17 ms·

As 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 wit

by bla2 9y ago

As 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 ago
    English seems to manage okay with no 'special' latin characters.
    - qu4z-2 9y ago
      What 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 ago
        G, 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 ago
        Sure about the G?
        Tepix 9y ago
        Hardly. See https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Iulius_Caesar https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Iulius_Caesar
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Latin wikipedia isn't exactly an ancient source. Without bothering to read the article, why do you think it has a subhead of "Fontes_de_vita_C._Iulii_Caesaris_praecipui"?
        cronjobber 9y ago
        I'll take this cum cranulo salis.
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        You think "cum granulo salis" is evidence for G being an original part of the Latin alphabet, while not being evidence that U was an original part of the Latin alphabet?
        cronjobber 9y ago
    - codeflo 9y ago
      What do you mean by "special"? If you mean "can be encoded in US-ASCII", then that's a bit circular, because that character set was obviously designed to encode the English language. In a parallel universe where the ancient Romans had designed a character set, it would be the English language that would require all those weird unicode characters like "J" and "U" (which didn't exist in the Roman alphabet).
      - TulliusCicero 9y ago
        I meant that at least AFAIK all the English characters exist in several languages. No special tics or dots that are unique or very unusual.
        CrystalLangUser 9y ago
        > tics or dots that are unique or very unusual It's almost like a lot of languages have a shared ancestry. Differences may be unusual to you. Are ș, î, or ț unusual because they don't exist in English? Those phonemes aren't common in English which is why we don't have distinctions for them, but they're important in Romanian. Not unusual at all if you're Romanian. By your logic, 대한민국 characters are weird and unusual also, and so on...
        TulliusCicero 9y ago
        Yes, hangul is unusual, because there's only one language that uses it. Duh. Latin characters are less unusual because tons of languages use them. I'm not sure why this is difficult to grasp.
        Tepix 9y ago
        Tons of languages use é, ø, and other accents so they are "normal" by your definition.
      - Tomte 9y ago
        Except "café"
    - petre 9y ago
      You haven't seen Old English then. https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.gif https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.g...
      - TulliusCicero 9y ago
        Yes, but that's not modern English.
    - pluma 9y ago
      When I think "weird special English letter" I think Œ, as in fœtus. Granted, in American English it has been eliminated almost completely and even in British English it's now often seen as a bit archæic (pardon the pun) but it's still there and to me signifies "English" just as ß signifies "German", ø signifies "Nordic", ı signifies "Turkish" and é signifies "French".
tptacek 9y ago
How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?
- kuschku 9y ago
  Take 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 ago
    I think you meant it the other way 'round? long/short, I mean. Otherwise I totally agree, ß is important to distinguish phonetics.
    - pishpash 9y ago
      It is important but you are marking the wrong thing, you could make it Māsse and Masse if you really cared.
      - matt4077 9y ago
        I 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 ago
As 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 ago
  Sure, 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 ago
The sharp s is only used in Germany and Austria, but not in Switzerland. There really is no need for it.

by bla2 9y ago

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 ago
  English seems to manage okay with no 'special' latin characters.
  - qu4z-2 9y ago
    What 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 ago
      G, 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 ago
        Sure about the G?
        Tepix 9y ago
        Hardly. See https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Iulius_Caesar https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Iulius_Caesar
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Latin wikipedia isn't exactly an ancient source. Without bothering to read the article, why do you think it has a subhead of "Fontes_de_vita_C._Iulii_Caesaris_praecipui"?
        cronjobber 9y ago
        I'll take this cum cranulo salis.
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        You think "cum granulo salis" is evidence for G being an original part of the Latin alphabet, while not being evidence that U was an original part of the Latin alphabet?
        cronjobber 9y ago
  - codeflo 9y ago
    What do you mean by "special"? If you mean "can be encoded in US-ASCII", then that's a bit circular, because that character set was obviously designed to encode the English language. In a parallel universe where the ancient Romans had designed a character set, it would be the English language that would require all those weird unicode characters like "J" and "U" (which didn't exist in the Roman alphabet).
    - TulliusCicero 9y ago
      I meant that at least AFAIK all the English characters exist in several languages. No special tics or dots that are unique or very unusual.
      - CrystalLangUser 9y ago
        > tics or dots that are unique or very unusual It's almost like a lot of languages have a shared ancestry. Differences may be unusual to you. Are ș, î, or ț unusual because they don't exist in English? Those phonemes aren't common in English which is why we don't have distinctions for them, but they're important in Romanian. Not unusual at all if you're Romanian. By your logic, 대한민국 characters are weird and unusual also, and so on...
        TulliusCicero 9y ago
        Yes, hangul is unusual, because there's only one language that uses it. Duh. Latin characters are less unusual because tons of languages use them. I'm not sure why this is difficult to grasp.
        Tepix 9y ago
        Tons of languages use é, ø, and other accents so they are "normal" by your definition.
    - Tomte 9y ago
      Except "café"
  - petre 9y ago
    You haven't seen Old English then. https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.gif https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.g...
    - TulliusCicero 9y ago
      Yes, but that's not modern English.
  - pluma 9y ago
    When I think "weird special English letter" I think Œ, as in fœtus. Granted, in American English it has been eliminated almost completely and even in British English it's now often seen as a bit archæic (pardon the pun) but it's still there and to me signifies "English" just as ß signifies "German", ø signifies "Nordic", ı signifies "Turkish" and é signifies "French".

tptacek 9y ago

How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?

kuschku 9y ago
Take 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 ago
  I think you meant it the other way 'round? long/short, I mean. Otherwise I totally agree, ß is important to distinguish phonetics.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    It is important but you are marking the wrong thing, you could make it Māsse and Masse if you really cared.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      I 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 ago

As 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 ago
Sure, 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 ago

The sharp s is only used in Germany and Austria, but not in Switzerland. There really is no need for it.