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.
Gendered nouns are really simple. I'd say the hardest part is the subjunctive case but it's not critical for communicating.
While there are good things about Spanish, speaking as a native English speaker there are annoyances too. One big on compared to English is that English is seemingly more economical with syllables than Spanish for many common words e.g. Demasiado, todavia, many adverbs like recientemente.
Spanish does seem to be one if the better languages for gender of nouns in that fairly simple rules seem to correctly classify many but still not having a gender for table or chair is imho inherently better from a cognitive load standpoint. Likewise the agreement of article, gender and number is much simpler than, say, German.
English also wins with much simpler verb conjugation. The forms in Spanish are distinct enough that pronoun subjects are often dropped. I prefer "I speak" and "we speak" to "[yo] hablo" and "[nosotros/nosotras] hablamos". Again English is far more economical with syllables here.
Spanish object pronouns are a PITA because they're ambiguous to the point that you gave to add "a ella" to things.
I also find the number of accents used to be incredibly tedious but at least they don't seem to be critical and are consistent with the pronunciation.
Modern English also has only one second person form. Spanish has 3 or 4 (tu, usted, ustedes and Latin American Spanish doesn't seem to use the vosotros form that Spain does).
I also find the ordering of pronouns common in mainland European languages a PITA meaning objection pronouns before the verb, non-pronoun objects after.
English actually front weights important information pretty darn well from a linguistic standpoint but at least Spanish doesn't have anything silly like German's separable verbs or putting the verb last in Nebensatzen.
The interesting thing about English was that it lost a lot of the linguistic bullshit (basically) during the centuries wheer it wasn't the official language of England (French was), this being the transition from Old English (essentially a foreign language at this point) to Middle English (mostly comprehensible to Modern English speakers).
(Editing this comment because I made a conjugation mistake for the millionth time – "add" instead of "adds".)
Apparently the information density of most languages when spoken by native speakers is much the same, despite variations in verbosity.
FTFY
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".
On a semi-related note: in the Rhineland gendered articles are also used colloquially when talking about people: "Der Mark", "Die Steffi" and so on. I was born into this but I'm unsure how I feel about it after finding out it's actually non-standard in the rest of Germany.
The gender is often derived from synonyms or etymologically related words. I'm guessing the reason it's "Der Computer" for example is that "Computer" works similarly to e.g. "Trockner" (drier) or "Rechner" (calculator, in fact often the German synonym for "Computer") and these are all male (as generally words ending in -er tend to be).
OTOH it's "Das Steak" (maybe because "Das Fleisch" or "Das Kotlett"?) and "Das Shirt" (maybe because "Das Hemd"?). The fallback generally seems to be "das", i.e. neuter, not male.
An example of something with inconsistent use is "Der Laptop" vs "Das Laptop". Presumably this is because "Der Laptop" is derived from "Der Desktop", which in turn is likely simply a shorthand for "Der Desktop-Rechner", making it male. Even the Duden (the closest thing to a "standard" dictionary in Germany) lists it as "der; auch das Laptop" (i.e. "der" seems to be somewhat more common but both are in use).
Some words are kind of gender-fluid too. E.g. a word meaning "hall" was female and neuter in past centuries, and now is male. The word for "coffee" is male in formal/educated speech and neuter is less-educated but (to my despair) rapidly gaining legitimacy speech. Russian is fun :)
For things like the user, you can always assume male, but as with other such assumptions, some people may object to it. In some cases, there is a built-in assumption that male includes female when gender is unknown, but in others it just means male and that's it.
What they all missed was that German already had degendering built right in, the diminutive (something dearly missing from the English language) : der Holzfäller -> das Holzfällerchen, der General -> das Generälchen, die Kanzlerin -> das Kanzlerchen, die Maid -> das Mädchen
Danish is my primary language. We are blessed with only two genders, not three as in German. As closely related as the two languages are, I really cannot make a useful gender mapping from one to the other. That's one - not the only, but definitely one - reason I shall never speak German with anything like the ease with which I've mastered English, even though being exposed to the former at a much younger age.
- what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
- (more immediate to my experience) 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?
- 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.
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.
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.).
> 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.
Much like English spelling it's all a mess now.
Some people say Lithuanian has kept most of proto-Indo European features. If that's true, inanimate/neuter had to evolve later than gender split.
