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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
by faho 9y ago
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?
QWERTZ is already bad for e.g. programming with all its punctuation (typing "]" means holding altgr and pressing 9), so that would make it even worse.
Personally I'd rather use composing since that would mean I could continue ignoring "ß" like I already do (I use "ss" instead), only now I'll ignore both forms.
Note also that a capital "ß" is barely useful to begin with - no word begins with it, so the only reason to use it is to write a word in ALL CAPS.
- bla2 9y agoAs 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".
- faho 9y ago>This change fixes an internal inconsistency I agree that it does! "ß" turning into "SS" when uppercasing is awful. >It feels like replying to some bugfix in, say, Ruby with something like "I never liked Ruby anyhow". In this analogy, "Ruby" would be the German language. And in that case... yes, I can disagree with a bugfix if it makes matters more complicated! I can argue that something is a misfeature, like ß is. Removing it would improve the situation, especially from a technological viewpoint. >German's not English, even though you might prefer if it was That's kind of a low blow. "ß" is not a defining feature of the German language.
- ainar-g 9y ago>"ß" is not a defining feature of the German language. It is though. As a language-lover and German-learner, AFAIK, no other language uses this letter. "ß", along with less exclusive "ä", "ö", and "ü" are what distinguishes German orthography from other languages.
- TulliusCicero 9y agoEnglish seems to manage okay with no 'special' latin characters.
- qu4z-2 9y agoWhat a coincidence that English manages fine with just the letters in ASCII. Seriously though, what definition of "special Latin characters" are you using? Italian does just fine with fewer...
- thaumasiotes 9y agoG, 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).
- cronjobber 9y agoSure about the G?
- Tepix 9y agoHardly. See https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Iulius_Caesar https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Iulius_Caesar
- 9y ago
- tptacek 9y agoHow is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?
- kuschku 9y agoTake the words Maße (measurements, sizes) and Masse (weight, mass). There’s hundreds more of such examples. ß and ss have a different effect on surrounding letters (the a in Maße is short, the one in Masse is long)
- errata 9y agoI think you meant it the other way 'round? long/short, I mean. Otherwise I totally agree, ß is important to distinguish phonetics.
- pishpash 9y agoIt is important but you are marking the wrong thing, you could make it Māsse and Masse if you really cared.
- matt4077 9y agoI don't think speakers of the language that invented Worcester Sauce are in a position to give prescriptive logical advice to other languages. Languages are the products of a sort of evolutionary processes. Rarely do the conventions appear to be the best possible solution at first sight. But it isn't uncommon for convincing arguments to appear later, showing that some seemingly arbitrary rules are almost beautifully constructed to make languages efficient. Not only do common words tend to be shorter than uncommon ones; I've also seen examples of word pairs that would be dangerous to confuse to be further apart in spelling and pronunciation than statistics would suggest (I believe sailing was the example I saw: single words can mean life or death, and are often spoken under difficult circumstances).
- faho 9y ago
- jacquesm 9y agoAs a European, I disagree with you. I don't have the German letters on my keyboard and I've yet to come across someone from Germany who took exception to my butchered German spelling. I do the same in my own language which has a compound letter for ij, which I wouldn't even know how to create and which is part of my name. Communication is not about glyps, it's about getting meaning across from one person to another and whatever works is good enough. Schoene gruesse :)
- fkistner 9y agoSure, 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 words. For instant messaging this probably does not matter too much, but what about books, technical reports, etc.? What's to gain from not using "proper" orthography in them, which might give the reader more hints about the sentence structure and hence its meaning? Schöne Grüße ;)
- jacquesm 9y ago> 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 I've never felt that having upper case for the first letter of each noun made German any easier to parse, I'm mostly blind to 'case' and have to really remind myself that 'I' in English is with a capital letter. In Dutch this is even stronger, we do not capitalize most of those except for proper names and the first letter of a sentence.
- Freak_NL 9y ago> 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Hermel 9y agoThe sharp s is only used in Germany and Austria, but not in Switzerland. There really is no need for it.
- bsimpson 9y agoI'd suggest maybe it should just be a ligature, but that would make it hard to type English words like crossing and German sharp-S words in the same font.
- Vivtek 9y agoAnd there are double-s words in German (like "Amtssicherheit", off the top of my head) that don't use a sharp S - it's not a ligature.
- cbmueller 9y agoIt's actually a ligature for "sz" - at least it used to be. You probably won't find many german words that have an actual "sz" in them.
- detaro 9y agoBut there are some – e.g. Auszeit. And at the same time, we use ß in locations where it'd otherwise be ss. While it started as a ligature, its current usage doesn't fit that.
- cbmueller 9y agoAbsolutely true, it's not really its own letter nor is it really a ligature. It's an unique feature of the german language, which is hopefully here to stay...
