We had an official rule in the Swiss equivalent of high school, that during school camps "Alkohol in Massen" is allowed. This was of course still no problem because everyone knows what it meant in that context. And of course we drank way too much anyway. :)
Yeah, living in Switzerland, it is clear in almost every case, but sometimes I do wish back sth like the ß, just to show the difference clearly. Mass und Maß is a very good example for this. Also Busse and Buße. All written with ss it could be: many 'Busse' (short u) / buses, 'Buße' / penance or 'Busse' (long u): Swiss word for Strafzettel / all public order offences ticket / fine like a parking ticket. But Mass und Maß are mostly the ones I wish back the ß 🤷🏼♀️
@@Fritz_Haarmann Google Translate makes this phrase sound funny, it says "Alcohol in moderation is definitely more desirable than alcohol in moderation" lol
I'm German living in England. My son learned German at school and was told that the esszett is called "beta s". I told him otherwise and he started using the esszett . His teacher corrected him and insisted that it actually called beta s. Finally I wrote a letter to his teacher pointing out the correct wording of that particular letter. Of course, being a teacher he thought he knows it all but with the help of a number of clever books (that was pre-internet time) I was able to show him that I was right. The blighter from then on accused me of doing the home work for my son. Yes, I admit, I helped him when he had problems but, as I pointed out to the teacher, I also helped my son in other subjects when needed just likke any other parent would do.
@@OntarioTrafficMan a blighter is a person who is regarded with contempt, irritation or pity. I would have called this chap a first class arrogant arsehole but that wouldn't have been nice.
@@OntarioTrafficMan "Blighter" = British English literally derived from "blight" in the sense of "eyesore" used for a person who is an "eyesore of a human being" basically a "disgrace of mankind"
I keep telling my coworkers who are not (yet) fluent in German that their ultimate goal should be to be able to correct Germans when they're using their own language wrong. That will be the final proof that they have become fully Germanized.
As a German I _have_ to apply some insufferable nitpicking to your statement: The _ability_ to correct Germans isn't enough. The final proof of Germanization is in the _action_ .
@@CLipka2373 i disagree, the ABILITY to correct germans is enough to prove you have mastered the german language, the ACTION of doing so proves you have mastered the german culture
The spelling with the "e" after the vowle is actually older than the umlaut. It comes from Latin when they use ae (Æ, æ) and oe (Œ, œ) as the sounds ay and ö respectively. The Germans then simply adopted this for their own language, but in script started to represent the "e" wit two dots over the letter.
It is indeed a little more complicated. The letter "e" in German cursive (which unfortunately or fortunately is hardly used after 1945) consists essentially of two short dashes, and these were placed over the vowel to mark the umlaut. It wasn't a ligature as in "æ" but a stack. This eventually became the characters we use today for our funny umlauts.
@@goebelmasse Oh, that's interesting. I knew they used to write the e above the vowle, like Torax here mentions, but I always wondered how it came to be that an e was abreviated to two dots. Thanx for that info
@@sempersuffragium9951 "Goebelmasse" is a nick I used as a young punk, in a time, in which German keyboards are rare and everybody wrote "ae", "oe", "ue" and "ss" instead of "ä", "ö", "ü" and "ß". Written correctly, it is "Göbelmasse". The word is hard to translate, als many informal compound words in German one will never find in any dictionary. The verb "göbeln" is very colloquial for "to vomit", and "Göbelmasse" is the substance produced by vomiting. Creating such a neologism with "-masse" sounds funny for a German, the formal word is "Erbrochenes". Native speakers of Germany parse "goebelmasse" with ease and see that "oe" is "ö" and "ss" is "ss". But for a non-native speaker it isn't that clear…
5:06: at least if you use beer as your favorite tipple - the sentence "ich trinke bier in maßen" still is dangerously ambiguous even with the Eszett properly put in. In Southern Germany a beer mug containing one litre of beer is called 'eine Maß' - it is the default size you get when you order at the Oktoberfest for instance, the Dative Plural of this is Maßen (that's the case you'll want if you use the preposition "in" before a word) so "ich trinke Bier in Maßen" is either "I drink beer in moderation" or "I drink at least two 1-litre-mugs of beer". I leave it to you to decide whether this latter meaning comes dangerously close to "I drink beer in massive amounts" or not...
Das Scharfe S wurde nach dem 2. Weltkrieg in Deutschland und Österreich eingeführt, weil die Schreibweise "ss" an Hitlers Schutzstaffel (Terrororganisation) erinnert. Ansonsten macht das Scharfe S keinen Unterschied in der Bedeutung und der Aussprache des Wortes, welche man am Kontext erahnen kann. Heutzutage hat das Wort "Schutzstaffel" keine Bedeutung mehr!
On Tuesday’s “Richard Osman’s House of Games” the contestant needed to spell Schrödinger. She spelt it “Schrodinger” which was considered correct. Richard and another contestant said, that they would have put an “e” in there, and thought they where wrong. Of course they were right, the question writer was wrong, as was the contestant.
On the other hand, in Finnish, definitely do _not_ replace the umlaut/diaeresis with ”e”. The name Kyösti Käyhkö (Finnish y is same as German ü) is pronounced very, _very_ differently from if it were spelled Kueoesti Kaeuehkoe. We pronounce each letter symbol separately and take meticulous care in doing so. Ö and ä are single-letter symbols, so they are single sounds. Oe and ae are sequences of two distinct vowels each (diphthongs). If you are unable to type letters with a diaeresis, then bare letters will do. It’s a different vowel then, but we can usually guess what you meant. Some words may become ambiguous and entirely change meaning if the reader doesn’t notice what’s going on. But never, _ever_ replace diaeresis with an added e. It will make the text an ordeal to read for no benefit whatsoever. If you have a keyboard that has these symbols instead: æ/ø (such as dk/is/no), you can use them, but do not go out of your way to use them. They do not exist in Finnish, so it always introduces some overhead to the reading.
Well, naturally, the rules for German orthography don't apply to Finnish orthography. They're completely different languages. They're not even in the same family (Finnish is one of the few languages in Europe that is not Indo-European).
@@rewboss That is absolutely true. But it doesn’t stop sports TV overlay systems from 1980s (that are still being used today at least in spirit, for some reason) from treating Finnish names like they’re German and spelling Hämäläinen as Haemaelaeinen.
Working on Linux with a German keyboard layout for years now, I Iearned that there are even four characters mapped to each key, typed in by the use of itself, [Shift], [Alt Gr] and [Shift] + [Alt Gr]. This allows you to type almost every Latin derivative letter, like the Polish Łł, Danish Øø, Ææ, Icelandic Ðð, Þþ, … Also there are so-called "dead keys", which only give you such a character after pressing a second key in succession: `+a = à, ^+o = ô, ˚+a = å, ¨+i = ï, … I wish there were more lectures about this in computer classes …
Funny thing about the "dead keys": they also work with just spaces: "¸" for instance, which is the small hook that's supposed to go under a "c" or something: "ç". Well, I said it's a "funny thing" while it's actually quite a nuisance. I wrote my dissertation thesis in LaTeX on an Ubuntu system. For macros you require the backslash, which (at least on a German QWERTZ keyboard) you get by [AltGr]+[ß]. But the "¸" you get by typing [AltGr]+['], which is the key right next to [ß]. Similar things are true for many of the other dead keys. So, one can imagine, my dissertation was packed full with little ¸'s and ¨'s and what not.
@@lonestarr1490 It gets even the more crazy when you look into character encodings, especially Unicode. There are multiple ways to encode those diacritics into a text, e.g.: - Ää Öö Üü - one character each - Ää Öö Üü - using "Combining Diacritical Marks" , which means these are actually two characters each, a letter followed by the 'combining diäresis', which allows you to put them on any letter you want as long as the font supports it (like D̈, Þ̈ δ̈, Д̈ …). And I even found a third solution once in a pdf, where the trema signs "¨“ [U+00A8] and the "a, o, u" were just overlayed to get the umlaut.
"US-INTL with Alt-Gr dead keys" is the layout I use. It has [Alt-Gr]+Q = Ä [Alt-Gr]+P = Ö [Alt-Gr]+Y = Ü [Alt-Gr]+s = ß And countless other characters from many (albeit mostly Latin script) languages. The mappings (Q->Ä, Y->Ü) take some time to get used to, especially when coming from German keyboards that have those keys built in, but after a while it's just second nature. I use INTL keyboards because they are more convenient for programming (where the German layout has many of the brackets and other such symbols in inconvenient places)
I wish there were more lectures about how finding out what a software you use offers in computer classes. I can't count the times I have been called to help someone and all I did was go through the menu until I found an entry that had exactly the same name as what they asked me to do for them. Although, nowadays that most programs hide their menu behind a tiny unlabelled button that's not even marked as a button, I find it harder and harder to blame people.
I am afraid that in French the accents above uppercase letters are as mandatory as they are in German, so tells me my dictionary. On a 'French' AZERTY-keyboard they are easy to make, by tapping 'alt gr' together with the given accent first, then tapping uppercase together with the actual letter . Only if your keyboard can't form accents above uppercase letters, you may ommit them. In French speaking countries this shouldn't be an issue, should it? Still, accentless uppercase is widely spread in French... By the way, thanks for your brilliant uploads, the contents as well as the presentation; always very enjoyable. Cheerio, Willem (Belgium, with an AZERTY-keyboard, of course)
Writing the letter ß as sz _was_ an optional spelling for uppercase in the old rules before 1997, and only if there was an ambiguity. This rule was so optional, authorities used lowercase ß on ID cards and passports…
On one hand I would like the use of sz, cause it would stomp some of those artificial ambiguities and it would finally be what the name says it should be. On the other hand sz really looks confusing
From my military service in the late 1970s I remember that in Telex pages the ß was always spelled as sz - I guess Telex transmissions used a very limited character set. Assuming it was Telex and not some other communication technology.
@@OntarioTrafficMan When I have the caps-lock on and hold down S. It always pops ups with a lowercase ß. That's the only letter on my android phone keyboard that stays lowercase when the caps-lock is on. I won't change my keyboard because I need it to type in Polish, my native language and this keyboard is also compatible with most not all European languages like Spanish, French and Czech.
I can explain that in German, French and Portuguese using examples: German: lauten = to sound, to be läuten = to ring zahlen= to pay zählen = to count rosten = to rust rösten = to roast die Masse = the mass die Maße = the dimensions French: ou = or où = where mais = but le maïs = the corn l'élève = the student élevé/élevée = high a = has à = at, to du (de + le) = of/from the (masculine) dû (devoir) = had to Portuguese: a caça = the hunting a caca = the poop a maçã = the apple a maca = the stretcher o cocó = the poop o coco = the coconut é = is e = and o bebé = the baby ele/ela bebe = he/she/it drinks
lauten : to be only relatet to a text (the text reds ...)
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In further defence of the vowel followed by "e" to substitute the Umlaut: I have an old 19th century cookbook that has the Umlaut represented by the vowels with a small "e" above the vowel instead of the dots.
The ß is actually a ligatur in the Kurrent font that was in use in 19th century in Germany. It puts together the lower case s and z that's why it is called eßzett.
The pronunciation predicts where to set an ß, yes, but for the reason to pronounce the word correctly, which is that the ß lengthens the previous vowel, and because of this, you should use it this way, because it is also why the other usage of ß was abolished.
I hit the reality of this when I worked for SAP AG in the US. Back in the 1990s, I needed to email a German colleague who had an umlaut in his name. There wasn't an email directory that could help me bypass the problem, so someone taught me the "insert e" trick.
I actually have it stated in my Austrian Passport that Trawöger equals Trawoeger . Which is super helpful when you want to get a plane ticket outside a German speaking country. Because most reservation systems still don't accept Unicode in a name.
In fact, it's not the website's fault that ÄÖÜẞ are not accepted, its because airlines still use a horridly old booking system that still often relies on mainframe computers that only know capital letters, and no special characters whatsoever. That's why, on your plane tickets, you are spelled MR ANDREAS TRAWOEGER
@@m0llux I spent most of my lifetime writing software for those ancient computers. To be fair, all computers I know of since the early 1970s have both upper and lowercase, and all computers from the accounting machine days in the 1940s have known at least a few special characters. It is the reservation software that validates the field contents, and is programmed to only allow uppercase and nothing else. Now that said, mainframes generally only know ASCII or the approximately equivalent EBCDIC code, not Unicode. So umlauts, accent marks, etc. are right out in the normal character encoding. I suppose you could write u: for an umlaut, but nobody would recognize it.
Some people have it far worse: Featherstone (pronounced Fanshore) Nguyen (Nuen) Aneesha (Anisha) and the list goes on... I've seen a case where cops didn't accept official documents insisting that the name was incorrectly spelled! He tried to argue with them and it became a huge mess, which earned him stalker cops who gave him parking tickets for months! (they kept falsely flagging his car for parking illegally).
@@edi9892 " gave him parking tickets for months! (they kept falsely flagging his car for parking illegally)." It also works the other way round: I still try to pay the toll for the Tyne Tunnel/Bridge between England and Scotland. It is impossible, because my "Vehicle does not exist" (German licence plate with Umlaut "Ö"?). Strangely it worked fine with Deptford Crossing. Can it have to do with the geographical latitude??
I largely use a German keyboard because it has the äöüß and accented characters readily available. This is useful if I am writing in French, Estonia and Finnish. I gave up on UK or US keyboards because of the alt-key codes which are a nightmare. My fingers now automatically go to the German key positions so if I have to type on a UK or US keyboard I have to think where the key is.