The idea that Lithuanian is extremely conservative from a PIE perspective is rather outdated. Lithuanian does preserve a number of features of what might be termed “Proto-Nuclear-Indo-European” (to use the terminology of Lundvist & Yates), but the insights from the Anatolian languages show that not all of these features can be reconstructed back to Proto-Indo-European itself.
Got any links or literature on how that evolved according to the new school?
Any recent introduction to IE linguistics starting from Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics will discuss the neuter being an innovation after the Anatolian languages broke off. However, I would especially recommend the Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics that will be published by Mouton de Gruyter this September, as it will contain a state-of-the-art survey of the field by a number of prominent scholars. See Lundvist & Yates' chapter on Morphology in it (you can also download a preprint PDF of this chapter from Yates' papers on Academia.edu if you have an account there).
For my part I'd say that it probably doesn't maintain them that much more than the huge number of other modern-day descendants of PIE.
Some languages (Dutch and Danish at least) still only have two genders: male+female and neuter.
It's not the concept that is difficult, it's the extra piece of information that makes it more difficult.
My native language is English, and I never have to remember whether a "keyboard" or a "rock" is masculine or feminine. I've studied a few other languages (French, German, Spanish) that do expect me to remember such things.
To be clear, I'm not trying to refute your statement that they're useful, just asking how. I'm interested in learning about a different perspective.
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).
The major argument for keeping gendered nouns as they are in existing languages is that speakers would be uncomfortable with having their language changed by some standards body.
I agree it feels silly to learn the gender of "sexless" words; but this case and the rule behind it are quite clear in the respective languages this occurs in. I guess it's not unlike English using neuter for animal pronouns, which feels strange to speakers of most Germanic languages.
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.
It also makes translations to other languages hell, when noun genders are used for allegoric purposes.
Ugh, really? How disappointing.
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Ein_Fichtenbaum_steht_einsam
Now try translating this to a language where the tree names are gendered differently, such that e.g. both are male, or both are female.
https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0_%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%...
In Russian, both words are female.
Although it's actually more complicated, because there's more than one Russian translation, and this problem was tackled in different ways. Lermontov just did a straightforward translation, changing the implied meaning. Tutchev and Fet both changed the pine to another tree such that the word is male: cedar or oak (in the latter case, this also required changing the described environment in which it grows).
I agree it's harder for students though.
Example:
A basket is in the car -> some kind of basket of unknown shape or color.
The basket is in the car -> a specific, known basket.
HTH
My native language don't have anything like articles. I frequently misuse a/the in borderline cases. Or just omit the article completely..
Yet gender is super easy in my language! Each noun has gendered suffix. Once you know the word, you know it's gender. Or once you know the gender, you know the suffix... :)
A == non-specific The == specific
'A dog' could be any old dog.
'The dog' is a specific dog we know.
Thus
A == any The == thing
Perhaps I'm not clear where with this understanding it would trip you up. Can you think of an example?
On the other hand, I omit article completely more frequently than using a wrong one. I find I have to consciously think if I should use an article and which article should I use. When I write/talk quickly without double checking, shit happens. Even after using English a lot for 2 decades, articles is just a foreign feature that I have to use consciously.
Like tones in Chinese are another example of "easy enough for native speakers, really freaking hard to non-native".
French has quite a few words that break the apparent gender rules: un musée, un lycée, un mille (meaning "mile"; the homograph meaning "thousand" is feminine but usually doesn't take an article), le mort (dead person) vs. la mort (death), etc. All adding to the shit you gotta memorize. If you don't, your meaning will still come across but you'll sound "off".
(I don't even think I remember all my Vandertramp verbs...)
But it's not that important, gender does add some redundancy and some error-correction to a language. It's not necessary (as shown by English) but it has some use.
It's similar to English which uses "an" instead of "a", but it happens very very very rarely.
(Needless to say, "águila" and "ala" ARE feminine nouns, what's changing here is the determiner so the two a's don't clash, not the gender of the nouns)
This sentence is short. It is short.
"What did you do today?"
"Rode bike"
Sometimes we even use genders for nouns even though it's not official:
The ship sank. She sank.
Compared to German:
The dog jumped on the table and bit the man.
Aww shit there are three "the"s in there... if I'm speaking, I can just slur through it and say "d'Hund" or "d'Tisch" but that doesn't work when I'm writing... okay let's try to get through this.