- NoodleIncident 9y agoThat doesn't mean it's not a ligature. If English still had a "th" ligature, the word "outhouse" wouldn't use it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- malz 9y ago
- dukoid 9y agoIf we have this character, I think it makes sense to have an uppercase form, turning toUpperCase() into a proper bijective mapping for German :)
- microcolonel 9y agoI'm a big fan of ASCII German (downconversion of scharfes s and umlauts); but some people just like the way the hand orthography looked, and will do anything to hold on to it.
- dpkendal 9y agoAs a learner/non-native speaker of German, please don't abolish the only way to tell the vowel length of an unfamiliar word.
- fs111 9y agoWeg vs weg. No way to tell either...
- matt4077 9y agoThis really doesn't have much of any effect on anybody–as you noticed yourself. It's for use in ALL CAPS, which is mostly done in software these days (i. e. headlines formatted with CSS), so you actually don't have to type it. It in fact simplifies lots of things, because the ß->SS capitalisation screws up all sorts of algorithms: It's unusual to replace a single lower caps letter with two capital letters. It's also not reversible, so you actually need a dictionary to do 'AUSSENTHEMPERATUR'.lowercase.
- pluma 9y agoAs a developer the ß->SS transformation has been one of my pet peeves about digital German. Uppercase meant destroying data. It's awkward. The ẞ glyph fixes that.
- pygy_ 9y agoBelgian here, I grew up on AZERTY, but ended up learning QWERTY for coding. Story time... My last laptop had a physical QWERTY keyboard, but it met a fateful end (I drove on it) and had to replace it immediately. Good luck finding a QWERTY MacBook in the stores of the corner of France I currently live in... So now I'm typing QWERTY on an AZERTY keyboard. Not sure how it works on PCs, but OS X has a "US. International" keyboard mode, were ` ' " and ^ àré dëâd keys to type accented characters. You can toggle plain US and "US International" with a simple keyboard shortcut.
- user5994461 9y agoYou can find almost any laptop parts on eBay. The Mac parts are usually 2 or 3 times as expensive as the similar PC parts.
- pygy_ 9y agoOh, yes, I know. I usually source Mac parts from iFixit though, they provide a warranty and are a known quantity. I'm used to repairing my computers, but the broken one was wrecked (it still booted, but the case was bent around the battery, and the screen was broken). Changing the keyboard of the new one would void the warranty, and having it changed by Apple staff would cost half a new notebook. So I type QWERTY on an AZERTY keyboard. The only issue I have is the closing paren, (<shift> + <0> in QWERTY) is next to the corresponding key in AZERTY (<-> in QWERTY), so I end up sometimes typing underscores (<shift> + <->) when I want to close parentheses. I touch-type for the most part, but that key is too far from the home row for me to hit reliably, so I end up looking and mistyping anyway :-)
- tom_mellior 9y ago> I see this as a step in the wrong direction. Agreed. The council's press release mentions that this will enable the use of the character in passports. The horror for the poor people who have this in their name! I hope for their sake they will have a say in this. Otherwise, filling in any form abroad will become a headache.
- fkistner 9y agoHow is this different from names that contain an umlaut (ÄÖÜ)?
- tom_mellior 9y agoForeign officials ignore the umlaut when looking at your passport or when transcribing what you scribbled onto a paper form. It's (rightly) viewed as a modifier of a letter they know. (In contrast, the sharp S is a letter they don't know. Many people think it's a B.) When filling in electronic forms, you're typically better off leaving off umlauts. Source: A lifetime of experience with funky accents in my name, not living in the place where the name comes from.
- fkistner 9y agoI see your point. But wouldn't this problem be better addressed with an additional field on one's passport, which states the name in a standardized alphabet, e.g. ASCII? Asian passports seem to include something like this.
- germanier 9y agoThe passports contain such a field in the machine readable zone. It has created some confusion in the past, as the transformations ß -> ss and ä -> ae are pretty surprising if you never heard of that.
- int_19h 9y agoMost (all?) countries that use non-Latin alphabets include a romanized name for these reasons. The only problem is that often there isn't a good clearly unambiguous set of rules on how to do that. For the forms, it doesn't matter, so long as the country chooses one and sticks with it. But it can mess up the pronunciation of your name real bad.
- Swizec 9y ago> QWERTZ is already bad for e.g. programming with all its punctuation (typing "]" means holding altgr and pressing 9), so that would make it even worse. This is why I switched to a US layout a few years ago. Mac in particular makes US layout pleasant to use with European languages. Want a funny S? Hold S, pick what you want. All these are one longpress, and one num key, away: ß ś š
- CrystalLangUser 9y agoI personally think the bubble takes way too long to pop up. There are hotkey alternatives to a lot of the common characters. alt+u makes the next character have an umlaut (¨). alt+e -> ´. alt+s -> ß. alt+c -> ç, etc.