@@MildlyInterested_ that is nearly as poetic as counting syllables would be
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I highly prefer the US Intl (with Alt Gr) layout for better availability of punctuation and parenthesis characters. It makes available lots of other diacritic characters in reasonable positions. I'm touch typing anyway, so I don't care that much about the physical layout. If it were not for the punctuation characters, German T3 layout would be a good alternative. Sorry, I'm no poet XD
Using the hack is better than just writing the letter without dots. Two famous Umlaut cities are Köln and Düsseldorf and while English speakers avoid one problem by using Cologne, Düsseldorf usually gets written as Dusseldorf which is slightly insulting but I have seen it too often on foreign airport departure boards. Every German will fully understand the spelling with ae, oe, ue and ss.
for anyone who is still not convinced of the gravity of such a spelling mistake, a "Dussel" is a dimwit, so by ignoring the Umlaut, you're questioning the intelligence of everyone of the city's citizens.
When you write a letter to Münster, but you ignore the Umlaut, then you shouldn't be surprised, when the letter goes somewhere else. To be precise: to the city Munster. Yes it exists and you would have to drive about 3 hours between the two.
Oh! I fell for that one although I grew up next door to Münster. I did not opt out of Bundeswehr because of reasons that no longer matter and when I got the letter I was like: YES! (stupid army, can't even afford printers that print umlauts!) aaand: What's this number? Cannot be the zip code because that would be 48something ... Uneasiness grows. Where's the Diercke? So I ended up with 3 months of free rides on the IC Sperber from Iforgotwhence to Munster (Örtze), iirc and I still hate every minute wasted there. The Münsterland is also a region where ae/oe is different from the umlauts: Laer which is close to Leer which sounds like Lär, Graes and Coesfeld.
ok but that is why we have Postcodes and I would hope the post checks them (tho I can't really confirm that they do) so even if they ignore the umlaut it should still reach Münster...
The usage of the correct postcode would easily avoid this problem. I live in Münster and parcels from abroad are often addressed to Munster, but the postcode 48155 avoids misunderstandings, so far 😎
Two Danish villages are named Nørup. I live in one of them. Two other Danish villages are named Norup. Fortunately they all are in different postal districts. I recently received a package from USA in spite of a misspelling.
Unterschied zwischen rosten und rösten: rosten = unter Einwirkung von Feuchtigkeit gelblich bis rötlich braun werden Beispiel: Metall rostet, wenn es nass wird. rösten = etwas längere Zeit ohne Zusatz von Fett oder Wasser grosser Hitze aussetzen, sodass es gar wird, eine braune Kruste bekommt, knusprig wird Beispiel: Essen auf dem Grill rösten
I’ve recently been really into old prints and manuscripts. One interesting thing to look for is changes in letters and how they were written over time. For example, the Eszett developed out of a ligature combining the letters “S” and “Z” (the clue is in the name, so the brothers Grimm shouldn’t have lost that 19th century fight). But there were also other letters like that which don’t exist anymore. One letter probably started out as an abbreviation, not a ligature, but it certainly became its own thing. It looks like the numeral “8” but with a little opening up top. Basically, it was a gothic letter “d” with a little squiggle added up top. That squiggle represented the letters “er”. So the glyph stands for the syllable “der” and it was used a lot in old manuscripts and early prints. Abbreviations like that were extremely common and the rules around them were incredibly complex. I tried to decipher a hand written Latin sentence from the 16th century once. Just one little sentence and really short to boot, yet I had to study massive books on abbreviations to figure it out. There were so many of these abbreviations . Luckily, most abbreviations disappeared with the printing press. But in manuscripts they lingered on. My grandparents still learned in school to write “mm” as one “m” with a dash on top. That was the last of these abbreviation rules. But there used to be countless rules and symbols for abbreviations, some of which also made the jump into the era of printing presses, like the glyph representing “der” which I mentioned above.
@@pierrefley5000 Well, that’s easy, it doesn’t. The curvature of the second part is opposite that of a short s, in line with that of a z. Also, when you look at gothic scripts, it’s even more obvious. There you can easily make out the z. Just look at the (German) Wikipedia entry. Not only can you read about the origins as ligature of long-s and z, there are also plenty of images which make it rather obvious.
To clarify, the letter ß has been simplified and smoothened over the centuries, so I can see how one would interpret the second half of the ligature as “s” instead of “z”. But that is quickly corrected by looking at a gothic ß. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
@@pierrefley5000 I have to correct myself slightly. After looking into it a bit, I found that in Italy a separate ligature developed independently during the 15th century, a combination of long- and short-s which ended up looking very similar when using an Antiqua font. That may be why some modern fonts make the ß look like a combination of long-s and s. But in a German context, the ß developed out of long-s and z.
But the point is that if the circumstances dictate, you can simply omit the accent. That's not possible in German: it's either "KÖLN" or "KOELN", never "KOLN".
@@rewboss It's not even a stylistic choice, it's entirely wrong spelling, only seen in archaic 90's broken fonts and the rare extremely lazy signage like in your example. "cafe" would definitely be read as the sound "caff", or like the english for baby cow; I'll stick to drinking café instead of attempting the same with calves (eww)
The same is true for Danish. You should write æ, ø, and å, though if you for some reason should be unable to, ae, oe, and aa are perfectly acceptable substitutes, even if it's not the correct spelling.
Written languages... whether it's us germans with Umlauten and other special cases, english with it it's unpronounced letters, the mess that is french or the three japanese alphabets, it's never easy. By the way, when I learned to write, I was told the ß is called the 'Rucksack S' (the backpack s). I wonder how many different names that letter actually has...
Just discovered you channel. As a Kiwi who lived several years in Germany I think it is excellent! My German father-in-law used to call the scharfes S a Rucksack S, but I never heard the term Eszett used when I was there.
First off, do I imagine it, or do British people only pretend not to be able to pronounce these Umlaute? For instance, _work_ and _syringe_ sound often awfully close to an ö- and ü-sound respectively... Now, what he meant by the brothers Grimm failing is actually a funny story. It originally was mostly _sz_ and not _ss,_ AFAIK. You have to imagine it similar to _ye old tavern._ There used to be another letter in German that fell out of use. It looked a bit like the integral symbol. This is what gave the _Esszett_ (I don't have it on the keyboard either, just the Umlaut button, LOL) the long stroke, as it looked originally a bit like _I3,_ similar to how _&_ used to be spelled _et._ It all boils down to ancient Latin. Latin had many different dialects and corresponding dialects so that _Caesar_ could be pronounced similarly to _Kaiser_ or _Tsar_ (both titles are derived from it!). Thus, to sort out the mess, people started adding new letters to make it clear if a _C_ is supposed to be _K, Z,_ or _G_ and if a _U_ was a _V, or W._ However, pronunciation and spelling kept changing, thus it all became this mess we have to deal with today. Thus, there were probably people that pronounced _CAIVS, IVLIVS, CAESAR_ starting with _K, J, and Z._ (thus, having two different C despite both being in a similar position; unlike *V* I *C* I, vs *C* AI *V* S) Just know that the following letters are related: C: K, G, Z V: U, W I: J, Y
I agree on everything you said! I just wanted to make a case for calling the ß "scharfes S" instead of "Eszett". If you are e.g. of Hungarian descent and your name is Laszlo you dont want people to write it Laßlo :D Where I come from this would never happen as "scharfes S" makes it very clear that you didnt mean the letters s and z.
@@darth0tator In Hungarian, "s" is /ʃ/ (e.g. Sándor, Solti), "sz" is /s/ (e.g. László), and "z" is /z/ (e.g. Zoltán). So the s and z don't represent separate sounds, but they are both needed. "sz" can occur in German, too (e.g. Tageszeit), and ß would be wrong there, too.
I am German, and I have an Eszett in my last name. It is a "soft" Eszett, in fact - it pronounes like a normal S, as does the one in "Soße", depending on your dialect. I will still say "scharfes S" when spelling it on the phone, though, before someone makes an S and a Z out of it. During my time in the military I spelled it "Sierra Sierra", not "Sierra Zulu". Anyways, in the human readable part, my ID card has a lowercase Eszett with the rest of the name in caps. The machine readable part has a double S. My driver's license also has the lowercase Eszett amidst the caps. I've been pulled over in my car one night and the (rather young) cop actually asked me what that "funky B" in my name was...
I live near the French border and sometimes we would get leaflets from French supermarkets that would advertise special deals to Germans in German language. The ones featuring alcohol always had the advice "ALKOHOL IN MASSEN GENIESSEN" at the bottom.
Es wäre manches einfacher, wenn Deutsch dem Finnisch näher käme: IN MAASSEN GENIISSEN. Aber leider sind unsere deutschen Regeln nicht so 😞Deutsch tut sich schwer mit dem Verschriftlichen von lang oder kurz gesprochen Vokalen. Maße könnte man auch Maasse schreiben, ähnlich dem Fluss, Maas ("von der Maas bis an die Memel"). Wäre dann klar von MASSE zu unterscheiden. Some things would be easier if German were closer to Finnish: IN MAASSEN GENIISSEN. But unfortunately 😞 our German rules are not so. German has a hard time with writing long or short spoken vowels. Measures could also be written Maasse, similar to the river, Maas ("from the Meuse to the Memel"). Would then be clearly distinguishable from MASSE.
In Finnish, you definitely shouldn't replace ä and ö with ae and oe. They are completely different things representing totally different phonemes. E.g. the words "hän" and "haen" are very different words pronounced significantly differently, "hän" being the third person singular pronoun, and "haen" being "I fetch". Moreover, since Finnish has what's called vowel harmony, lots of äs and ös will appear in the same word, such as "hätääntyä" (to get alarmed), so spelling that as "haetaeaentyae" is just ridiculously difficult to read. So if you're unable to write ä and ö, the best workaround is to just write them as a and o.
Not pretending the Umlaut letters exist and simply ignoring it can bring you to two totally different cities in Germany: "Münster", is a beautiful bike friendly city in Westphalia with 317000 inhabitants, most of them students. "Munster", is a small backwater town in Lower-Sayony with 15000 inhabitants, most of them soldiers and home to two of the most largest army training areas of the German Heer. And on the topic of the "esszett": It's a ligature between the old "long-s"/"ſ" and the letter "z", see how when I write "ſz" it almost looks like "ß"?
"ſz" looks like "ß" in blackletter, but in Latin script it's "ſs". The history of the character is very complicated, but the evolution of "ß" wasn't complete until 1901, by which time it was firmly established that it represented "ss". In Aschaffenburg there is a remnant of the old freight train station that predates the 1901 Orthographic Conference: it's an archway with the words "Güterannahme Richtung Preussen" painted onto it. "Preussen" is spelled that way because the lettering is Latin, and in those days the convention was for the blackletter "ß" to be represented by "ss" in Latin typefaces.
@@rewboss Yeah, you're correct. I should have mentioned that while the long s exists in Latin script it's rarely used and more of a Fraktur thing where there exists multiple rules on when to use it. It doesn't get better that the rules for these ligatures are different in almost all European languages (of which almost all had a long s at some point). For example, in German the first ligatures were done by combining "ſz" to ß, but in Italian (from where we get antiqua) it started as "ſs". Oh and the final tidbit: The reason why German didn't have a capital ß was because when the Nazis rules that only Antiqua was to be used (contrary to what popular history and Holywood wants us to believe), they wanted to remove the ß from the language (like Swiss did). Hitler intervened but stated that there mustn't be a capital ß and that instead SS was to be used.
On MacOS with an English keyboard, pressing option-U will put an umlaut over the following lowercase or uppercase vowel: ä ö ü Ä Ö Ü. Option-s gives you an ß. Shift-option-2 gives an €. This is much easier than trying to remember alt-codes.
@Matejko108 And frankly - I spent a lot of time in Germany. Especially in Berlin. I'm always happy to be there, since it offers me the opportunity to speak German.
the EsZett is a ligature of the small sz letters. It's just sad that the brothers Grimm lost the argument to write Eszett as sz. But it's how the world went and now we have to use a double ss where we intent to use a stressed s and where we intended to use an Eszett in case there is no proper keyboard around. In the past Germans could hear a difference, wether a sz or ss was spoken and we could produce 2 slightly different stressed s sounds. That's why Eszett existed in the first place. So the Swiss went the most consequential way that also Germany and Austria should have taken. If you can't actually form the Eszett sound anymore and you allways use the ss sound instead or if your hearing just can't differenciate between them , then write them both with the same letter , just like the Swiss do! Also there is no problem to reform words that just don't make sense without an Eszett. These words are rare anyway. "Maassen" and "Massen" would have worked perfectly fine for everyone. I think that we should write more phonetically anyway. It would add a lot double vowels to the German language and make written German look pretty similar to written Dutch, but it would be way more systematic and more easy to use and to learn.
My old Farm house here in Germany was built in 1830 and has a text engraved above the main door, they actually wrote "Straßen" as "Straszen" They also wrote "Hilfe" as "Hulfe" , "thut" instead of "tut" , "last" instead of "lässt" and also replaced every ü with just u...
Das Esszett ist tatsächlich eine Ligatur aus dem langen s (das so aussieht wie ein f ohne Querstrich) und einen z (das in alten Schreibschriften einer 3 ähnlich sah).
I also never ever heard of the term "Eszet". I only ever know it als "scharfes s". That may be one of those regional things. Here in Switzerland where I live now (I am orignally from Vienna) it does not exist and I do not miss it at all. I hardly even notice. Funnly enough, German lost its more commonly used "langes s" long ago (it looked similar to the letter "f") and it was no issue as well. So "ß" is definitly not required, it is just unnescessary complication. And yes, given that all Swiss just use "ss" instead of the "ß" means that is is absolutely allowed and yes, it is the replacement to use. If you dont have "ß", dont worry just use "ss", more than 5 million native German speakers do so.
