HN Gopher Feed (2017-07-03) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
84 points by fanf2
https://typography.guru/journal/the-capital-sharp-s-in-now-part-...___________________________________________________________________
zzleeper - 1 hours ago
Interestingly, this is the opposite as what happened in Spanish
[1]We had two extra letters, CH and LL that were just ligatures, so
we dropped them and everyone is better off.[1]
http://www.rae.es/consultas/exclusion-de-ch-y-ll-del-abeceda...
[deleted]
yellowapple - 1 hours ago
Well damn. Now I have to learn myself a new alphabet song.
kuschku - 1 hours ago
In German, ?? is not just a ligature.Since the recent
orthographic reforms, ?? means a very specific sound that?s
separate from s, and from ss.
1maginary - 1 hours ago
> ?? means a very specific sound that?s separate from s, and
from ssKinda. ?ss? and ??? are both /s/, ?s? being /z/ for
contrast, but they do affect how you read the preceding vowel.
filmor - 1 hours ago
As other's have written already, ? is not simply a ligature.
Since the orthography reform in the nineties it universally
indicates that the preceding vowel is lengthened, dropping it
would lead to a large amount of homophones. An example is Ma?e
(measures) vs Masse (mass).
4ad - 20 minutes ago
What a non-issue.
1maginary - 1 hours ago
>La eliminaci?n de los d?grafos ch y ll del inventario de letras
del abecedario no supone, en modo alguno, que desaparezcan del
sistema gr?fico del espa?ol.Important distinction to make. They
are still part of written Spanish. To be completely honest I
didn't even know they were part of the alphabet before and I
wouldn't know how that affects everyday life.The capital Eszett
is a new letter that (almost literally) no one used before
joubert - 1 hours ago
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?):In German
orthography, the grapheme ?, called Eszett (IPA: [?s?ts?t]) or
scharfes S (IPA: [??a??.f?s ???s], [??a?.f?s ???s]), in English
"sharp S", represents the [s] phoneme in Standard German,
specifically when following long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is
used after short vowels. The name Eszett represents the German
pronunciation of the two letters S and Z.It originates as the sz
digraph as used in Old High German and Middle High German
orthography, represented as a ligature of long s and tailed z in
blackletter typography (??), which became conflated with the
ligature for long s and round s (?s) used in Roman type.The
grapheme has an intermediate position between letter and ligature.
It behaves as a ligature in that it has no separate position in the
alphabet. In alphabetical order it is treated as the equivalent of
?ss? (not ?sz?). It also has no traditional capital form (although
some type designers have introduced forms of "capital ?" de facto).
It behaves like a letter in that its use is prescribed by
orthographical rules and conveys phonological information (use of ?
indicates that the preceding vowel is long).
rini17 - 1 hours ago
ParselsprachebenutzerInnen feiern! ?ssss?s sss!
cmurf - 40 minutes ago
Were words using ? ever spelled with sz? The ? is pronounced as sz
(in German) and I think it's a ligature of old German shrift s
which is a line when found in the middle of a word, and z. So
again, were words like strasse, spelled as strasze and hence the ??
And then later it became ss as the sharp s?Edit: OK nevermind.
Other comments and wikipedia discuss this.
microcolonel - 1 hours ago
Languages with priesthoods make me chuckle.
virtualritz - 27 minutes ago
What a typographic disaster.Making an uppercase version of a
lowercase ligature was bad idea from the get go.I suggest to type
designers who want to add this symbol to do an SZ or SS
ligature.Caveat: I studied typography in another life.
lvh - 1 hours ago
While the glyph is still missing from many fonts, Unicode 5.1
designated a code point for it:U+1E9E ? LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP
S
the8472 - 1 hours ago
And it has been in unicode since 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E
quink - 1 hours ago
Arguments against:? is a ligature, one of ss. ? is a ligature, but
that doesn't mean FFL should have one too.Just get rid of it.
Switzerland did and they're managing just fine.Capitalisation in
Unicode for German locales is just a headache, and this really
doesn't help.How would one enter it on a keyboard?Argument for:ss
is pretty much the same shape as SS, and Dutch has ? and ?.It's
just an optional ruling, anyone can do whatever they want and as
with the new orthography, they did. Prescriptive linguistics is
useless anyway, especially over the past two decades in German-
speaking regions.
tomjakubowski - 1 hours ago
Spelling reform got rid of quite a lot of the use of ? in
(German) Standard German, didn't it? As a German learner, I
actually quite like the eszett, as the ? is a very obvious hint
that the preceding vowel (if "monophthongic") is long.>
Capitalisation in Unicode for German locales is just a headache,
and this really doesn't help.Huh, if anything doesn't this make
it easier? Replacing one code point (?) with two (SS) when
capitalizing seems like a bigger headache.