Der Hund sprang auf... Hmm, well "the table" is Der Tisch, but hang on, I have to figure out what case this is... ah, accusative! den Tisch und biss Ah fuck, "the man" is "der Mann" but what case is this... I don't even care anymore... d'Mann. Nailed it.
It's not like anyone is going to say "he jumped on him and bit him", so the genders serve absolutely no purpose.
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. :-|
- Yoda
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/30/spell...
I'll also make the contentious claim that they are clearly visible as being kinda sexist to progressively-oriented native speakers of languages that don't have them. Of course, if you honestly follow that train of thought, it doesn't stop at having gendered pronouns for inanimate objects. See https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
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.
Languages also differ significantly in terms of which grammatical gender they assign to things.
It's worse than useless.
Gendered nouns are a significant barrier to learning a new language.
For starters, we probably can’t split “th” into “þ” and “ð” because of words like “with”, where “wiþ” and “wið” are in free variation; even words like “thank”, which you might expect to be uniformly “þank”, show up as “ðank” in some dialects, sometimes also in free variation.
English consonants are pretty consistent across dialects, with a few rare exceptions (like [x] in Scottish “loch”), but the vowels are all over the place phonetically. Even attempts to represent them phonemically (e.g. the 24 Standard Lexical Sets[1]) aren’t perfect across dialects because of the presence of different vowel mergers & splits, as well as one-off exceptions.
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...
English would be a more-useful global language — in that it'd be easier for non-native speakers to learn and use it — if we pedants who secretly look down on anything less than "proper" spelling and grammar (and I'm embarrassed to be one of them) would get over ourselves and accept simpler, easier forms as they naturally arise.
EXAMPLE: Less vs. fewer — it's disconcerting to read or hear, e.g., less and less people when the supposedly-correct form is fewer and fewer people; there's no logical reason that the former shouldn't do double duty, as it does in math.
EXAMPLE: Who vs. whom.
EXAMPLE: It's vs. its.
EXAMPLE: Different forms for the subjunctive — e.g., if I was a carpenter (supposedly-incorrect) vs. if I were a carpenter.
"It's" vs "its" is also bothersome, but for a different reason - this probably has to do with learning English in a way that emphasized formal sentence structure, rather than just the way it sounds. But I think that's not all that uncommon for non-native speakers. When I studied in college in New Zealand, I once had a chance to converse with our ethics teacher (native Kiwi) one on one, where she remarked on my spelling in a recent essay. From there she quickly went on to a general rant about how immigrants are much better than natives at spelling, citing "its" vs "it's" as one of the examples - according to her, she had never seen a non-native speaker substitute one for the other inappropriately.
On the other hand, "if I were" never made any sense to me, and is one of the more common mistakes I still make, even after 8 years of speaking and writing English 99% of the time.
Before reaching that level, however, they have to deal with truly maddening stuff like how to pronounce word like "read" or "tear" or "close", or why it's "an interesting little book" instead of "a little interesting book", or why you can see a movie but you're not "seeing TV", or the fact that both "thir-tee" and "thir-dee" mean 30.
Languages evolve to suit the needs of their speakers. If people find themselves without words to describe something succinctly, languages will evolve to become more expressive.
I think compound nouns (as used in German) are a good example of this. They make the language more complex and harder to learn, but allow speakers to capture what exactly an object is or how it relates to others by slapping multiple nouns onto each other.
My pushchair wheel lock mechanism is broken.
Or my pushchairwheellockmechanism is broken.
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.
I'm learning Danish, and regularly have trouble working out where compound words should be divided. I can't see any benefit compared to separating the words with hyphens or spaces. The pronunciation would be the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... begs to differ. There are whole language families without genders.
But don't expect a non-native speaker to pronounce "pothole" correctly...
They were just ambiguously referred to as the English "Tee Aitch", which doesn't help anyone.
Note they did point out the different pronunciations for each word but it was pretty much along the lines "they're the same thing but sometimes sound differently".
- [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.
The variations around "th" is one of the things I remember finding particularly difficult when learning English pronounciation, so my comment came from there.
However I fully understand the problem, given that one of the "clever" ideas of the latest Portuguese revision was to get rid of a few accents.
So "para" (going, giving to some one) and "pára" (stop doing something) are both "para".