Excellently researched, described and presented. As a German with Abitur and son of a teacher, nitpicker and walking encyclopedia, I can attest to the truth of its content.
I only use the ALT codes because very rarely do I need to use umlauts and eszetts... when I have to I use the cheat sheet for those. If my usage of those were frequent I would probably switch to another method, being the added E or getting a new keyboard. Anyway, good and succinct explanation as always.
... und dann gibt es die Bondrucker, die behaupten man hätte im Biergarten einen KLOB MIT SOBE gegessen und in der Bäckerei eine Kµsebreze und eine Nu³ecke :)
Naja, ich störe mich mehr an den Hanseln die für unsere Pässe einen Zeichensatz verwenden auf dem man die Null nicht vom großen O unterscheiden kann. 😒
Not only looks like but *is* a leftover. It's literally a ligature of ſs, a double s consisting of a long s (commonly used in Fraktur fonts) and a (in modern view) “normal”s that regularly appeared in Fraktur only at the end of words or the end of parts of compound words. Hence also the old spelling rules pre 1996 making use of ß at the end of the word like in “daß”, because that's what you'll naturally get in Fraktur fonts by writing “dass”, but making only the final s not a long s, i. e. “daſs”, and then using the ligature ß for a cleaner look. I don't know the design considerations that make up the capital ẞ, maybe they just used the style of ß based on ſz ligatures, but with a “ʒ”- style Z. Such a style of ß exists for the lower case version, too, in some fonts, but in those where it doesn't, they might have decided its a nice way to optically distinguish the thing from the lower case letter. That, and also the ẞ seems to be slightly wider than ß, giving it a shape more similar to most other upper case letters.
@@steffahn Correct, a few days ago I've seen Rewboss' video from 7 years ago where he explained this very good (th-cam.com/video/cMo4gJIlDeU/w-d-xo.html). As far as I know the capital ß was an invention of the ISO because every other letter has a non-capital and a capital and therefore there was kind of gap in the ISO standard. I've heard it some time ago but not sure. In reality the capital ß is not used and never was, and if then it's a mistake.
@@steffahn The letter ß is really somewhat of an amalgamation of two ligatures, ſs and ſʒ (whence the name Eszett). There have been, over the years, many suggestions for a capital, most of which just looked like crap. ẞ looks reasonably niche and also not too much like any other letter (B in particular).
Very good and informative video, it seems that you did your research very well! I commend you for giving objective information without giving too much about the trolls with their bullshit, but simply correcting them. Great work! Why I watch this as a native German though I don't know. Seems to me your videos are just really well made!
For those who don't know yet: on a regular German keyboard, the uppercase ß is written by holding Alt Gr and Shift and then hitting ß: ẞ For those who wonder and don't have a German keyboard: this is different from all other letters including ä/ö/ü, because ß is a separate key (like ä/ö/ü as well), but since ß used to be a lowercase only letter, Shift+ß was re-assigned to ?. And Alt Gr+ß as next best option was already taken for \. So the only remaining option was Alt Gr+Shift+ß all together.
I notice that the Interrail planner app spells München as Muenchen, so presumably doesn't have the umlauts installed in the operating software. It also spells Norwegian places names such as Bodø and Tromsø as Bodoe and Tromsoe, so presumably substituting an E works for the Ø character in Norwegian as well
I'm happy to be on Linux, as the Swedish keyboard layouts in Window$ have a ton of dead AltGr+[letter key] combos, while they're all filled with special characters in Linux, such as AltGr+S for ß (or the arrow characters on the following key combos: AltGr+Y:←, AltGr+Shift+U:↑, AltGr+U:↓, AltGr+I:→).
When people proclaim it's not called "Eszett" they just exhibit a lack of knowledge about the history of the ligature that became a singular letter in modern German writing. Historically it was the two graphemes for S and Z put together into a ligature. If you've seen older German writing(writen/printed in Fraktur typefaces), you know where that ligature came from and that it is indeed an S and a Z. Over time the use was more widely adopted and what was once a simple ligature became it's own grapheme. I personally would love to see the grapheme have an official replacement rule set as "sz" rather than "ss" for clarity and I personally use it that way but I doubt that change will ever become official, we'll probably rather see the letter disappear alltogether.
In the late 90s as a teenager I had to get online late at night because my parents didn't want me tying up the phone line during the day, so when I went online there was a disproportionate number of people from Europe in chatrooms and message boards so I ended up talking to a lot of Germans. I would help them practice English and they would help me practice German. I remember a lot of them used the e to denote an umlaut even though they (presumably) had a German keyboard. This is actually how I learned about this. Also, a pro tip, if you're going to be writing a lot in a language that uses special characters whether it be German or Old English, just type the characters out once somewhere and copy and paste them as needed. If you're good with the copy and paste macros, it's faster than alt codes.
In the late 90s, a lot of computer systems couldn't cope with non-ASCII characters, so it doesn't surprise me that they'd use e's instead of umlauts, even with a German keyboard. (By the way, "practice" is the noun,, and "practise" the verb. Same spelling rule as "advice" vs "advise", but the latter's easy to remember because it matches the pronunciation.)
I use a customized US English keyboard layout on my Windows computer that I brought over with me from the States. I in addition to mapping "CTRL-ALT 3" to "£" and "CTRL-ALT 4" to "€", I used a label maker and printed out all the common diacritics that I need for the German and Spanish letters along with their mapping numbers. I use shorthand on the label like "ü252" and "Ñ209" to stand for typing in ALT-0252 and ALT-0209 respectively. I then stuck the resulting 30cm label to the top of my desk monitor attached to my laptop.
@@gwaptiva This is only for my US keyboard setup. I recently acquired a Samsung Galaxy Book 360 notebook computer from Samsung Germany. They only offer "Deutsche Tastur" which help me greatly. All I need to memorize are: (1) most of the special diacritics are on my right hand and that (2) the Z and Y characters are switched around. from US keyboard. Another thing that influenced my purchase of it is that it was discounted at €1275 marked down from €1699 and Klarna was offering 0% zinsen for 12 months on it. :-)
@@UsmanBello Writing software code on a German keyboard is a nightmare; all the extra keystrokes you have to do to get \| etc... it's why I put up with the occasional Alt-code typing
Mir ist vor kurz klar geworden dass das ß kein Buchstabe im eigentlichen Sinne ist. Im sütterlin (eigentlich "deutsche Schrift") werden s und z so geschrieben dass es praktisch ein ß ergibt... Diese Sprache ist ein Wunder und der größte deutsche Schatz das es gibt! Vielen Dank für Ihre Video.
As a non-German-speaker, just curious, would there ever be a case where the letter sequences pronounced /aə/ /oə/ /uə/ could accidentally be interpreted as /ɛ/ /ø/ /y/? Or is there no situation where it would be ambiguous?
With very few exceptions, the only positions in native German words where you have ae/oe/ue as separately pronounced vowels are at the edges of syllables and postfixes (e.g. -er). Those are usually quite obvious unless you have "place name"+"-er" and you don't know the place. There's also an old production where an added e denoted a long vowel, this has long been replaced with an h, but there still are names around. Those you just have to know, as there is no other indication that e.g. Coesfeld is Kohsfeld and not Kösfeld or Koësfeld. Then there's a number of foreign words like Muezzin or the very old may-be-influenced-by-french-or-not Poet. BTW, Germans will tend to use aë/oë/uë when seeing ae/oe/ue in a text that also has äöü unless it looks like a place name and they are aware of the long vowel marker (it's regional). The assumption is "there must be a reason it's not written äöü" and there are not that many alternative pronunciations to choose from. PS: e as a low vowel marker is still commonly used with i. Something that tends to drive native English speakers crazy, as this means ie and ei swap their pronunciations between German and English.
Very informative! P.S. I don't think many English speakers have much trouble with representing /ai/. German spellings like "Einstein" are very recognizable and easy to remember for English speakers. And representing /i/ isn't too weird either - if you pluralize an English noun ending in , the convention is to replace the with (ex. puppy -> puppies) but it's still pronounced /i/.
@@rzeka You'd think so, but there seems to be some psychological block when learning a foreign language. For some reason, people reduce their skill in their native language to what they have explicitly learned, not what they actually do. Likely caused by actively trying to suppress their instincts applying native language rules automatically to the other language. For example, it can be quite funny watching someone trying to pronounce the schwa at the end of German words...when you know that schwa is the most common vocal in spoken English (it's how the e in "the" sounds when it's not ee). Same to some extent with ö; English has a sound that's close enough (especially for beginners), e.g. in nerd, but people still end up with knots in their tongues from trying. And then there are some that pronounce ö like ü, but can't get the ü right. The same is even true for native speakers in their native language. In standard German, "das" (the) and "dass" (that) are pronounced the same, so it's understandable that children struggle to get those right. But in my dialect region, they are pronounced differently (das->des). Absolutely nobody mixes them up when speaking, but it doesn't help them write those correctly at all.
Interestingly the town of Oelde where I used to work used in the nineteenth century to be written Ölde but the problem was perceived to be that the umlaut on the O wasn't clear so postal workers had to stop to think about it so the town changed the spelling of its name.
In Lower German place names "oe" usually stands for a long "o" like in "Soest" or "Coesfeld". So in Westphalia one would expext to read "Oelde" not like "Ölde" but like "Oolde". It's the same with "Oerlinghausen" that is actually pronounced "Örlinghausen". It's confusing.
@@roli9091 I was aware of Soest etc but on a late 19th century map of the area I looked at in Bielefeld library - Oelde was written as Ölde and is pronounced like that today.
Good job 👍🏻 One further infornation you might mentioned the video before: Originally the ß sz actually was a S and a Z written together. Back in a time where they used to write in Sütterlin script (yes invented by Herr Sütterlin or Suetterlin) (The scriot, where you often mix up the s and the f) The f got a stroke, the s doesnt. The z was totally different and looked more bulbous like a g in handwriting. Now put the two together. The f without the stroke and the z looking like g. And voila you got the extraordinary letter ß looking a bit like a capital B. 😁
The "ß" was a thing long before Sütterlin was, and has a much more complicated history (and it's that complicated history that explains why it's called "eszett" but represents "ss"). And although every German has heard of Sütterlin, it was actually quite rare: it was only used for a few decades in the first half of the 20th century, and it was used in schools to teach handwriting. The normal cursive used in real life was Kurrent, and Sütterlin based his script on Kurrent.
@@rewboss correct. 👍🏻 And thanks for the extra Informationen. 😊 Germans' knowledge of the ß / ss often just reaches back to Sütterlin. 🙈 And I fear even this knowledge will be forgotten soon.
Taking a look into the DIN 5002.22 Standart, the name "Eszett" is the official word in the german Phonetic alphabet for the "ß" character, so... yeah. Probably the right name for it?
My family name is written with an Umlaut. But Umlaute can cause severe problems in an email address or a website's name. So I write it "ue" there. If you can type the "ß" you should do so because "Alkohol in Maßen" (a bit) is different to "Alkohol in Massen (a lot).
Just a quick comment that the "-a doesn't only "work on windows" but slightly different on all Linux/Unix systems that have a compose-key configured. (I for example usually map my caps-lock key to compose) So you can type ä with compose-"-a, or ß with compose-s-s, or a lot of other international symbols like ¥ as compose-=-y or the nordic æ with compose-a-e or å with compose-o-a, or € with compose-=-c and a lot of other quite "intuitive" combinations. And there are also tools that add that functionality to Windows.
I studied German in Finland before the spelling reform in 1996 and I still find it confusing when to use ß and when ss. I prefer the old spelling, however Balletttänzerin is a nice word. In Finnish we can have four same vowels in a row, but not more than two consonants.
Hey rewboss, something that I surprisingly didn't find a video on in your channel is Stolpersteine. Those little golden stones in the sidewalk, commemorating Jews and others deported by Nazis. There are over 90,000 Stolpersteine all over Europe, with most in Germany, where the project started. There's quite a bit of controversy about them, but I do think highly of them. You'd probably able to make a great video on them.
I was recently using a program that opens a specific window with the [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Shift]+[S] key combo - imagine my surprise when not only did it open the window, but it also inserted a "ẞ" [yes, a capital "ß"] into the window's search box!
The ß is actually a ligature of the letters s and z. If you got on old book written in Gothische Frakturschrift you will see how the letters s and z looked like.
In Fraktur the "ß" is a ligature of "sz", but in Antiqua it is a ligature of "ss". This was effectively confirmed by the 1901 Orthographic Conference. Originally "ss" and "sz" represented slightly different sounds. But over time "ss" came to be pronounced the same as "sz", and at that point people started getting confused over whether to write "ss" or "sz". Over time "ss" won the argument, but the ligature "ß" remained and continued to be called "eszett".
@@rewboss No, I don't contradict that, I was simply explaining why the ß called also Eszett, while it does not resembles the letters s and z of fonts that are used nowadays.
I usually replace an eset with an sz rather then ss if im aware of the entomological history of a word and know historically it was sz rather then ss. I do the same sort of thing in english and french, like for example monitour and monitor are used as different words for me, one being a screen, another being an action, or english words derived from french like government becomes gouvernement. I only use these changes in certain contexts though and often not with people who are just going to be very confused.
Well, the use of SZ as long replacement did not vanish already in the 19th century. In telegrams and more so telex communication it persisted and was even the only allowed replacement. Personally I only learned that when being trained as Fernschreiber (telex-operator) during Bundeswehr. Use of SZ was mandatory to avoid any misinterpretation of SS as replacement vs. SS as regular spelling. (On a side note, pronunciation of SS and SZ is not really about the vowel before, but in itself different - that's why it's other name is 'Scharfes S'. Of course, this differs on region and gets more and more lost. I blame it on Northerners being omnipresent on TV).
