English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:01 AM

Hi guys, I've got a short question which I suspect may have already been covered on here

I'm currently typing up a document which features some German names with special characters (e.g. Gauß, Graßmann)

The document is in English, however. Now, I was wondering whether it's generally considered better to keep the original special characters which appear in the German versions, or get rid of them in favor of the usual English spelling (Gauss, Grassmann)

Jez

the eszett would look odd in English text

i'd convert it to "ss". then again, i'd do that in German too :-D

tchrist

@Danu Leave it: always attempt to spell people’s names as they do. If their names are not written in the Latin script, then you can transliterate it and put the original in parens. This is purely Latin, so don’t mangle it.

And those are not special characters.

They are regular Latin letters.

Danu

Knew I'd mess something up...

tchrist

It is respectful, especially but not solely in academia.

Jez

purely Latin? did the Romans have an eszett?

in fact, does any language outside German have it?

it's a typographical oddity

tchrist

12:08 AM

Donald Knuth and Robert Bringhurst both have strong things to say about this, and you will be hard-pressed to find more respected figures.

@Jez You fail to understand what "Latin characters" means today in a modern context.

Jez

well i guess i'm a respectful person. i'll just go degauß my monitor.

tchrist

@Jez Please don’t be rude.

Jez

rude??

tchrist

@Danu I can pull the Knuth and Bringhurst refs if you’d like.

Jez

i was making a point. we do not typically keep the eszett in English text because it is not an English character

tchrist

12:09 AM

@Jez Yes, that was rude. It’s called sarcasm.

Danu

Whoah, calm down guys.

Jez

you might as well argue for keeping a Japanese character in the text

Danu

Not trying to start a fight here

tchrist

@Jez Then their names are Smith and Jones. Those are lies.

Ok, that's enough. I am going to appeal to higher authorities.

Danu

@tchrist If it's easy for you to do so, then sure.

tchrist

12:11 AM

Donald Knuth on this matter, famed mathematician and dean of the science of computing algorithms.

Jez

appeal to authority

Danu

@tchrist I do know who Knuth is :)

tchrist

heh

Robert Bringhurst, acknowledged authority of matters typographical.

Robusto

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Can't put a square pig into a round hole.

tchrist

Both give rock-solid reasons for why you should not fiddle with people’s names. This is not the 1950s.

@Danu I hope the reasoning from those two gentlemen convinces you. If it does not, then Lord knows I cannot. :)

Jez

12:14 AM

@tchrist political correctness

tchrist

@Jez Non sequitur.

Jez

what makes the most sense is to render a name in a form that the reader is most likely to understand

using a typically non-English characters is frankly idiotic

tchrist

“English” is silly idea. There names use Latin letters. So should you.

Jez

and i'll wager you wouldn't be recommending it if it were a Japanese/Chinese/Russian character

tchrist

I have already explained.

Jez

12:15 AM

there is nothing Latin about the eszett

tchrist

You did not pay attention.

Do so.

Danu

Thanks. @tchrist, for your help, although I have to say I'm getting a bit of an... aggressive vibe from you. I hope my question did not annoy you, and wish you a nice continuation of your day!

tchrist

That is not what Latin means.

Danu

@Jez You have a nice day too!

Jez

ß

In the German alphabet, the letter ß, called "eszett" (IPA: [ɛsˈtsɛt]) or "sharp S" in English, is a consonant that evolved as a ligature of "long s and z" (ſz) and "long s over round s" (ſs). When speaking it is pronounced [s] (see IPA). Since the German orthography reform of 1996, it is used only after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is written after short vowels. The name eszett comes from the two letters S and Z as they are pronounced in German. It is also called scharfes S (IPA: [ˈʃaɐ̯.fəs ˈʔɛs, ˈʃaː.fəs ˈʔɛs] in German, meaning "sharp S". Its Unicode encoding is U+00DF. While the letter...

Notice the phrase "German alphabet" in the first four words

tchrist

12:16 AM

@Danu You’re right. I’m a Unicode guy, and I have fought this battle a thousand times from pig-headed ASCII-or-die people. It is regressive and disrespectful. I would like to be kind to the world.

Jez

lol

tchrist

> 9.1 The Hundred‐Thousand Character Alphabet

It is often said that the Latin alphabet consists of 26 letters, the Greek of 24 and the Arabic of 28. If you confine yourself to one case only, a narrow historical window and the dialect in power, this assertion can hold true. If you include both caps and lower case, accented letters and a global set of consonants and vowels — á à â å ã ä ą ă ā æ ǽ ç ć č ð đ é ł ñ ň ņ ő š ș þ ű ū ŵ ý ž ź ż and all the rest — the Latin alphabet is not 26 letters long after all; it is closer to 600 and able to increase at any time. The alphabet that classicists …

Never was the Latin alphabet 26 characters. Period.

Jez

so, Unicode lets you render tons of non-English characters... that's reason enough to do so!

tchrist

Please do not be an English bigot. You’re starting to sound like . . . an American. :)

Jez

there isn't really a "Latin alphabet". the closest thing i guess would be the classical Latin alphabet which lacket a W or lowercase

it certainly did not have an eszett

tchrist

12:18 AM

> Early computers and e‐mail links were, by comparison, living in typographic poverty. The alphabet they used was the basic character set defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII. Each character was limited to seven bits of binary information, so the maximum number of characters was 2⁷ = 128. Thirty‐three of those were normally subtracted for control codes, and one was the code for an empty space.