Same for "côr" (color) and "cór" (know something by heart), which are "cor" now.
Or "fato" (suit) and "facto" (fact about something), which became "fato".
Oh and in spite of having been reduced to the same spelling, they kept the original pronunciation when spoken, which adds more fun for the foreigners learning the language.
There are lots of other examples, the goal was to make all Portuguese spelling variants more consistent, but made the language much more context dependent.
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,
Reminds me of the scifi short story "Xong of Xuxan" by Ray Russell about a girl with a typewriter that didn't have the letter 's'.
So with current spelling system, it's possible to distinguish words pronounced with long vowels from the ones with short vowels (e.g. by a German learner who sees a word for the first time). So it does have its advantages.
I guess this goes back to the origins of the ß - it can be interpreted as either a ligature of ſs=ss or ſz=sz (ſ is the "long s" which is no longer used).
Maybe we should go back to write the long vowel words with "sz". I am sure that would irritate everybody :D
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)
Otherwise I totally agree, ß is important to distinguish phonetics.
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).
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).
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 ß 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?
And I’ll prefer a natural language that tries to be as unambigous as possible, and with as little exceptions as possible, while being as expressive as possible.
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 für $company" till I understood this wasn't about busses, but a penalty fine (Buße) Both are pronounced differently and mean different things.
EDIT: Erroneously swapped 'c' and 'k'.
Can you source this? It doesn't make a lot of sense -- the Latin letter C wasn't redundant, because there is no Latin letter K.
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'.
That is an innovation to deal with language change. It is not a part of classical or old Latin. Quintilian isn't proposing dropping K because C makes it unnecessary; he's proposing retroactively not adopting K in the first place because the change that prompted people to use it is wrong.
I wonder if I even used them right.
As someone who speaks natively German, can you give me an example or a source for this ?
ß is after a long vocal, ss is after a short vocal. I don't know any regional problems with that (and I come from a region with a VERY different language than most of the German speaking people)
Communication is not about glyps, it's about getting meaning across from one person to another and whatever works is good enough.
Schoene gruesse :)
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 Über, 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.
I'm thinking of France here, which has something called the 'Academie Francaise' (apologies for butchering the c-cedille in this context, the accent aigu 'e' in cedille and acedemie). The only effect this seems to have had is some token re-inforcement of French as a 'world language', but in practice it became a 'come up with French words for words where we already have a perfectly good one that everybody the world over understands but which isn't French'.
If that's culture then I'd much more concentrate on the content than on the form and remove these artificial barriers. Which of course will lead to more and bloodier wars ;)
Unicode is great, it made all languages equal. But I don't see the point of artificially making the problem worse by introducing new glyphs, that's the wrong message to send. We should aim for simplification within limits (not to go down to carricature) and if German got by so far without the 'capital sharp S' I see absolutely no reason to introduce it in the modern age. It's a step back, a small one, but still.
Now, emoji, OTOH, just feels to me like unnecessarily polluting the character space. I'd much rather have a capital ß in the codespace than some smiling poo family.
[1] http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15327r-n4704-medieval-punct....
However, I think it is important to note that the ẞ is not a letter they just made up. Heck, even the picture in the article shows an old book cover, which uses this never standardized letter. To me this is just correcting a previous oversight and formally allowing (not forcing) people to use the 'capital sharp s', for example in print, where they want to typeset a title in capitals.
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).
Collation rules that vary by locale exist for this reason, and all major programming languages and OS'es support this. Of course whether the software you use does this or not depends on the developers writing the software.
Actually, German has the Council of the German Language, which is what did this standardization effort of the new ẞ
This lazy way of writing had some valid technical reasons in the past (like phones not supporting diacritics), but these have long been solved.
P.S: if you think gendered nouns are hard, try language where almost everything is gendered: nouns, verbs, adjectives. In English: "I saw a nice boy walking"/"I saw a nice girl walking". In Lithuanian: "Mačiau gražų vaikiną einantį"/"Mačiau gražią merginą einančią".
And then there is this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/51/91/e2/5191...
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously though, what definition of "special Latin characters" are you using? Italian does just fine with fewer...
That would be wrong -- as the name suggests, W derives from U, similarly to how G, J, R, and U derive from C, I, P, and V. But it shouldn't be hard to see the intuition behind the idea that s is a "natural" letter and š is an unnatural modification.
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...
https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.g...