It's the internet afterall xD Been living in Germany for 40 years and yes, the substitutions (and only these) ä/ae ö/oe ü/ue and ß/ss are recognised as fallback notation and not as spelling error. They were also used by us Germans ourselves quite frequently before support for these characters in devices was more widespread.
My last computer had no ß combination on my (US international) keyboard, so I used "SS" everywhere I had to. Never had any problems with it. This PC 🖥, I have now, has a combination on my keyboard. +. But I still write ✍️ in the "Swiss" way.
Third possibility: Copy the letter from a web page where you can find it. Btw.: It is always fascinating when a guy who is officially also German since only a few years knows more about Germany and German culture - including language - than many or even most native Germans.
@@Delibro Not really. Anyone living in a foreign country will likely have some special interest in particularly that country that goes way beyond the interest an average native of that country has for it. After all, they moved there, spent a great deal of (usually adult) lifetime learning its language and will see contrasts to their place of origin on every corner. I'm sure there are a lot of people from Germany living in the UK the US and many other places who know more details about historical or cultural things of those places than most people you would randomly ask on the street will remember from their school days. Add the fact that accuracy when it comes to information spread in schools is often shaky and boiled down at best, and you will get similar results in a lot of places.
There is also the insert symbol function in the Insert menu in Word which will offer you all the symbols you have available (including Arabic...). May take a while to find them, but it will then stay in your last used menu.
As a typogaphy student, I in fact wouldn't advice to use the uppercase ß in most cases, it really looks out of place most of the time, because it is an artificial letter just introduced to allow proper spelling of names in all caps - for IDs for example. As you pointed out, the general rule is to replace the uppercase ß by double S and there is no reason to change that procesure, just because the ẞ was invented a few years ago for bureaucratic reasons.
I am not sure if you told that yet, but the name Eszett (ß) actually contains the typographic origin of the letter. Eszett (which is the spelled out version of the letters SZ) originally just written as an "sz" which in old blackletter writing looks like "ſʒ" was later combined into just a single symbol and although the look of the original letters changed over time, the look of the "new" symbol "ß" stayed nearly the same.
We learned "scharfes s" in pre school. Later on, we switched the term to "eszett". It always looks a bit infantile to me, seeing adults calling it "scharfes s", like they missed something whilst growing up.
We were young and they put as in school and learning German was pretty hard although it was supposed to be our first language. German is simply not written as it is spelled and that's why our dear Germanisten have a faible for useless letters. Proven by the 21st century introduction of the capital letter ß. Once our German teacher confessed that pupils no longer making spelling mistakes would be her greatest nightmare.
Thanks for clearing this up. You explained the rules and naming conventions exactly like I learned them in school, so no complains here :) One thing (because I'm just that pedantic): The issue in computer systems is less often the font (i.e. how the letters are displayed on the screen or printed on the printer) but rather the character encoding (i.e. what letter the program in question can represent in memory). The thing with the font can be circumvented in a lot of ways, web browsers for example use fallbacks if a specific character cannot be rendered in the selected font. This may look a bit weird, but at least the letter is displayed correctly. Text encoding on the other hand is a more difficult thing. In theory, this problem has been solved by the unicode standard since the nineties. In practice, this problem still occurs in some software, for different reasons: - some systems are just that old and do not use a unicode encoding internally (often in the administration of countries, which leads to people not being able to use their actual name in documents which in turn leads to annoying questions whenever their passport is checked) - some (old) standards just specify the use of ASCII in certain places and it would break the internet to completely change them. There are some workarounds for that but not all software handles them the way you would expect it - security reasons: there are things called homoglyphs, i.e. different characters that look more or less the same when displayed, but are a different character internally. For example "sparkasse" and "sрarkasse" look pretty similar, but in one case the second letter is the latin p and in the other case it is a cyrillic letter. So to prevent attacks based on this confusion, the character set is limited in some places. Fortunately we have the replacements you explained in this video (and the previous video about this). Thanks again, because it always annoys the heck out of me if someone just drops the umlaut completely.
Take it from a german: I'm too lazy to swap my keyboard (I usually use US, even when my physical layout is DE), so yes I do just use ue, ae, oe, ss The last one only rarely becomes an issue in case of masse vs maße. In all other cases it is obvious
Changing your keyboard input language is literally just two button presses, or even just one depending on your view since you press two buttons at once (on Windows). Press Alt+Shift to switch between German and English layouts instantly when you have them both installed. You can't blame that on lazyness.
Windows has a standard tool (always installed with it) called "Character Map". It shows all character available in a given font and you can copy it from there easily into your documents. This is yet another way of "typing" the character without having to substitute it, and of course all of these "hacks" are a bit more effort you might want to avoid when just writing something once. However, I am always a bit upset when I see TH-cam video titles doing it wrong, because it kind of like shouts "look, I made a thing but I didn't want to put any effort into it".
of course, there are quite a few ways around it, but they are all quite cumbersome when you're just writing a short text message on a keyboard that doesn't have them.
Language is about communication, not about following rules. Usually there is a reason for the rules. More often than not the rule aims at improving communication. That's why knowing the rules and understanding their purposes increases communication. So, one should stay curious and try to understand the logic behind rules; it may improve one's communication skills. But when communication isn't hindered by mistakes, there is no reason in fighting over blindly following rules. Nobody likes a smart ass. -Your- You're welcome!
One little note for the statement at the beginning of the video : in French not using the diacritic IS a spelling mistake. And in fact you will vary rarely see them omitted where they should be because they are in A LOT of past conjugated verbs with a -er end at the infinitive (to eat : manger -> eaten/ate : mangé; to speak : parler -> spoke : parlé) and when you DON'T write the diacritic (accent in French) you end up with the verb conjugated at the present tense and thus the meaning of the sentence can change entirely. The reason it looks like it doesn't matter in the image of the french café is because when writing french in capital letters, people do not write the diacritic either because they feel it doesn't look good and/or because the french keyboards don't have the diacritic for capital letters. However the consensus among french linguists is that omitting the diacritic is in all cases a spelling error.
US International keyboard can be installed on a Mac as well. I'm typing this on a Chromebook running Crostini but the Chromebook allows for this keyboard config w/o Linux. Scharfes 'S' and Es-zett are interchangeable terms. One might opt to write 'ss' for one of three possible reasons: (1) you are using a keyboard configuration that doesn't have 'ß', (2) you don't know how to type 'ß', or (3) you're writing in Schweizerhochdeutsch or a Swiss Dialect and Switzerland, at least officially, does not use 'ß' (scharfes 'S'/es-zett). These are interchangeable: ü =ue ö =oe ä = ae These are not: u = ü a = ä o = ö Multiple miscommunications that could arise because of how many functions umlaut tackles in German: Singular v. Plural distinction - are you offering someone 'einen Apfel' or '2+ Äpfel" Different word altogether - 'eine Mücke' is not 'eine Mucke.' Distinction between Konjunktiv II i.e. the Conditional vs Past tense = 'hatte' vs 'hätte' i.e. 'had' vs 'would have' ... Rewboss knows his shit. Have a little faith, ppl.
Something that really annoys me is the fact, that some people tried replacing the ß with an upper case B, because non-Germans think it looks similar. I often read street names in English texts like "HauptstraBe", "SchadowstraBe", or "StraBenbahn".
@@thomasl.9090 Fun trivia: Old IBM computers actually used the beta as an ß in the OEM encoding. There wasn't much room left in 256 codes after ASCII used up half of it, so they mixed some mathematical symbols and special characters together. Thanks to Unicode we now can use every symbol of any writing system at the same time, or we couldn't have Wikipedia…
Huh? This is one of the first things you learn in any German (as a foreign language) class, and all of my teachers, most of whom were native speakers, all taught me the exact same stuff; If you don't have the umlauts, just put an extra e, and ß is ss in a pinch. I'd have never thought the thema was so controversial.
@@rewboss Well, I would argue that even on the internet it's not that controversial. Not like e.g. the question if you should use vi or emacs. But maybe we hang out in different corners of the internet. 😁
I tried to look up the rules in the "Amtliches Regelwerk des Rats für deutsche Rechtschreibung" and to my surprise I did find the rule for replacing the ß with ss, but NOT the one for the umlauts. My 26 year old printed Duden has both rules in "Hinweise für das Maschinenschreiben" .
Well, I’m 🇳🇴, a small linguistic “æøå” area (with Denmark). I simply change the “soft” keyboard on any handheld device to English or German (sometimes Swedish). With a computer, the foreign letters are accessible through modifier keys (on a Mac). All dandy, but don’t make me any better at writing German 😅…
I wrote a script to change my caps lock key (which I only ever use about once a week, for a very specific use case) into an "Umlaut Key" - a little icon pops up on the taskbar with a german or british flag, and when the german flag is on, caps lock doesn't function (and is automatically switched off after I couldn't type in lowercase without using the shift key...), and typing an a, o or u while pressing it makes ä, ö or ü (and the same with AOU -> ÄÖÜ). I have both s and b tied to ß, as the ß looks rather like a B and 14 year old me thought it would be nice to have both options (I personally use the "b" shortcut more often). It's served me well for years (the flags were the only major update), and means I can type like a german on my british keyboard (which is the better keyboard, just saying). Shame it only works on windows, not linux too. I'm still using "Alt-Gr+[, a" for that (if memory serves, it's muscle memory now). Confuses the living daylights out of my german friends though when they quickly want to search something and they keys aren't there XD
I half expected each occurrence of "ss" to be replaced with "ß" in the credits as a gag :P. And yeah, in Dutch it's commonly referred to as "ringel-S" for some reason. 🤷♂ I wonder if the name "Eszett" has any relation to the "sz" in Hungarian, where the added "z" changes the pronunciation - somewhat counter-intuitively - from "sh" to "s". The description "sharp S" would make a lot more sense with that in mind.
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Such a controversial topics definitely needs a follow-up regarding long s/round s and long s/z ligatures formerly used in printing presses. And of course a disussion of long s and round s spelling rules of old :D I'm sure there'll be something about the Grimm brothers in it, too ...
We had an official rule in the Swiss equivalent of high school, that during school camps "Alkohol in Massen" is allowed. This was of course still no problem because everyone knows what it meant in that context. And of course we drank way too much anyway. :)
At Oktoberfest they do both at the same time 😁
I was genuinely confused just now.
That's a good one.
Alkohol in Massen ist aber definitiv erstrebenswerter als Alkohol in maßen.
Whoever made up that rule had a sense of humour.
Yeah, living in Switzerland, it is clear in almost every case, but sometimes I do wish back sth like the ß, just to show the difference clearly.
Mass und Maß is a very good example for this. Also Busse and Buße.
All written with ss it could be:
many 'Busse' (short u) / buses,
'Buße' / penance or
'Busse' (long u): Swiss word for Strafzettel / all public order offences ticket / fine like a parking ticket.
But Mass und Maß are mostly the ones I wish back the ß 🤷🏼♀️
@@Fritz_Haarmann Google Translate makes this phrase sound funny, it says "Alcohol in moderation is definitely more desirable than alcohol in moderation" lol
I'm German living in England. My son learned German at school and was told that the esszett is called "beta s". I told him otherwise and he started using the esszett . His teacher corrected him and insisted that it actually called beta s. Finally I wrote a letter to his teacher pointing out the correct wording of that particular letter. Of course, being a teacher he thought he knows it all but with the help of a number of clever books (that was pre-internet time) I was able to show him that I was right. The blighter from then on accused me of doing the home work for my son. Yes, I admit, I helped him when he had problems but, as I pointed out to the teacher, I also helped my son in other subjects when needed just likke any other parent would do.
What is a blighter?
@@OntarioTrafficMan a blighter is a person who is regarded with contempt, irritation or pity. I would have called this chap a first class arrogant arsehole but that wouldn't have been nice.
@@hanshartfiel6394 thanks, never heard that word before
@@OntarioTrafficMan "Blighter" = British English literally derived from "blight" in the sense of "eyesore" used for a person who is an "eyesore of a human being" basically a "disgrace of mankind"
@@OntarioTrafficMan I guess that's because you live in the colony and speak more American than English
I keep telling my coworkers who are not (yet) fluent in German that their ultimate goal should be to be able to correct Germans when they're using their own language wrong. That will be the final proof that they have become fully Germanized.
As a German I _have_ to apply some insufferable nitpicking to your statement:
The _ability_ to correct Germans isn't enough. The final proof of Germanization is in the _action_ .
@@CLipka2373 Well, I stand corrected.
@@CLipka2373 i disagree, the ABILITY to correct germans is enough to prove you have mastered the german language, the ACTION of doing so proves you have mastered the german culture
@@vhaelen326 I agree with all three of you, even though you were correcting each other. What can I say, I'm Swiss.
The spelling with the "e" after the vowle is actually older than the umlaut. It comes from Latin when they use ae (Æ, æ) and oe (Œ, œ) as the sounds ay and ö respectively. The Germans then simply adopted this for their own language, but in script started to represent the "e" wit two dots over the letter.
Ich sah auch schon mal diese Schreibweise in einem Kirchenbau aus den 50ern: "Hoͤhe"
It is indeed a little more complicated. The letter "e" in German cursive (which unfortunately or fortunately is hardly used after 1945) consists essentially of two short dashes, and these were placed over the vowel to mark the umlaut. It wasn't a ligature as in "æ" but a stack. This eventually became the characters we use today for our funny umlauts.
