the words just felt right with one gender or another (and in speech you could usually get away with something between "the" and "duh"…

They are generally going to sound good together because the word and the pronoun co-evolved. If they didn't sound good together, either the pronoun or the word would have changed. That isn't about the gender being right so much as just the sound, though.

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

#353

Post by pluma »

dang wrote: post #349
pluma wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Please don't insinuate Nazism to score points in an argument on HN. We all know where that leads to and we don't wanna go there.

While some Reichsbürger share neonazi ideologies, the term actually refers to the German equivalent of the Sovereign citizen movement. But I admit that was a bit of a low blow even without insinuating neonazi leanings, I apologize.

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

#354

Post by pluma »

Loic wrote: post #322
pluma wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW the French ç is a pain to type on a German keyboard too (hooray for compose-comma-c on Linux) but I like these quirks of our languages that all share a variation of the same alphabet but took it in different directions.

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

#355

Post by pluma »

majewsky wrote: post #286
Zorlag wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the dispute this generates! You wouldn't believe how many friendships are torn apart over the question of whether it is "die Nutella" oder "das Nutella". It is "die Nutella", just so we are clear!

> das Nutella-Glas FTFY

Der Nutella-Brotaufstrich.

Two can play this game. There is no sane answer.

Except for rules of thumbs like "Romance-sounding word ending in -a is probably female".

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

#356

Post by dang »

pluma wrote: post #353
dang wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't insinuate Nazism to score points in an argument on HN. We all know where that leads to and we don't wanna go there.

While some Reichsbürger share neonazi ideologies, the term actually refers to the German equivalent of the Sovereign citizen movement. But I admit that was a bit of a low blow even without insinuating neonazi leanings, I apologize.

Ah—guilty of my own charge I see. Thanks for responding so charitably! These subtleties escape me.

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

#357

Post by thaumasiotes »

pavlov wrote: post #334
thaumasiotes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rather different" phonemes? There is no room for them to be more similar to each other without coinciding. And they contrast in only a single minimal pair, one element of which is incredibly rare.

Well, ok. I'm not a native English speaker, so I suppose "rather" wasn't the right word. Maybe "notably different"?

"Rather" appears to be a fine word choice for your intended meaning. I'm objecting to your intended meaning (as far as I can perceive it):

- [θ] and [ð] are objectively similar sounds, differing only in voicing.

- The argument is not even very good that /θ/ and /ð/ are different phonemes in English -- they contrast only in the pair of words teeth/teethe, and one of those words is fairly rare. If you, as a foreign speaker, pick the wrong one of those sounds, you have 100% odds of being correctly understood as a "guy with a foreign accent". Even if you get confused between s/z (compare "visible"), you're very likely to be understood, but with θ/ð there is literally no chance of confusion.

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

#358

Post by nicky0 »

greglindahl wrote: post #280
nicky0 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is objecting to gendered pronouns (he, she, him, her) but rather gendered nouns in general. For example in french "night" and "baguette" are female whereas "book" and "chair" are male. It seems arbitrary and makes learning the language more difficult.

I was speaking about gendered nouns. They help me resolve pronouns.

Oops I'm sorry about the mansplaining then. Can you give an example? I'm struggling to conceive what you mean.

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

#359

Post by greglindahl »

nicky0 wrote: post #358
greglindahl wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was speaking about gendered nouns. They help me resolve pronouns.

Oops I'm sorry about the mansplaining then. Can you give an example? I'm struggling to conceive what you mean.

The nouns for heel, foot, and toe have gender. When I get to the end of a dance step mentioning all 3, and it says "and in the final beat you lift ", I use the clue that the pronoun gender should match the noun gender to try to finger out what the antecedent is.

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

#360

Post by majewsky »

pluma wrote: post #355
majewsky wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> das Nutella-Glas FTFY

Der Nutella-Brotaufstrich. Two can play this game. There is no sane answer. Except for rules of thumbs like "Romance-sounding word ending in -a is probably female".

My point is that, whenever you want to use a brand name like "Nutella" in a specific context and you're unsure about the gender, you can just use a compound word with a clearly defined gender instead.
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