- kazinator 9y agoGerman millennials must have something to do with this; it didn't bother anyone throughout the 20th century. The strange thing is that it looks indistinguishable from the lower case one. It's as though they have taken the lower ß and tweaked its font metrics to make an capital version, and not actually invented a proper upper case character. For all we know, the examples shown could just be a of a lower ß taken from a different font. They should have changed something substantial in the glyph, like added a corner, or loop or whatever; some feature that the lower case one doesn't have. How about borrowing a Chinese radical: ⻏ ? That's can't be, of course; this whole thing is part of some initiative to save Germany from cultural invasion. GRÜ⻏ GおTT!
- germanier 9y agoThe idea for a capital ß is pretty old and goes back to the 19th century. One edition of the DDR Duden had a capital ß on its cover. German ID cards only use capital letters and need to distinguish ß and ss. It has nothing to do with millenials.
- kazinator 9y ago> goes back to the 19th century Yes, and so that indicates people are reviving a problem that their great grandparents didn't bother with. > German ID cards only use capital letters and need to distinguish ß and ss Are these newly introduced? If not, why hasn't it been a problem so far? If they are newly introduced, why do they only use capital letters?
- germanier 9y agoThe 1988 passports had capital letters and used ß as well, not sure what was used before. International standards (namely ICAO Doc 9303, starting in 1980) strongly recommend capital letters but I don't know the reasoning.
- Tomte 9y agoThe idea is old, yes. But except from the one singular example, noone ever used it. It has no place in the language.
- tomatsu 9y ago> how do I type this? On Linux, capslock then ß works. No idea how to do that on Windows, though. > so the only reason to use it is to write a word in ALL CAPS. Yep, it was only added for ALL CAPS. It was actually added to Unicode back in 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E IMO it makes sense that it exists. ß -> SS -> ss is a lossy transformation.
- Freak_NL 9y agoI love the compose key on Linux and other -nix-like OS'es. I'm Dutch, and use a standard US-layout keyboard. I can type every diacritic and special character I need — including these em-dashes — just by hitting the compose key (most people use right-alt for this), and a logical sequence of keys. For ë, this is (compose key) " e. For the em-dash; (compose key) - - - (for en-dash, it is - - .). I.e., it all makes sense. So when I write in German, I can enter the ß by hitting (compose key) s s. Makes sense right? So reading this article I wondered: could I compose the upper-case ß? Sure: ẞ. (compose key) S S. Totally guessable. Someone must have submitted a patch for it sometime these past few years, and another person submitted the glyph to a couple of fonts. It's such a shame the compose key never took off on Windows or Mac OS. I cringe every time I see a colleague enter a memorized alt-code on Windows, or just forego diacritics and non-ASCII characters in general; even in people's names.
- gumby 9y agoThe use of ß permits consistency in the syllable splitting rule (split ,,ss'' but not ß). It's a little weird that it looks and is pronounced like s-z but languages do evolve...and we no longer have need for the ch and tz fraztur letter/ligatures. Would you always write ,,ue'' instead of ,,ü''?
- holri 9y agoA language should not be optimized for easy keyboard typing. The power of German comes through it's richness and beauty of expression, including ß. Downgrading this for easy typing would be the wrong direction.
- greglindahl 9y agoHumans downgrade for easy typing all of the time. It's a nightmare for search engines.
- int_19h 9y agoA language should be optimized for what its speakers want it to be optimized. Of late, this has always been easy keyboard typing.
- pluma 9y agoIt's trivial to support ẞ in smartphone virtual keyboards. Physical keyboards may follow.
- pgeorgi 9y ago"Personally I'd rather use composing" Then use a keyboard with a compose key: compose-s-s for ß is already typical, set up compose-S-s for the few cases you need ẞ.
- pluma 9y agoI'm on Ubuntu and have a laptop with a Menu key, so I rebound that to Compose. compose-S-S also works, btw, as does compose-s-s with capslock.
- pluma 9y agoAs 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 typography can now use the proper capitalization and maybe 5-10 years from now keyboard layouts will support this like they added support for the Euro symbol (although that was a bit easier).
- Loic 9y agoAs 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.
- pluma 9y agoFWIW 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.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoAs a german with a US layout for coding I do not care.
- das_keyboard 9y agoWe 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.
- Tepix 9y agoThanks. Do you know how to fix this on Linux (Ubuntu in particular)? When I press ALTGR+H I get ħ, not ẞ.
- das_keyboard 9y agoAFAIK the official keyboard driver for the DIN 2137 T2 layout is avaiable only for Windows. I think you have to rebind the keys manually...
- MichaelMoser123 9y agoWhy 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...
- ttepasse 9y agoAs a german with an ß in my last name I love it.