@@goebelmasse Oh, that's interesting. I knew they used to write the e above the vowle, like Torax here mentions, but I always wondered how it came to be that an e was abreviated to two dots. Thanx for that info
@@goebelmasse Also, your username is goebelmasse?? Or göbelmaße? Are you trying to prove a point about umlauts 🙃?
@@sempersuffragium9951 "Goebelmasse" is a nick I used as a young punk, in a time, in which German keyboards are rare and everybody wrote "ae", "oe", "ue" and "ss" instead of "ä", "ö", "ü" and "ß". Written correctly, it is "Göbelmasse". The word is hard to translate, als many informal compound words in German one will never find in any dictionary. The verb "göbeln" is very colloquial for "to vomit", and "Göbelmasse" is the substance produced by vomiting. Creating such a neologism with "-masse" sounds funny for a German, the formal word is "Erbrochenes". Native speakers of Germany parse "goebelmasse" with ease and see that "oe" is "ö" and "ss" is "ss". But for a non-native speaker it isn't that clear…
5:06: at least if you use beer as your favorite tipple - the sentence "ich trinke bier in maßen" still is dangerously ambiguous even with the Eszett properly put in. In Southern Germany a beer mug containing one litre of beer is called 'eine Maß' - it is the default size you get when you order at the Oktoberfest for instance, the Dative Plural of this is Maßen (that's the case you'll want if you use the preposition "in" before a word) so "ich trinke Bier in Maßen" is either "I drink beer in moderation" or "I drink at least two 1-litre-mugs of beer". I leave it to you to decide whether this latter meaning comes dangerously close to "I drink beer in massive amounts" or not...
Das Scharfe S wurde nach dem 2. Weltkrieg in Deutschland und Österreich eingeführt, weil die Schreibweise "ss" an Hitlers Schutzstaffel (Terrororganisation) erinnert. Ansonsten macht das Scharfe S keinen Unterschied in der Bedeutung und der Aussprache des Wortes, welche man am Kontext erahnen kann. Heutzutage hat das Wort "Schutzstaffel" keine Bedeutung mehr!
Strictly speaking it should be "aus Maßen"
Can a liquid be "massive"? ;-)
@@michaelschuckart2217 apparently even heart attacks can be massive ... as can be price reductions according to advertising specialists..
@@michaelschuckart2217 "Menschenmassen" can even be constituted of flimsy people.
On Tuesday’s “Richard Osman’s House of Games” the contestant needed to spell Schrödinger. She spelt it “Schrodinger” which was considered correct. Richard and another contestant said, that they would have put an “e” in there, and thought they where wrong. Of course they were right, the question writer was wrong, as was the contestant.
I thought it was called Ringel S.
On the other hand, in Finnish, definitely do _not_ replace the umlaut/diaeresis with ”e”. The name Kyösti Käyhkö (Finnish y is same as German ü) is pronounced very, _very_ differently from if it were spelled Kueoesti Kaeuehkoe. We pronounce each letter symbol separately and take meticulous care in doing so. Ö and ä are single-letter symbols, so they are single sounds. Oe and ae are sequences of two distinct vowels each (diphthongs).
If you are unable to type letters with a diaeresis, then bare letters will do. It’s a different vowel then, but we can usually guess what you meant. Some words may become ambiguous and entirely change meaning if the reader doesn’t notice what’s going on. But never, _ever_ replace diaeresis with an added e. It will make the text an ordeal to read for no benefit whatsoever.
If you have a keyboard that has these symbols instead: æ/ø (such as dk/is/no), you can use them, but do not go out of your way to use them. They do not exist in Finnish, so it always introduces some overhead to the reading.
Well, naturally, the rules for German orthography don't apply to Finnish orthography. They're completely different languages. They're not even in the same family (Finnish is one of the few languages in Europe that is not Indo-European).
@@rewboss That is absolutely true. But it doesn’t stop sports TV overlay systems from 1980s (that are still being used today at least in spirit, for some reason) from treating Finnish names like they’re German and spelling Hämäläinen as Haemaelaeinen.
Working on Linux with a German keyboard layout for years now, I Iearned that there are even four characters mapped to each key, typed in by the use of itself, [Shift], [Alt Gr] and [Shift] + [Alt Gr].
This allows you to type almost every Latin derivative letter, like the Polish Łł, Danish Øø, Ææ, Icelandic Ðð, Þþ, …
Also there are so-called "dead keys", which only give you such a character after pressing a second key in succession: `+a = à, ^+o = ô, ˚+a = å, ¨+i = ï, …
I wish there were more lectures about this in computer classes …
Funny thing about the "dead keys": they also work with just spaces: "¸" for instance, which is the small hook that's supposed to go under a "c" or something: "ç".
Well, I said it's a "funny thing" while it's actually quite a nuisance. I wrote my dissertation thesis in LaTeX on an Ubuntu system. For macros you require the backslash, which (at least on a German QWERTZ keyboard) you get by [AltGr]+[ß]. But the "¸" you get by typing [AltGr]+['], which is the key right next to [ß]. Similar things are true for many of the other dead keys. So, one can imagine, my dissertation was packed full with little ¸'s and ¨'s and what not.
@@lonestarr1490 It gets even the more crazy when you look into character encodings, especially Unicode.
There are multiple ways to encode those diacritics into a text, e.g.:
- Ää Öö Üü - one character each
- Ää Öö Üü - using "Combining Diacritical Marks" , which means these are actually two characters each, a letter followed by the 'combining diäresis', which allows you to put them on any letter you want as long as the font supports it (like D̈, Þ̈ δ̈, Д̈ …).
And I even found a third solution once in a pdf, where the trema signs "¨“ [U+00A8] and the "a, o, u" were just overlayed to get the umlaut.
"US-INTL with Alt-Gr dead keys" is the layout I use. It has
[Alt-Gr]+Q = Ä
[Alt-Gr]+P = Ö
[Alt-Gr]+Y = Ü
[Alt-Gr]+s = ß
And countless other characters from many (albeit mostly Latin script) languages. The mappings (Q->Ä, Y->Ü) take some time to get used to, especially when coming from German keyboards that have those keys built in, but after a while it's just second nature. I use INTL keyboards because they are more convenient for programming (where the German layout has many of the brackets and other such symbols in inconvenient places)
I wish there were more lectures about how finding out what a software you use offers in computer classes. I can't count the times I have been called to help someone and all I did was go through the menu until I found an entry that had exactly the same name as what they asked me to do for them. Although, nowadays that most programs hide their menu behind a tiny unlabelled button that's not even marked as a button, I find it harder and harder to blame people.
I'm a huge fan of SunCompose. Easy to map on any useless key like the Windows key
I love it when you school the Germans in the most German way possible
Pointing to the Duden is kind of a Totschlagargument for germans, well done
@@FPanzer nicht mehr seit "kucken" drinsteht
@@nilkonomEek!
I am afraid that in French the accents above uppercase letters are as mandatory as they are in German, so tells me my dictionary. On a 'French' AZERTY-keyboard they are easy to make, by tapping 'alt gr' together with the given accent first, then tapping uppercase together with the actual letter . Only if your keyboard can't form accents above uppercase letters, you may ommit them. In French speaking countries this shouldn't be an issue, should it? Still, accentless uppercase is widely spread in French... By the way, thanks for your brilliant uploads, the contents as well as the presentation; always very enjoyable. Cheerio, Willem (Belgium, with an AZERTY-keyboard, of course)
Writing the letter ß as sz _was_ an optional spelling for uppercase in the old rules before 1997, and only if there was an ambiguity.
This rule was so optional, authorities used lowercase ß on ID cards and passports…
On one hand I would like the use of sz, cause it would stomp some of those artificial ambiguities and it would finally be what the name says it should be. On the other hand sz really looks confusing
From my military service in the late 1970s I remember that in Telex pages the ß was always spelled as sz - I guess Telex transmissions used a very limited character set. Assuming it was Telex and not some other communication technology.
@@alvazi1 I did my Grundwehrdienst in 1996/97 and we still used these old teletypers. And yes, ß had do be substituted by sz there.
I still have respect for people who use the Captial ß
My android phone has the lowercase ß but it doesn't have the uppercase version. I have to copy and paste it from Wikipedia, ẞ.
@@modmaker7617 Then you may want to switch to a different keyboard lol
The ẞ is the only proper solution for writing the ß in capitals.
@@modmaker7617 my android phone has ẞ, you hold down S on the keyboard
@@OntarioTrafficMan
When I have the caps-lock on and hold down S. It always pops ups with a lowercase ß. That's the only letter on my android phone keyboard that stays lowercase when the caps-lock is on.
I won't change my keyboard because I need it to type in Polish, my native language and this keyboard is also compatible with most not all European languages like Spanish, French and Czech.
I can explain that in German, French and Portuguese using examples:
German:
lauten = to sound, to be
läuten = to ring
zahlen= to pay
zählen = to count
rosten = to rust
rösten = to roast
die Masse = the mass
die Maße = the dimensions
French:
ou = or
où = where
mais = but
le maïs = the corn
l'élève = the student
élevé/élevée = high
a = has
à = at, to
du (de + le) = of/from the (masculine)
dû (devoir) = had to
Portuguese:
a caça = the hunting
a caca = the poop
a maçã = the apple
a maca = the stretcher
o cocó = the poop
o coco = the coconut
é = is
e = and
o bebé = the baby
ele/ela bebe = he/she/it drinks
lauten : to be only relatet to a text (the text reds ...)
In further defence of the vowel followed by "e" to substitute the Umlaut: I have an old 19th century cookbook that has the Umlaut represented by the vowels with a small "e" above the vowel instead of the dots.
The ß is actually a ligatur in the Kurrent font that was in use in 19th century in Germany. It puts together the lower case s and z that's why it is called eßzett.
The pronunciation predicts where to set an ß, yes, but for the reason to pronounce the word correctly, which is that the ß lengthens the previous vowel, and because of this, you should use it this way, because it is also why the other usage of ß was abolished.
I hit the reality of this when I worked for SAP AG in the US. Back in the 1990s, I needed to email a German colleague who had an umlaut in his name. There wasn't an email directory that could help me bypass the problem, so someone taught me the "insert e" trick.
I actually have it stated in my Austrian Passport that Trawöger equals Trawoeger . Which is super helpful when you want to get a plane ticket outside a German speaking country. Because most reservation systems still don't accept Unicode in a name.
In fact, it's not the website's fault that ÄÖÜẞ are not accepted, its because airlines still use a horridly old booking system that still often relies on mainframe computers that only know capital letters, and no special characters whatsoever. That's why, on your plane tickets, you are spelled MR ANDREAS TRAWOEGER
@@m0llux I spent most of my lifetime writing software for those ancient computers. To be fair, all computers I know of since the early 1970s have both upper and lowercase, and all computers from the accounting machine days in the 1940s have known at least a few special characters. It is the reservation software that validates the field contents, and is programmed to only allow uppercase and nothing else.
Now that said, mainframes generally only know ASCII or the approximately equivalent EBCDIC code, not Unicode. So umlauts, accent marks, etc. are right out in the normal character encoding. I suppose you could write u: for an umlaut, but nobody would recognize it.
Some people have it far worse:
Featherstone (pronounced Fanshore)
Nguyen (Nuen)
Aneesha (Anisha)
and the list goes on...
I've seen a case where cops didn't accept official documents insisting that the name was incorrectly spelled! He tried to argue with them and it became a huge mess, which earned him stalker cops who gave him parking tickets for months! (they kept falsely flagging his car for parking illegally).
@@m0llux I've heard about a guy named Amr whose name sometimes ends up being shortened to A by airlines.
@@edi9892 " gave him parking tickets for months! (they kept falsely flagging his car for parking illegally)."
It also works the other way round: I still try to pay the toll for the Tyne Tunnel/Bridge between England and Scotland. It is impossible, because my "Vehicle does not exist" (German licence plate with Umlaut "Ö"?). Strangely it worked fine with Deptford Crossing. Can it have to do with the geographical latitude??
I largely use a German keyboard
because it has the äöüß and accented characters
readily available.
This is useful if I am writing in
French, Estonia and Finnish.
I gave up on UK or US keyboards
because of the alt-key codes
which are a nightmare.
My fingers now automatically go to
the German key positions
so if I have to type on a UK or US keyboard
I have to think where the key is.
nice poetry
@@user-vi1lv2xi9i i think its the frequent
and random line breaks
that make it sound
like poetry
@@Maric18
maybe
it
would
sound
even
more
poetic
if
you
would
type
every
word
in
a
separate
line
x)
@@MildlyInterested_
that is nearly as
poetic as counting
syllables would be
I highly prefer the US Intl (with Alt Gr) layout for better availability of punctuation and parenthesis characters. It makes available lots of other diacritic characters in reasonable positions. I'm touch typing anyway, so I don't care that much about the physical layout. If it were not for the punctuation characters, German T3 layout would be a good alternative. Sorry, I'm no poet XD
Using the hack is better than just writing the letter without dots. Two famous Umlaut cities are Köln and Düsseldorf and while English speakers avoid one problem by using Cologne, Düsseldorf usually gets written as Dusseldorf which is slightly insulting but I have seen it too often on foreign airport departure boards. Every German will fully understand the spelling with ae, oe, ue and ss.
So if you're incapable of writing "Mötörhead", just write "Moetoerhead" 🤪
@@schmoemi3386 I used to pronounce Motörhead as if it had a real, German ö.
@@silubr1 🤣🤣🤣
for anyone who is still not convinced of the gravity of such a spelling mistake, a "Dussel" is a dimwit, so by ignoring the Umlaut, you're questioning the intelligence of everyone of the city's citizens.
Zürich has an umlaut as well
When you write a letter to Münster, but you ignore the Umlaut, then you shouldn't be surprised, when the letter goes somewhere else. To be precise: to the city Munster. Yes it exists and you would have to drive about 3 hours between the two.
