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

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...

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 suggest

And 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).

And I seem to have swapped 'c' and 'k'; Quintilian wished to eliminate 'k' in favor of 'c', which is probably why you think there is no Latin letter 'k'.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/30/spell...

Now, in English, the author might have used fewer pronouns if they were ambiguous... but I've seen a lot of ambiguous pronouns in English writing.

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 neutral gender - being a particularly egregious example).

I agree it's harder for students though.

EDIT: Well, in English you can say "The dog jumped on the table and bit him", but it is not ambiguous. ;-/ The ambiguity in German is not due to gendered pronouns, but due to the gender of table/Tisch. :-|

The masculinity or femininity of a table ought not be controversional except among those who are eager for things about which to be offended. It would seem there are certain groups of people that seem to derive pleasure from being offended. It might also seem, to speakers of languages with gender, that these so-called progressives are being regressive by imposing their linguistic ideology upon others.

Of course I support sex equality for humans, but really sometimes so-called progressives venture into Newspeak territory or at the very least, absurdity. “Womyn” is another example of similar nonsense.

I would say that (at least in Spanish) gendered nouns mainly provide some redundancy that helps error-correct sentences, but apart from that and the occasional meaning subtleties that can carry, they are not very useful.

> what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?

None whatsoever. When speaking of things that don't have any meaningful gender, it makes things unnecessarily complicated. When speaking of things that do have physical gender, it often forces you to make assumptions about it even when it's completely irrelevant.

> ow do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out?

In Russian, it mostly follows the spelling of the words - i.e. if a word ends with a certain vowel, it's feminine, except if ... etc.

Sometimes it doesn't work that way, mostly with loanwords. Some loanwords so obviously don't match any "genderizing" pattern, that they basically end up with neuter by default.

In other cases the historical form of the word did match a pattern, and was assigned a gender accordingly - and then changed (e.g. by re-loaning it in a more accurate spelling), and no longer fits. When that happens, people will use the more "appropriate" rather than the "right" gender in colloquial speech, and eventually it becomes the new standard, collecting the mismatch.

A good example of this is the Russian word "coffee". When it was first loaned back in 18th century, it was "kofiy" - and in Russian, that is definitely masculine. Eventually it got re-loaned as "kofe", which would normally be neuter; but the masculine gender assignment stayed from past spelling. In the dictionaries, that is - in practice treating the word as neuter became one of the common incorrect colloquialisms, just because it doesn't "look" masculine. Language purists fought this for several decades, and eventually lost: it's still nominally masculine, but neuter is considered an "accepted variant" in modern dictionaries.

> how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometime

For new words, by their spelling, as described above. So "laptop" is masculine because it ends with a consonant, for example.

Personal names are an exception to this stuff. As in, when a foreign name is used in a context where gender cannot be guessed, people will often apply the usual rules (and then often get it wrong). But once context is established, it's properly accounted for.

On the other hand, for place names, gender is automatically assigned by the usual rules. So to a Russian speaker, New York and Texas are masculine, while California and Florida are feminine.

Many new nouns are nouned forms of verbs. In German there are a bunch of fixed suffixes for turning verbs into nouns, and they have their own fixed genders: "-er" (masculine), "-ion", "-ung", "-age" (feminine), "-en" (neutral).

For other words, speakers, over time, sort of converge on a consensus, which may only be regional. For example, in some regions "Cola" (the drink) is "die Cola" (female), in others it's "das Cola" (neutral).

Others... not sure. "Mobile phone" is "das Handy" (neutral), I guess from "das Telefon". I'm fairly sure "das Internet" came by analogy from "das Netz", which is the German word for "net".

> - what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?

Not a whole lot, but a language doesn't gain much utility from English features like mandatory plural agreement or a/an distinction either. Even something like "his/her" and "he/she" distinction isn't necessarily and a lot of non-native speakers of English struggle with it. You can dream up some sentences that are clarified by the distinction, but in a different language you obviously just express the same idea differently.

Ultimately a committee sitting around asking if a feature has utility and should be added is not very close to the way languages actually form.

> how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?

Sure. If a Spanish word ends in a it's probably feminine unless it's of Greek origin. But there is also memorization involved. Getting the wrong gender on an inanimate object is a lot like any other non-native mistake; it's likely someone who is talking to you can figure out what you meant.

Again, having to just memorize some cases is common in languages. How do you know what preposition goes with which verb? It probably seems very natural to you, but there isn't much logical basis for a lot of them. In Spanish you dream "with" someone rather than "of" them. Someone who wants to speak native-sounding English has to spend a lot of time learning the right pairings (as well as stuff like which compound expressions should have the infinitive versus the gerund).

> - how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.

It's not really like a group sits around deciding, but of course there's a lot of precedent with existing words that could inform you which answer is likely. Synonymous words can have different genders, so it's not really like, for instance, computing words are all masculine. In general if a totally new word is borrowed into Spanish it's more likely to be masculine (so, like, el kabuki, el ánime, etc.).

Apparently the information density of most languages when spoken by native speakers is much the same, despite variations in verbosity.

(Editing this comment because I made a conjugation mistake for the millionth time – "add" instead of "adds".)

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 others. That's the beauty.

The variations around "th" is one of the things I remember finding particularly difficult when learning English pronounciation, so my comment came from there.

For sorting there is standard (DIN 5007). Replacing ß with ss is correct (even in the lower case variant). The other letters are more fun: ä is replaced with a for sorting, except if you sort a list of names. In that case you need to replace it by ae. Probably not something international software is aware of. The Austrian sorting of names is different and other languages that have the same glyph (e.g. Swedish) also have other rules (e.g. by placing ä at the very end of the alphabet).