raverbashing - 1 hours ago
Actually it's a ligature of SZ (as even it name says, eszet)
kuschku - 1 hours ago
And it has a separate, and distinct sound from s or sz, and has
a separate meaning for the pronunciation of the surrounding
letters than ss.For example, Ma?e and Masse are only possible
to differentiate due to ?.
legulere - 1 hours ago
It started out as a ligature of ? and ?, forms of s and z that
don't exist anymore today in German. And it became a letter like
? did. Also this happened at a time where z was pronounced
differently from how it is pronounced today.
quink - 1 hours ago
> It started out as a ligature of ? and ?I know that, but again
prescriptive linguistics vs. descriptive and descriptive
definitely says ss.
legulere - 41 minutes ago
Ss is horrible because double consonants signify short
preceding vocals in German. Yet ? is preceded by long vocals.
If you want to replace it, then just with s.
vacri - 56 minutes ago
I can't speak for other languages, but in English ? isn't
really a letter in the modern tongue. It's just used when
someone wants to be 'fancy'. You'll see athenaeum far more than
you see athen?um, for example.
faho - 1 hours 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 "?", I press the key above "p" (in the
same position as with qwerty) and "?" (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 "?" like I already
do (I use "ss" instead), only now I'll ignore both forms.Note also
that a capital "?" 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.
dpkendal - 44 minutes ago
As a learner/non-native speaker of German, please don't abolish
the only way to tell the vowel length of an unfamiliar word.
fs111 - 33 minutes ago
Weg vs weg. No way to tell either...
dukoid - 1 hours ago
If we have this character, I think it makes sense to have an
uppercase form, turning toUpperCase() into a proper bijective
mapping for German :)
microcolonel - 1 hours ago
I'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.
matt4077 - 19 minutes ago
This 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 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.
pygy_ - 11 minutes ago
Belgian 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
^ ?r? d??d keys to type accented characters. You can toggle plain
US and "US International" with a simple keyboard shortcut.
tom_mellior - 10 minutes 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 - 6 minutes ago
How is this different from names that contain an umlaut (???)?
bla2 - 1 hours 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 - 1 hours ago
>This change fixes an internal inconsistencyI agree that it
does! "?" 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 ? is. Removing it would
improve the situation, especially from a technological
viewpoint.>German's not English, even though you might prefer
if it wasThat's kind of a low blow. "?" is not a defining
feature of the German language.
ainar-g - 1 hours ago
>"?" 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. "?", along with less
exclusive "?", "?", and "?" are what distinguishes German
orthography from other languages.
TulliusCicero - 15 minutes ago
English seems to manage okay with no 'special' latin
characters.
qu4z-2 - 3 minutes 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...
tptacek - 1 hours ago
How is using "ss" instead of ? in German any worse from using
"th" instead of ? in English?
kuschku - 1 hours ago
Take the words Ma?e (measurements, sizes) and Masse (weight,
mass).There?s hundreds more of such examples.? and ss have a
different effect on surrounding letters (the a in Ma?e is
short, the one in Masse is long)
fs111 - 34 minutes ago
as somebody else already said in this thread: this argument
is irrelevant, it works just fine w/o the ? in Switzerland.
errata - 1 hours ago
I think you meant it the other way 'round? long/short, I
mean.Otherwise I totally agree, ? is important to
distinguish phonetics.
pishpash - 49 minutes ago
It is important but you are marking the wrong thing, you
could make it M?sse and Masse if you really cared.
matt4077 - 25 minutes 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 - 4 minutes 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.Of course they are.
They didn't invent it, and even if they did they could
still be right on _this_ argument.>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 suggestAnd there's a whole bunch of
counter-examples for that. One is the german "zwei" (the
number 2) and "drei" (3). The german military commonly
uses "zwo" for 2 because those two are so easily
confused.It's not like our languages are willfully poorly
designed, but there's still a bunch of bad decisions in
there, and we might be in a position to fix it,
especially when it comes to things like spelling (which
is mostly decreed from on high, since what schools teach
matters most).
jacquesm - 12 minutes ago
Or Maesse, which is closer to what it sounds like anyway.
Karellen - 1 hours ago
You're right! It's a good job there are no words in English
where one spelling encompasses many meanings, of which some
could even be contradictory, which would have to be
inferred from context. That would be so bad!
matt4077 - 34 minutes ago
There's no reason for sarcasm, especially not with such
misplaced sarcasm. Nobody is arguing that the ? is
required for the future of humanity, or that German is
somehow different, or even superior, to English, and
requires this letter to do its magic.But for good or bad,
it is part of the language. People used to it consider
replacing it with 'ss' as ugly. Because of custom, and
also because a double consonant almost always indicates a
short vowel, whereas a single 's' indicates a soft s.