Oh! I fell for that one although I grew up next door to Münster. I did not opt out of Bundeswehr because of reasons that no longer matter and when I got the letter I was like: YES! (stupid army, can't even afford printers that print umlauts!) aaand: What's this number? Cannot be the zip code because that would be 48something ... Uneasiness grows. Where's the Diercke? So I ended up with 3 months of free rides on the IC Sperber from Iforgotwhence to Munster (Örtze), iirc and I still hate every minute wasted there. The Münsterland is also a region where ae/oe is different from the umlauts: Laer which is close to Leer which sounds like Lär, Graes and Coesfeld.
ok but that is why we have Postcodes and I would hope the post checks them (tho I can't really confirm that they do) so even if they ignore the umlaut it should still reach Münster...
The usage of the correct postcode would easily avoid this problem.
I live in Münster and parcels from abroad are often addressed to Munster, but the postcode 48155 avoids misunderstandings, so far 😎
Two Danish villages are named Nørup. I live in one of them. Two other Danish villages are named Norup. Fortunately they all are in different postal districts. I recently received a package from USA in spite of a misspelling.
Unterschied zwischen rosten und rösten:
rosten = unter Einwirkung von Feuchtigkeit gelblich bis rötlich braun werden
Beispiel: Metall rostet, wenn es nass wird.
rösten = etwas längere Zeit ohne Zusatz von Fett oder Wasser grosser Hitze aussetzen, sodass es gar wird, eine braune Kruste bekommt, knusprig wird
Beispiel: Essen auf dem Grill rösten
I’ve recently been really into old prints and manuscripts.
One interesting thing to look for is changes in letters and how they were written over time.
For example, the Eszett developed out of a ligature combining the letters “S” and “Z” (the clue is in the name, so the brothers Grimm shouldn’t have lost that 19th century fight).
But there were also other letters like that which don’t exist anymore. One letter probably started out as an abbreviation, not a ligature, but it certainly became its own thing. It looks like the numeral “8” but with a little opening up top. Basically, it was a gothic letter “d” with a little squiggle added up top. That squiggle represented the letters “er”. So the glyph stands for the syllable “der” and it was used a lot in old manuscripts and early prints.
Abbreviations like that were extremely common and the rules around them were incredibly complex. I tried to decipher a hand written Latin sentence from the 16th century once. Just one little sentence and really short to boot, yet I had to study massive books on abbreviations to figure it out. There were so many of these abbreviations .
Luckily, most abbreviations disappeared with the printing press. But in manuscripts they lingered on. My grandparents still learned in school to write “mm” as one “m” with a dash on top. That was the last of these abbreviation rules. But there used to be countless rules and symbols for abbreviations, some of which also made the jump into the era of printing presses, like the glyph representing “der” which I mentioned above.
If ß is a ligature of sz, why does it look like a ligature of ſs (long + short s)?
@@pierrefley5000 Well, that’s easy, it doesn’t. The curvature of the second part is opposite that of a short s, in line with that of a z. Also, when you look at gothic scripts, it’s even more obvious. There you can easily make out the z. Just look at the (German) Wikipedia entry. Not only can you read about the origins as ligature of long-s and z, there are also plenty of images which make it rather obvious.
To clarify, the letter ß has been simplified and smoothened over the centuries, so I can see how one would interpret the second half of the ligature as “s” instead of “z”. But that is quickly corrected by looking at a gothic ß. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
@@pierrefley5000 I have to correct myself slightly. After looking into it a bit, I found that in Italy a separate ligature developed independently during the 15th century, a combination of long- and short-s which ended up looking very similar when using an Antiqua font.
That may be why some modern fonts make the ß look like a combination of long-s and s.
But in a German context, the ß developed out of long-s and z.
@@pierrefley5000 It’s really kind of a mixture of both.
0:20 No. The accent on the e is just usually omitted when witting in uppercase, depending on the font. It's *not* optional otherwise.
But the point is that if the circumstances dictate, you can simply omit the accent. That's not possible in German: it's either "KÖLN" or "KOELN", never "KOLN".
@@rewboss It's not even a stylistic choice, it's entirely wrong spelling, only seen in archaic 90's broken fonts and the rare extremely lazy signage like in your example.
"cafe" would definitely be read as the sound "caff", or like the english for baby cow; I'll stick to drinking café instead of attempting the same with calves (eww)
The same is true for Danish. You should write æ, ø, and å, though if you for some reason should be unable to, ae, oe, and aa are perfectly acceptable substitutes, even if it's not the correct spelling.
Written languages... whether it's us germans with Umlauten and other special cases, english with it it's unpronounced letters, the mess that is french or the three japanese alphabets, it's never easy.
By the way, when I learned to write, I was told the ß is called the 'Rucksack S' (the backpack s). I wonder how many different names that letter actually has...
Just discovered you channel. As a Kiwi who lived several years in Germany I think it is excellent! My German father-in-law used to call the scharfes S a Rucksack S, but I never heard the term Eszett used when I was there.
First off, do I imagine it, or do British people only pretend not to be able to pronounce these Umlaute?
For instance, _work_ and _syringe_ sound often awfully close to an ö- and ü-sound respectively...
Now, what he meant by the brothers Grimm failing is actually a funny story. It originally was mostly _sz_ and not _ss,_ AFAIK.
You have to imagine it similar to _ye old tavern._ There used to be another letter in German that fell out of use. It looked a bit like the integral symbol. This is what gave the _Esszett_ (I don't have it on the keyboard either, just the Umlaut button, LOL) the long stroke, as it looked originally a bit like _I3,_ similar to how _&_ used to be spelled _et._
It all boils down to ancient Latin. Latin had many different dialects and corresponding dialects so that _Caesar_ could be pronounced similarly to _Kaiser_ or _Tsar_ (both titles are derived from it!). Thus, to sort out the mess, people started adding new letters to make it clear if a _C_ is supposed to be _K, Z,_ or _G_ and if a _U_ was a _V, or W._ However, pronunciation and spelling kept changing, thus it all became this mess we have to deal with today. Thus, there were probably people that pronounced _CAIVS, IVLIVS, CAESAR_ starting with _K, J, and Z._ (thus, having two different C despite both being in a similar position; unlike *V* I *C* I, vs *C* AI *V* S)
Just know that the following letters are related:
C: K, G, Z
V: U, W
I: J, Y
I agree on everything you said! I just wanted to make a case for calling the ß "scharfes S" instead of "Eszett". If you are e.g. of Hungarian descent and your name is Laszlo you dont want people to write it Laßlo :D
Where I come from this would never happen as "scharfes S" makes it very clear that you didnt mean the letters s and z.
I would then argue, that the s in Laszlo is pretty much silent and it just becomes Lazlo...or Laslo? damnit...we need more S sounds!
@@darth0tator In Hungarian, "s" is /ʃ/ (e.g. Sándor, Solti), "sz" is /s/ (e.g. László), and "z" is /z/ (e.g. Zoltán). So the s and z don't represent separate sounds, but they are both needed.
"sz" can occur in German, too (e.g. Tageszeit), and ß would be wrong there, too.
I immediately thought of hungarian when i saw that sz combo.
hungarian spelling is probably the reason we have a ß at all in german. i bet it originated in the austro-hungarian empire.
I am German, and I have an Eszett in my last name.
It is a "soft" Eszett, in fact - it pronounes like a normal S, as does the one in "Soße", depending on your dialect.
I will still say "scharfes S" when spelling it on the phone, though, before someone makes an S and a Z out of it.
During my time in the military I spelled it "Sierra Sierra", not "Sierra Zulu".
Anyways, in the human readable part, my ID card has a lowercase Eszett with the rest of the name in caps.
The machine readable part has a double S. My driver's license also has the lowercase Eszett amidst the caps.
I've been pulled over in my car one night and the (rather young) cop actually asked me what that "funky B" in my name was...
I live near the French border and sometimes we would get leaflets from French supermarkets that would advertise special deals to Germans in German language. The ones featuring alcohol always had the advice "ALKOHOL IN MASSEN GENIESSEN" at the bottom.
Es wäre manches einfacher, wenn Deutsch dem Finnisch näher käme: IN MAASSEN GENIISSEN. Aber leider sind unsere deutschen Regeln nicht so 😞Deutsch tut sich schwer mit dem Verschriftlichen von lang oder kurz gesprochen Vokalen. Maße könnte man auch Maasse schreiben, ähnlich dem Fluss, Maas ("von der Maas bis an die Memel"). Wäre dann klar von MASSE zu unterscheiden.
Some things would be easier if German were closer to Finnish: IN MAASSEN GENIISSEN. But unfortunately 😞 our German rules are not so. German has a hard time with writing long or short spoken vowels. Measures could also be written Maasse, similar to the river, Maas ("from the Meuse to the Memel"). Would then be clearly distinguishable from MASSE.
In Finnish, you definitely shouldn't replace ä and ö with ae and oe. They are completely different things representing totally different phonemes. E.g. the words "hän" and "haen" are very different words pronounced significantly differently, "hän" being the third person singular pronoun, and "haen" being "I fetch". Moreover, since Finnish has what's called vowel harmony, lots of äs and ös will appear in the same word, such as "hätääntyä" (to get alarmed), so spelling that as "haetaeaentyae" is just ridiculously difficult to read. So if you're unable to write ä and ö, the best workaround is to just write them as a and o.
Das ist tatsächlich das erste Mal, daß ich davon höre, daß es neuerdings ein großes ß gibt.
Na gut, ich schreibe auch noch „daß“ mit ß...
Not pretending the Umlaut letters exist and simply ignoring it can bring you to two totally different cities in Germany: "Münster", is a beautiful bike friendly city in Westphalia with 317000 inhabitants, most of them students. "Munster", is a small backwater town in Lower-Sayony with 15000 inhabitants, most of them soldiers and home to two of the most largest army training areas of the German Heer.
And on the topic of the "esszett": It's a ligature between the old "long-s"/"ſ" and the letter "z", see how when I write "ſz" it almost looks like "ß"?
"ſz" looks like "ß" in blackletter, but in Latin script it's "ſs". The history of the character is very complicated, but the evolution of "ß" wasn't complete until 1901, by which time it was firmly established that it represented "ss".
In Aschaffenburg there is a remnant of the old freight train station that predates the 1901 Orthographic Conference: it's an archway with the words "Güterannahme Richtung Preussen" painted onto it. "Preussen" is spelled that way because the lettering is Latin, and in those days the convention was for the blackletter "ß" to be represented by "ss" in Latin typefaces.
@@rewboss Yeah, you're correct. I should have mentioned that while the long s exists in Latin script it's rarely used and more of a Fraktur thing where there exists multiple rules on when to use it.
It doesn't get better that the rules for these ligatures are different in almost all European languages (of which almost all had a long s at some point).
For example, in German the first ligatures were done by combining "ſz" to ß, but in Italian (from where we get antiqua) it started as "ſs".
Oh and the final tidbit:
The reason why German didn't have a capital ß was because when the Nazis rules that only Antiqua was to be used (contrary to what popular history and Holywood wants us to believe), they wanted to remove the ß from the language (like Swiss did). Hitler intervened but stated that there mustn't be a capital ß and that instead SS was to be used.
I'm a 48 year-old German and I've never thought of or seen the comparison of drinking "in Maßen" versus "in Massen". I feel so clever now!
On MacOS with an English keyboard, pressing option-U will put an umlaut over the following lowercase or uppercase vowel: ä ö ü Ä Ö Ü. Option-s gives you an ß. Shift-option-2 gives an €. This is much easier than trying to remember alt-codes.
In Dutch, the "sz" is sometimes called "Ringel S". Don't ask me why.
They do that in Germany too, but not often
We (in southwest Germany) also say "dreierles-s" (3-times s) :-)
Buckel-s oder Rucksack-s :)
@Matejko108 Well, German is just hopelessly antiquated Dutch ;-)
@Matejko108 And frankly - I spent a lot of time in Germany. Especially in Berlin. I'm always happy to be there, since it offers me the opportunity to speak German.
the EsZett is a ligature of the small sz letters. It's just sad that the brothers Grimm lost the argument to write Eszett as sz. But it's how the world went and now we have to use a double ss where we intent to use a stressed s and where we intended to use an Eszett in case there is no proper keyboard around. In the past Germans could hear a difference, wether a sz or ss was spoken and we could produce 2 slightly different stressed s sounds. That's why Eszett existed in the first place.
So the Swiss went the most consequential way that also Germany and Austria should have taken. If you can't actually form the Eszett sound anymore and you allways use the ss sound instead or if your hearing just can't differenciate between them , then write them both with the same letter , just like the Swiss do!
Also there is no problem to reform words that just don't make sense without an Eszett. These words are rare anyway. "Maassen" and "Massen" would have worked perfectly fine for everyone. I think that we should write more phonetically anyway. It would add a lot double vowels to the German language and make written German look pretty similar to written Dutch, but it would be way more systematic and more easy to use and to learn.
Szene
My old Farm house here in Germany was built in 1830 and has a text engraved above the main door, they actually wrote "Straßen" as "Straszen"
They also wrote "Hilfe" as "Hulfe" , "thut" instead of "tut" , "last" instead of "lässt" and also replaced every ü with just u...
Das Esszett ist tatsächlich eine Ligatur aus dem langen s (das so aussieht wie ein f ohne Querstrich) und einen z (das in alten Schreibschriften einer 3 ähnlich sah).
I also never ever heard of the term "Eszet". I only ever know it als "scharfes s". That may be one of those regional things. Here in Switzerland where I live now (I am orignally from Vienna) it does not exist and I do not miss it at all. I hardly even notice. Funnly enough, German lost its more commonly used "langes s" long ago (it looked similar to the letter "f") and it was no issue as well.
So "ß" is definitly not required, it is just unnescessary complication. And yes, given that all Swiss just use "ss" instead of the "ß" means that is is absolutely allowed and yes, it is the replacement to use. If you dont have "ß", dont worry just use "ss", more than 5 million native German speakers do so.
Excellently researched, described and presented.
As a German with Abitur and son of a teacher, nitpicker and walking encyclopedia, I can attest to the truth of its content.
Objection! Encyclopedias can't walk.
On Linux you can use Compose + ÷ " with any layout. ẞ is compose + s + s
I only use the ALT codes because very rarely do I need to use umlauts and eszetts... when I have to I use the cheat sheet for those. If my usage of those were frequent I would probably switch to another method, being the added E or getting a new keyboard.
Anyway, good and succinct explanation as always.
i just google "o with dots" and then copy and paste.
... und dann gibt es die Bondrucker, die behaupten man hätte im Biergarten einen KLOB MIT SOBE gegessen und in der Bäckerei eine Kµsebreze und eine Nu³ecke :)
Naja, ich störe mich mehr an den Hanseln die für unsere Pässe einen Zeichensatz verwenden auf dem man die Null nicht vom großen O unterscheiden kann. 😒
I really like the ß/ẞ, it looks somehow medieval, like a leftover from the fraktur script. I hope it doesn't die out.
Not only looks like but *is* a leftover. It's literally a ligature of ſs, a double s consisting of a long s (commonly used in Fraktur fonts) and a (in modern view) “normal”s that regularly appeared in Fraktur only at the end of words or the end of parts of compound words. Hence also the old spelling rules pre 1996 making use of ß at the end of the word like in “daß”, because that's what you'll naturally get in Fraktur fonts by writing “dass”, but making only the final s not a long s, i. e. “daſs”, and then using the ligature ß for a cleaner look.
I don't know the design considerations that make up the capital ẞ, maybe they just used the style of ß based on ſz ligatures, but with a “ʒ”- style Z. Such a style of ß exists for the lower case version, too, in some fonts, but in those where it doesn't, they might have decided its a nice way to optically distinguish the thing from the lower case letter. That, and also the ẞ seems to be slightly wider than ß, giving it a shape more similar to most other upper case letters.
@@steffahn Correct, a few days ago I've seen Rewboss' video from 7 years ago where he explained this very good (th-cam.com/video/cMo4gJIlDeU/w-d-xo.html). As far as I know the capital ß was an invention of the ISO because every other letter has a non-capital and a capital and therefore there was kind of gap in the ISO standard. I've heard it some time ago but not sure. In reality the capital ß is not used and never was, and if then it's a mistake.
@@steffahn The letter ß is really somewhat of an amalgamation of two ligatures, ſs and ſʒ (whence the name Eszett).
There have been, over the years, many suggestions for a capital, most of which just looked like crap. ẞ looks reasonably niche and also not too much like any other letter (B in particular).
Very good and informative video, it seems that you did your research very well! I commend you for giving objective information without giving too much about the trolls with their bullshit, but simply correcting them. Great work! Why I watch this as a native German though I don't know. Seems to me your videos are just really well made!
Also ae, ue, oe are not always an Umlaut but long vowels (Dehnungs-e) or a diphthong. Or just two separate vowels.
From the local area: Coerde is spoken with an ö, Coesfeld is spoken with a long o. Names don't need to follow the rules, and often don't.
Berlin street signs have an unusual ß in the word Straße, you can see why it is called esszett
„This is the Internet after all.“ - Andrew, you made my day 😊
For those who don't know yet: on a regular German keyboard, the uppercase ß is written by holding Alt Gr and Shift and then hitting ß: ẞ
For those who wonder and don't have a German keyboard: this is different from all other letters including ä/ö/ü, because ß is a separate key (like ä/ö/ü as well), but since ß used to be a lowercase only letter, Shift+ß was re-assigned to ?. And Alt Gr+ß as next best option was already taken for \. So the only remaining option was Alt Gr+Shift+ß all together.
In School, we were taught that it ß was always an uppercase letter, hemce my non-understanding of why one would need an uppercase ß
I notice that the Interrail planner app spells München as Muenchen, so presumably doesn't have the umlauts installed in the operating software. It also spells Norwegian places names such as Bodø and Tromsø as Bodoe and Tromsoe, so presumably substituting an E works for the Ø character in Norwegian as well
I'm happy to be on Linux, as the Swedish keyboard layouts in Window$ have a ton of dead AltGr+[letter key] combos, while they're all filled with special characters in Linux, such as AltGr+S for ß (or the arrow characters on the following key combos: AltGr+Y:←, AltGr+Shift+U:↑, AltGr+U:↓, AltGr+I:→).
When people proclaim it's not called "Eszett" they just exhibit a lack of knowledge about the history of the ligature that became a singular letter in modern German writing. Historically it was the two graphemes for S and Z put together into a ligature. If you've seen older German writing(writen/printed in Fraktur typefaces), you know where that ligature came from and that it is indeed an S and a Z. Over time the use was more widely adopted and what was once a simple ligature became it's own grapheme. I personally would love to see the grapheme have an official replacement rule set as "sz" rather than "ss" for clarity and I personally use it that way but I doubt that change will ever become official, we'll probably rather see the letter disappear alltogether.
In the late 90s as a teenager I had to get online late at night because my parents didn't want me tying up the phone line during the day, so when I went online there was a disproportionate number of people from Europe in chatrooms and message boards so I ended up talking to a lot of Germans. I would help them practice English and they would help me practice German. I remember a lot of them used the e to denote an umlaut even though they (presumably) had a German keyboard. This is actually how I learned about this. Also, a pro tip, if you're going to be writing a lot in a language that uses special characters whether it be German or Old English, just type the characters out once somewhere and copy and paste them as needed. If you're good with the copy and paste macros, it's faster than alt codes.
In the late 90s, a lot of computer systems couldn't cope with non-ASCII characters, so it doesn't surprise me that they'd use e's instead of umlauts, even with a German keyboard. (By the way, "practice" is the noun,, and "practise" the verb. Same spelling rule as "advice" vs "advise", but the latter's easy to remember because it matches the pronunciation.)
I use a customized US English keyboard layout on my Windows computer that I brought over with me from the States. I in addition to mapping "CTRL-ALT 3" to "£" and "CTRL-ALT 4" to "€", I used a label maker and printed out all the common diacritics that I need for the German and Spanish letters along with their mapping numbers. I use shorthand on the label like "ü252" and "Ñ209" to stand for typing in ALT-0252 and ALT-0209 respectively. I then stuck the resulting 30cm label to the top of my desk monitor attached to my laptop.
Living in Germany and having to type German teaches you to learn those codes
@@gwaptiva This is only for my US keyboard setup. I recently acquired a Samsung Galaxy Book 360 notebook computer from Samsung Germany. They only offer "Deutsche Tastur" which help me greatly. All I need to memorize are: (1) most of the special diacritics are on my right hand and that (2) the Z and Y characters are switched around. from US keyboard. Another thing that influenced my purchase of it is that it was discounted at €1275 marked down from €1699 and Klarna was offering 0% zinsen for 12 months on it. :-)
@@UsmanBello Writing software code on a German keyboard is a nightmare; all the extra keystrokes you have to do to get \| etc... it's why I put up with the occasional Alt-code typing
This reminds me of the arguments between British and American spellings of words in English. -ize vs. -ise, encyclopoedia vs. encyclopedia, etc.
Mir ist vor kurz klar geworden dass das ß kein Buchstabe im eigentlichen Sinne ist. Im sütterlin (eigentlich "deutsche Schrift") werden s und z so geschrieben dass es praktisch ein ß ergibt... Diese Sprache ist ein Wunder und der größte deutsche Schatz das es gibt! Vielen Dank für Ihre Video.
As a non-German-speaker, just curious, would there ever be a case where the letter sequences pronounced /aə/ /oə/ /uə/ could accidentally be interpreted as /ɛ/ /ø/ /y/? Or is there no situation where it would be ambiguous?
With very few exceptions, the only positions in native German words where you have ae/oe/ue as separately pronounced vowels are at the edges of syllables and postfixes (e.g. -er). Those are usually quite obvious unless you have "place name"+"-er" and you don't know the place. There's also an old production where an added e denoted a long vowel, this has long been replaced with an h, but there still are names around. Those you just have to know, as there is no other indication that e.g. Coesfeld is Kohsfeld and not Kösfeld or Koësfeld. Then there's a number of foreign words like Muezzin or the very old may-be-influenced-by-french-or-not Poet.
BTW, Germans will tend to use aë/oë/uë when seeing ae/oe/ue in a text that also has äöü unless it looks like a place name and they are aware of the long vowel marker (it's regional). The assumption is "there must be a reason it's not written äöü" and there are not that many alternative pronunciations to choose from.
PS: e as a low vowel marker is still commonly used with i. Something that tends to drive native English speakers crazy, as this means ie and ei swap their pronunciations between German and English.
Very informative!
P.S. I don't think many English speakers have much trouble with representing /ai/. German spellings like "Einstein" are very recognizable and easy to remember for English speakers. And representing /i/ isn't too weird either - if you pluralize an English noun ending in , the convention is to replace the with (ex. puppy -> puppies) but it's still pronounced /i/.
@@rzeka You'd think so, but there seems to be some psychological block when learning a foreign language. For some reason, people reduce their skill in their native language to what they have explicitly learned, not what they actually do. Likely caused by actively trying to suppress their instincts applying native language rules automatically to the other language.
For example, it can be quite funny watching someone trying to pronounce the schwa at the end of German words...when you know that schwa is the most common vocal in spoken English (it's how the e in "the" sounds when it's not ee). Same to some extent with ö; English has a sound that's close enough (especially for beginners), e.g. in nerd, but people still end up with knots in their tongues from trying. And then there are some that pronounce ö like ü, but can't get the ü right.
The same is even true for native speakers in their native language. In standard German, "das" (the) and "dass" (that) are pronounced the same, so it's understandable that children struggle to get those right. But in my dialect region, they are pronounced differently (das->des). Absolutely nobody mixes them up when speaking, but it doesn't help them write those correctly at all.
There are a few place names like Coesfeld or Kues, where the e indicates a long vowel, not an umlaut. They are often mispronounced.
Interestingly the town of Oelde
where I used to work
used in the nineteenth century
to be written Ölde
but the problem was perceived to be
that the umlaut on the O wasn't clear
so postal workers had to stop to think about it
so the town changed the spelling of its name.
In Lower German place names "oe" usually stands for a long "o" like in "Soest" or "Coesfeld". So in Westphalia one would expext to read "Oelde" not like "Ölde" but like "Oolde". It's the same with "Oerlinghausen" that is actually pronounced "Örlinghausen". It's confusing.
@@roli9091
I was aware of Soest etc but on a late 19th century map of the area I looked at in Bielefeld library - Oelde was written as Ölde and is pronounced like that today.
During the recent remodelling of the Station "Schwabstraße" in Stuttgart someone wrote "Schwabstrasse" at the stations signposts.
Good job 👍🏻
One further infornation you might mentioned the video before:
Originally the ß sz actually was a S and a Z written together. Back in a time where they used to write in Sütterlin script (yes invented by Herr Sütterlin or Suetterlin)
(The scriot, where you often mix up the s and the f)
The f got a stroke, the s doesnt.
The z was totally different and looked more bulbous like a g in handwriting.
Now put the two together. The f without the stroke and the z looking like g. And voila you got the extraordinary letter ß looking a bit like a capital B. 😁
The "ß" was a thing long before Sütterlin was, and has a much more complicated history (and it's that complicated history that explains why it's called "eszett" but represents "ss"). And although every German has heard of Sütterlin, it was actually quite rare: it was only used for a few decades in the first half of the 20th century, and it was used in schools to teach handwriting. The normal cursive used in real life was Kurrent, and Sütterlin based his script on Kurrent.
@@rewboss correct. 👍🏻
And thanks for the extra Informationen. 😊 Germans' knowledge of the ß / ss often just reaches back to Sütterlin. 🙈 And I fear even this knowledge will be forgotten soon.
Taking a look into the DIN 5002.22 Standart, the name "Eszett" is the official word in the german Phonetic alphabet for the "ß" character, so... yeah. Probably the right name for it?
... and in html, it's "ß".
My family name is written with an Umlaut. But Umlaute can cause severe problems in an email address or a website's name. So I write it "ue" there. If you can type the "ß" you should do so because "Alkohol in Maßen" (a bit) is different to "Alkohol in Massen (a lot).
Just a quick comment that the "-a doesn't only "work on windows" but slightly different on all Linux/Unix systems that have a compose-key configured. (I for example usually map my caps-lock key to compose) So you can type ä with compose-"-a, or ß with compose-s-s, or a lot of other international symbols like ¥ as compose-=-y or the nordic æ with compose-a-e or å with compose-o-a, or € with compose-=-c and a lot of other quite "intuitive" combinations. And there are also tools that add that functionality to Windows.
I studied German in Finland before the spelling reform in 1996 and I still find it confusing when to use ß and when ss. I prefer the old spelling, however Balletttänzerin is a nice word. In Finnish we can have four same vowels in a row, but not more than two consonants.
Invernessshire has a triple-s in English, though proper nouns are cheating.
Hey rewboss, something that I surprisingly didn't find a video on in your channel is Stolpersteine. Those little golden stones in the sidewalk, commemorating Jews and others deported by Nazis. There are over 90,000 Stolpersteine all over Europe, with most in Germany, where the project started. There's quite a bit of controversy about them, but I do think highly of them. You'd probably able to make a great video on them.