Only ? actually represents the intended pronunciation.f
course w'd gt by witout it. Bt Englis wld similry srvive
vs fewr lttrs, so y nt ablsh 1/2 t lphbt?
CodeMage - 25 minutes ago
I don't know whether you're a native English speaker or
not, but you certainly reason like one. I started
learning English when I was 6 years old and have had very
few problems with it. My wife started learning it when
she was 39. She's having a horrible time trying to wrap
her head around all the inconsistencies, the incredible
amount of stuff that has to be inferred from context and
the utter lack of pronunciation rules.
[deleted]
pavlov - 26 minutes ago
Annoyingly, English uses "th" for two rather different
phonemes: ? ("thing") and ? ("this").Icelandic maintains this
useful distinction. I feel like English spelling would need
at least half a dozen more letters to disambiguate. As it is,
English is actually a not great choice for a global language
because it's so unphonetic.
TulliusCicero - 17 minutes ago
Every language has something dumb about it that makes it
"not a great choice for a global language". English
spelling is a nightmare, but the grammar isn't too bad, and
most importantly, it has no gendered nouns.
mrkrab - 12 minutes ago
What's so bad about gendered nouns? They are quite
useful, especially when the language allows you to omit
the noun and leave only a pronoun, or maybe the entire
subject altogether.
twiss - 7 minutes ago
They may be useful, but they make a language much harder
to learn to speak correctly.
_delirium - 13 minutes ago
A number of other languages maintain that distinction as
well. For example, ? versus ? in Greek, and th versus dd in
Welsh. But when it comes to confusing aspects of English
orthography, the list is much longer than that...
geff82 - 10 minutes ago
@TulliusCicero: the only true genderless language is
Persian. There is no he, she, it even. There is no way to
hear if someone is man or woman without a precise context
or asking "Man or Women?", which I often hear Iranians ask
in Conversations.
chmars - 58 minutes ago
It isn't, the Swiss easily live without ? and use ss ? the
meaning is usually apparent from the context.
johannes1234321 - 22 minutes ago
Well, many things are clear from context and spelling could
be simplified.For example, in Year 1 that useless letter
"c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s",
and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the
alphabet.The only kase in which "c" would be retained would
be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.Year
2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one"
would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well
abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the
"g/j" anomali wonse and for all.Jenerally, then, the
improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing
awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so
modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist
konsonants.Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu
meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now
jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais
"ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20
iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt
speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.(Attributed
to Mark Twain)About Swiss and the as: I remember one funny
occurrence I had while reading a Swiss paper. It took me
two paragraphs in an article "Neue Busse f?r $company" till
I understood this wasn't about busses, but a penalty fine
(Bu?e) Both are pronounced differently and mean different
things.
matt4077 - 8 minutes ago
The rules of spelling and pronunciation have evolved over
time, and include all sorts of nonlinear effects: the 'ss'
indicates short vowels around it (as all double consonants
do), and a sharp, voiceless 's'. For 's' it's the other way
around. So ? fills a somewhat required place.That's not to
say people wouldn't get around it, or get used to it. But
trying to change the rules of languages top-down are like
trying to change biology top-down: it makes a lot of sense,
and yes, cells are the worst sort side-effect spaghetti-code,
ever. But it won't make life easier.It's very much comparable
to eliminating some random letter from the english alphabet.
Life would definitely go on, but it would seem to be a net-
negative suggestion to do so now. Hey, keyboards would be so
much easier if we switched to binary.There's obviously the
other side of that argument, saying that an alphabet of 80
letters is probably not the best idea. But having studied
biology, I've seen too many examples of a messy long-term
process arriving at something approaching an optimism, and of
people taking a long time to grasp the elegance of some of
these solutions, to be willing to entrust this domain to top-
down decision making,
bla2 - 50 minutes ago
I don't think there's anything wrong with ? either. It fell
out of favor, so it went away. If ? falls out of favor one
day that's fine, but at the moment it's part of the language
and that's fine too.
[deleted]
jacquesm - 14 minutes 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 :)
matt4077 - 2 minutes ago
Of course nobody is going to fault you for succumbing to such
practicalities, and it's perfectly fine to use substitutions
when necessary.But there's something to be said for
preserving a few aspects of the diversity of cultures, as
each one acts as its own preserve of centuries of wisdom.
Hey, it's the German language that gave you Uber (the name).