I was recently using a program that opens a specific window with the [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Shift]+[S] key combo - imagine my surprise when not only did it open the window, but it also inserted a "ẞ" [yes, a capital "ß"] into the window's search box!
The ß is actually a ligature of the letters s and z. If you got on old book written in Gothische Frakturschrift you will see how the letters s and z looked like.
In Fraktur the "ß" is a ligature of "sz", but in Antiqua it is a ligature of "ss". This was effectively confirmed by the 1901 Orthographic Conference.
Originally "ss" and "sz" represented slightly different sounds. But over time "ss" came to be pronounced the same as "sz", and at that point people started getting confused over whether to write "ss" or "sz". Over time "ss" won the argument, but the ligature "ß" remained and continued to be called "eszett".
@@rewboss No, I don't contradict that, I was simply explaining why the ß called also Eszett, while it does not resembles the letters s and z of fonts that are used nowadays.
The actual mystery is why ss and sz merged rather than sch and sz.
0:43 Einen schönen *Grusz* aus Franken!
Immer noch die bessere Ersetzungsform, da es eindeutiger ist und offensichtlich als Ersetzungsform ins Auge sticht, wie die ae/oe/ue-Schreibweisen.
@@TheZett Aber nicht die offizielle! Leider verwenden heute viele Schreibweisen, die offiziell falsch sind.
@@TheZett Nö, falsch, weil es sich beschissen liest.
Der Pöt ist eventül ein virtüller Wichtigtür.
Dank Werner ist eventül schon lange ein echtes Wort. 🤣
I usually replace an eset with an sz rather then ss if im aware of the entomological history of a word and know historically it was sz rather then ss. I do the same sort of thing in english and french, like for example monitour and monitor are used as different words for me, one being a screen, another being an action, or english words derived from french like government becomes gouvernement. I only use these changes in certain contexts though and often not with people who are just going to be very confused.
Well, the use of SZ as long replacement did not vanish already in the 19th century. In telegrams and more so telex communication it persisted and was even the only allowed replacement. Personally I only learned that when being trained as Fernschreiber (telex-operator) during Bundeswehr. Use of SZ was mandatory to avoid any misinterpretation of SS as replacement vs. SS as regular spelling.
(On a side note, pronunciation of SS and SZ is not really about the vowel before, but in itself different - that's why it's other name is 'Scharfes S'. Of course, this differs on region and gets more and more lost. I blame it on Northerners being omnipresent on TV).
Very insightful Andrew
"In Maßen trinken" and "in Massen trinken" actually mean the same in Oktoberfest, XD
Imho absolutely correct in any way! Great video!
It's the internet afterall xD
Been living in Germany for 40 years and yes, the substitutions (and only these) ä/ae ö/oe ü/ue and ß/ss are recognised as fallback notation and not as spelling error. They were also used by us Germans ourselves quite frequently before support for these characters in devices was more widespread.
My last computer had no ß combination on my (US international) keyboard, so I used "SS" everywhere I had to. Never had any problems with it.
This PC 🖥, I have now, has a combination on my keyboard.
+. But I still write ✍️ in the "Swiss" way.
The question is now, can I write in Germany Güß instead of Guess?
Third possibility: Copy the letter from a web page where you can find it.
Btw.: It is always fascinating when a guy who is officially also German since only a few years knows more about Germany and German culture - including language - than many or even most native Germans.
This should be wondering about those German folks, rather about him ;)
@@Delibro Not really. Anyone living in a foreign country will likely have some special interest in particularly that country that goes way beyond the interest an average native of that country has for it. After all, they moved there, spent a great deal of (usually adult) lifetime learning its language and will see contrasts to their place of origin on every corner. I'm sure there are a lot of people from Germany living in the UK the US and many other places who know more details about historical or cultural things of those places than most people you would randomly ask on the street will remember from their school days. Add the fact that accuracy when it comes to information spread in schools is often shaky and boiled down at best, and you will get similar results in a lot of places.
There is also the insert symbol function in the Insert menu in Word which will offer you all the symbols you have available (including Arabic...). May take a while to find them, but it will then stay in your last used menu.
@@theopuscula My russian immigrated neighbour uses better German than I do. XD
As a typogaphy student, I in fact wouldn't advice to use the uppercase ß in most cases, it really looks out of place most of the time, because it is an artificial letter just introduced to allow proper spelling of names in all caps - for IDs for example. As you pointed out, the general rule is to replace the uppercase ß by double S and there is no reason to change that procesure, just because the ẞ was invented a few years ago for bureaucratic reasons.
I am not sure if you told that yet, but the name Eszett (ß) actually contains the typographic origin of the letter. Eszett (which is the spelled out version of the letters SZ) originally just written as an "sz" which in old blackletter writing looks like "ſʒ" was later combined into just a single symbol and although the look of the original letters changed over time, the look of the "new" symbol "ß" stayed nearly the same.
We learned "scharfes s" in pre school. Later on, we switched the term to "eszett". It always looks a bit infantile to me, seeing adults calling it "scharfes s", like they missed something whilst growing up.
We were young and they put as in school and learning German was pretty hard although it was supposed to be our first language. German is simply not written as it is spelled and that's why our dear Germanisten have a faible for useless letters. Proven by the 21st century introduction of the capital letter ß. Once our German teacher confessed that pupils no longer making spelling mistakes would be her greatest nightmare.
Thanks for clearing this up. You explained the rules and naming conventions exactly like I learned them in school, so no complains here :)
One thing (because I'm just that pedantic): The issue in computer systems is less often the font (i.e. how the letters are displayed on the screen or printed on the printer) but rather the character encoding (i.e. what letter the program in question can represent in memory).
The thing with the font can be circumvented in a lot of ways, web browsers for example use fallbacks if a specific character cannot be rendered in the selected font. This may look a bit weird, but at least the letter is displayed correctly.
Text encoding on the other hand is a more difficult thing. In theory, this problem has been solved by the unicode standard since the nineties. In practice, this problem still occurs in some software, for different reasons:
- some systems are just that old and do not use a unicode encoding internally (often in the administration of countries, which leads to people not being able to use their actual name in documents which in turn leads to annoying questions whenever their passport is checked)
- some (old) standards just specify the use of ASCII in certain places and it would break the internet to completely change them. There are some workarounds for that but not all software handles them the way you would expect it
- security reasons: there are things called homoglyphs, i.e. different characters that look more or less the same when displayed, but are a different character internally. For example "sparkasse" and "sрarkasse" look pretty similar, but in one case the second letter is the latin p and in the other case it is a cyrillic letter. So to prevent attacks based on this confusion, the character set is limited in some places.
Fortunately we have the replacements you explained in this video (and the previous video about this). Thanks again, because it always annoys the heck out of me if someone just drops the umlaut completely.
To complicate matters on the Eszett versus Scharfes S front, in the Netherlands wie are told to call it a Ringel S.
Never knew the eszett is always smaller case. I actually wrote things like STRAßE without thinking of your examples at all. Thanks for that!
Thanks rewboß!
Take it from a german: I'm too lazy to swap my keyboard (I usually use US, even when my physical layout is DE), so yes I do just use ue, ae, oe, ss
The last one only rarely becomes an issue in case of masse vs maße. In all other cases it is obvious
Changing your keyboard input language is literally just two button presses, or even just one depending on your view since you press two buttons at once (on Windows). Press Alt+Shift to switch between German and English layouts instantly when you have them both installed.
You can't blame that on lazyness.
Learned something new today! (Long ago, in school i was told that the swiss would actually write sz instead of ß.)
Windows has a standard tool (always installed with it) called "Character Map". It shows all character available in a given font and you can copy it from there easily into your documents.
This is yet another way of "typing" the character without having to substitute it, and of course all of these "hacks" are a bit more effort you might want to avoid when just writing something once. However, I am always a bit upset when I see TH-cam video titles doing it wrong, because it kind of like shouts "look, I made a thing but I didn't want to put any effort into it".
of course, there are quite a few ways around it, but they are all quite cumbersome when you're just writing a short text message on a keyboard that doesn't have them.
Language is about communication, not about following rules.
Usually there is a reason for the rules. More often than not the rule aims at improving communication. That's why knowing the rules and understanding their purposes increases communication.
So, one should stay curious and try to understand the logic behind rules; it may improve one's communication skills. But when communication isn't hindered by mistakes, there is no reason in fighting over blindly following rules. Nobody likes a smart ass.
-Your- You're welcome!
One little note for the statement at the beginning of the video : in French not using the diacritic IS a spelling mistake. And in fact you will vary rarely see them omitted where they should be because they are in A LOT of past conjugated verbs with a -er end at the infinitive (to eat : manger -> eaten/ate : mangé; to speak : parler -> spoke : parlé) and when you DON'T write the diacritic (accent in French) you end up with the verb conjugated at the present tense and thus the meaning of the sentence can change entirely. The reason it looks like it doesn't matter in the image of the french café is because when writing french in capital letters, people do not write the diacritic either because they feel it doesn't look good and/or because the french keyboards don't have the diacritic for capital letters. However the consensus among french linguists is that omitting the diacritic is in all cases a spelling error.
One exception to my statement when I say they are rarely omitted is titles or business names on the front facades of shops
US International keyboard can be installed on a Mac as well. I'm typing this on a Chromebook running Crostini but the Chromebook allows for this keyboard config w/o Linux.
Scharfes 'S' and Es-zett are interchangeable terms. One might opt to write 'ss' for one of three possible reasons: (1) you are using a keyboard configuration that doesn't have 'ß', (2) you don't know how to type 'ß', or (3) you're writing in Schweizerhochdeutsch or a Swiss Dialect and Switzerland, at least officially, does not use 'ß' (scharfes 'S'/es-zett).
These are interchangeable:
ü =ue
ö =oe
ä = ae
These are not:
u = ü
a = ä
o = ö
Multiple miscommunications that could arise because of how many functions umlaut tackles in German:
Singular v. Plural distinction - are you offering someone 'einen Apfel' or '2+ Äpfel"
Different word altogether - 'eine Mücke' is not 'eine Mucke.'
Distinction between Konjunktiv II i.e. the Conditional vs Past tense = 'hatte' vs 'hätte' i.e. 'had' vs 'would have'
...
Rewboss knows his shit. Have a little faith, ppl.
How dare you!
If everyone did that!
Where would we get!
Rules are rules!
That's not how I learned it!
Did I forget one?
Hahaha, a good list of outraged objections!
Something that really annoys me is the fact, that some people tried replacing the ß with an upper case B, because non-Germans think it looks similar. I often read street names in English texts like "HauptstraBe", "SchadowstraBe", or "StraBenbahn".
Or use the greek beta instead...
@@thomasl.9090 Fun trivia: Old IBM computers actually used the beta as an ß in the OEM encoding.
There wasn't much room left in 256 codes after ASCII used up half of it, so they mixed some mathematical symbols and special characters together.
Thanks to Unicode we now can use every symbol of any writing system at the same time, or we couldn't have Wikipedia…
Ha, yeah, it got this and beta on parcels addressed to me :D
Huh? This is one of the first things you learn in any German (as a foreign language) class, and all of my teachers, most of whom were native speakers, all taught me the exact same stuff; If you don't have the umlauts, just put an extra e, and ß is ss in a pinch. I'd have never thought the thema was so controversial.
This is the internet. There is nothing that isn't controversial.
@@rewboss True!
@@rewboss Well, I would argue that even on the internet it's not that controversial. Not like e.g. the question if you should use vi or emacs.
But maybe we hang out in different corners of the internet. 😁
I tried to look up the rules in the "Amtliches Regelwerk des Rats für deutsche Rechtschreibung" and to my surprise I did find the rule for replacing the ß with ss, but NOT the one for the umlauts. My 26 year old printed Duden has both rules in "Hinweise für das Maschinenschreiben" .
Well, I’m 🇳🇴, a small linguistic “æøå” area (with Denmark). I simply change the “soft” keyboard on any handheld device to English or German (sometimes Swedish). With a computer, the foreign letters are accessible through modifier keys (on a Mac). All dandy, but don’t make me any better at writing German 😅…
I wrote a script to change my caps lock key (which I only ever use about once a week, for a very specific use case) into an "Umlaut Key" - a little icon pops up on the taskbar with a german or british flag, and when the german flag is on, caps lock doesn't function (and is automatically switched off after I couldn't type in lowercase without using the shift key...), and typing an a, o or u while pressing it makes ä, ö or ü (and the same with AOU -> ÄÖÜ). I have both s and b tied to ß, as the ß looks rather like a B and 14 year old me thought it would be nice to have both options (I personally use the "b" shortcut more often). It's served me well for years (the flags were the only major update), and means I can type like a german on my british keyboard (which is the better keyboard, just saying). Shame it only works on windows, not linux too. I'm still using "Alt-Gr+[, a" for that (if memory serves, it's muscle memory now). Confuses the living daylights out of my german friends though when they quickly want to search something and they keys aren't there XD
I half expected each occurrence of "ss" to be replaced with "ß" in the credits as a gag :P. And yeah, in Dutch it's commonly referred to as "ringel-S" for some reason. 🤷♂
I wonder if the name "Eszett" has any relation to the "sz" in Hungarian, where the added "z" changes the pronunciation - somewhat counter-intuitively - from "sh" to "s". The description "sharp S" would make a lot more sense with that in mind.
Such a controversial topics definitely needs a follow-up regarding long s/round s and long s/z ligatures formerly used in printing presses. And of course a disussion of long s and round s spelling rules of old :D
I'm sure there'll be something about the Grimm brothers in it, too ...