Which should actually be ?ber, but I digress. (and it'll be
Over soon enough, anyway).We've come a long way with making
unicode universally available, and there's really no reason
to give up now when it's almost done. It's not a big issue
for German, but cultures with non-latin script would
rightfully be offended if forced to abandon it for ASCII, in
the same way that the world would be poorer if all
restaurants were replaced by McDonald's.
bsimpson - 1 hours ago
I'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 - 1 hours ago
And 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.
dukoid - 1 hours ago
There are words where the difference is actually significant,
e.g. "Masse" (=mass) vs "Ma?e" (=dimensions)It's also not a
ligature for sz ("Amtszeit"), although it has developed from
one (of the long s and the tailed z, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F )I like that the
information loss in toUpperCase() is gone now in this case,
so I am all for it O:)
cbmueller - 1 hours ago
It'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 - 1 hours ago
But there are some ? e.g. Auszeit. And at the same time, we
use ? in locations where it'd otherwise be ss. While it
started as a ligature, its current usage doesn't fit that.
NoodleIncident - 42 minutes ago
That doesn't mean it's not a ligature. If English still
had a "th" ligature, the word "outhouse" wouldn't use it.
cbmueller - 1 hours ago
Absolutely 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...
robert-boehnke - 1 hours ago
It's more apparent if you look at the long s (?) which has
since fallen out of favour.If you squint and your font
permitting, ?z should look more like ?.
rb2k_ - 1 hours ago
There are tons according to
http://www.wordmine.info/Search.aspx?slang=de&stype=words-
wi...FRAKTIONSZWANG FREIHANDELSZONE KONFISZIEREN [...]A lot
of them are combined, but still quite a few 'regular' ones
[deleted]
cbmueller - 47 minutes ago
Here is the full list of non compounded words containing
an "sz".Absze? - Adoleszenz - Disziplin - Eszett - Faszie
- Faszination - Fluoreszenz - Koaleszenz - Konfiszierung
- lasziv - Lumineszenz - Obsz?nit?t - omniszient -
Oszillation - phosphoresziere - Plebiszit - Proszenium -
Rekognoszierung - Rekonvaleszent - Szene - viszeralMost
of these actually are of latin origin. My favorite is
obviously "Absze?" - probably the only word in the german
language that will show a non compounded co-existence of
"sz" and "?".
BurningFrog - 58 minutes ago
So ? is finally out of ?-test!
champagnepapi - 58 minutes ago
ASK HN: Why is this at the top of HN?
roywiggins - 8 minutes ago
Because it was up voted.HN likes linguistic things, and
typographical things, and Unicode things, and this is all three.
And the weird .toUpper behavior required by ?->SS is an old
example of string-handling pitfalls that non-German programmers
probably remember.
weinzierl - 58 minutes ago
Most commenters seem to be under the impression that German
orthography gained a new letter, or that uppercase sharp S will be
the norm. This is not the case. From the original article:> The
change doesn?t mean that everyone now has to use a Capital Sharp S.
The previous spelling of replacing ? with SS in uppercase texts
remains the default for the time being.The Council for German
Orthography sanctioned the use of the uppercase ?. They just
accepted the fact that it exits and is used. No more, no less.That
being said, I find it a bit ironic that at first Unicode had to
bend over backwards to allow the strange surjective mapping that
only German requires, only to later resolve to problem the easy way
with the introduction of a new character. I mean it's probably the
right thing to do, because both things are used in German, but on
the other hand it introduces a lot of complications just for one
very specific special case.
detaro - 47 minutes ago
It's a bit more important than that, since ? didn't "exist" in
official use before (if you have a name with ?, the spelling on
your ID card can now use ?, instead of SS where its unclear if it
is ss or ?, now it becomes valid in schools, ...), but yes, it's
only an accepted variant now.
aristidb - 54 minutes ago
I for one find this GRO?ARTIG. Maybe not using umlauts or writing
nouns in lower case is more efficient, but sometimes it feels good
to have something like this.
JepZ - 1 hours ago
And how do I type thi? capital sharp S?The Unicode input seems a
little complicated :-/CTRL + SHIFT + u1E9E = ?
kuschku - 1 hours ago
on linux: [AltGr]-[Shift]-[S]: ?
simias - 1 hours ago
[compose]-S S also works
kuschkufan - 1 hours ago
actually Capslock + ?, on Fedora at least
kuschku - 1 hours ago
both work here (Ubuntu and Arch)
yellowapple - 1 hours ago
On a Unix-like system with X11 and a compose key, I believe
Compose + S + S should work (away from my computer, so can't
test).
ainar-g - 1 hours ago
YE?, it work?.
bla2 - 1 hours ago
On Windows, altgr-shift-?.
Pxtl - 47 minutes ago
So when will we see it in string.toUpper()?