Jez

the guy is writing a text in English.

tchrist

> This leaves 94: not even enough to hold the standard working character set of Spanish, French, or German. The fact that such a character set was long considered adequate tells us something about the cultural narrowness of American civilization, or American technocracy, in the midst of twentieth century.

Doesn’t matter.

Mitch

@Danu what audience are you writing for? If general then use 'ss', if technical then maybe sextet, but check with other articles in the publication you're writing for.

tchrist

It’s a person’s name.

Danu

@tchrist I have no idea what you're referencing, but okay. I'm actually (half-)German myself, and I was just wondering what the convention was, not trying to start some (incredibly nit-picky) heated discussion!

Jez

12:19 AM

but i give up at this point. my advice is to use English characters in an English text. if one chooses to do otherwise, people will make their judgments on that.

tchrist

@Danu I would write it the way the people themselves writes it.

Danu

@Mitch Graduate students of mathematics in general (not necessarily German or of any other nationality)

Mitch

Eszett might be ok then

It'll be recognizable by them.

Danu

Yeah, I think I'll keep it.

Mitch

Yes I think that's good

If it were outside of academia, you'd definitely have to use ss.

tchrist

12:23 AM

No matter whether one is writing about François Mitterrand or José González or Heinrich Schütz.

Those are their names, and deserve respect.

Jez

do they?

tchrist

It isn’t Frank Mitterand or Joseph Gonzalsen or Henry Shoots.

Jez

they haven't done anything to earn my respect

tchrist

You really are being rude, Jez. Please stop.

Jez

names are a series of sounds represented by characters

Danu

12:25 AM

No swearing, please, @Jez

Mitch

I think accents are ok because they don't obscure things.

But foreign characters are just sticking obscurantism in people's faces.

Danu

I guess the sharp S is right in between those cases ;)

Mitch

I can't read Japanese, or Devanagari or Cherokee.

I would suspect that most English readers (educated, but with little knowledge of other scripts) would think an eszett was a Greek beta.

Danu

I wonder whether there is any data on this type of stuff

Mitch

12:54 AM

do you mean relative usage of eszett in different countries or subcultures?

Robusto

►

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

1:56 AM

@Robusto You're . . . you're kidding, right?

So I'm working on this now.

Anonymous

@Jez Sometimes I wish people would. You can always supply both :-)

tchrist

2:25 AM

@Danu I bet you will find this example of printed English interesting:

As you see, it uses not merely both a long and a round s, but also a sharp s.

And because it is written using the authentic Latin script, it uses I where we today use J and U where we would use now use V.

Modern fonts vary in how well they support all three forms of S; some are better than others, but the good ones make clear that the sharp s originated in a long-S + sharp-S ligature, both of which are perfectly Latin letters.

I said “it was written”, but make no mistake: the earlier placard with the illuminated R is a truly typeset example set with movable type in London.

So it is a sample of actual type, not of some scribal hand.

You can still see the manuscript habits in it, though, such as using an overbar above a vowel to indicate a nasal consonant.

So the letter’s apprehēſiō would today be written apprehension.

It is just a different way of writing, but still using the same alphabet.

And of course, the spelling witneße would not have a final E in today’s printing. It would still, of course, have two S’s, just as that one does.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

2:41 AM

@Rob here's a sample of the pocket version.

@tchrist bites knuckle

Such shape.

tchrist

2:55 AM

Lovely, isn’t it?

We’ve spent almost half a millennium unlearning how to set type nicely.

Only in the last ten to twenty years have we seen stuff produced that is approaching the quality of craftsmanship with which Gutenberg’s very first book was set.

There have, of course, occasionally been the rare exception to the rule of crappy typesetting, but they have been few and far between.

tchrist

3:10 AM

Gutenberg used 290 sorts — glyph forms, if you would — to set his Latin Bible. And that used nothing but upper- and lowercase letters, digits, and punctuation. It didn’t even use diacritics or anything fancy.

Mitch

Pfft, Gutenberg.

tchrist

Pfft is not Latin. Perhaps it is German?

Mitch

Why do people stuff swirdfish to put over their fireplace? They could just eat it.

tchrist

That they might ever keep a sword at ready should need press them.

Mitch

'Pfft' is universal. Ferengis use it as a monetary unit

You can't eat a sword...without cooking it a long time and lots of sauce.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

3:21 AM

I'd take a stab at it.

tchrist

@Danu A sharp S is not a “foreign” character in English, as the demonstrated specimen proves. Quite interesting also is that when what we now write as blessings occurs midline in that sample, the word was written bleßings, but when it needs to span a line, it was written bleſ-ſing with the double-s split up across the line break. That proves this was a typographic ligature like we see in the ﬀ glyph, so one would go spelling something like diﬀerent or dif-ferent at line breaks.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 You slay me, madam!

> With a sword and a rose and a cape!

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

@tchrist I've got you in stitches.

Hey, I look nice in that cape.

tchrist

Knit one?

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

Perl 2.

tchrist

DING DING DING WE HAVE A WINNER!!!!!

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

3:26 AM

swishes cape around

Does it snow?

tchrist

It snows.

And it snows.

I have another pretty thing for you.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

O_O

tchrist

Note the spelling of impoßible in that Italic hand — and tongue.

’Tis the most natural thing in the world.

See how many different variant S glyphs you can count just in that specimen. And yes, this is set type, not a scribe’s own hand.

I suppose it might help if you could read Italian better, but I wager you can make it out well enough.

This next one of course is easier to the casual pedestrian of today, but the previous sample should not be discarded out of hand:

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

Sorry, I was picking my locks. Yes, I noticed impoßible immediately.

tchrist

I believe, but am not perfectly certain, that there are five different S sorts in that sample; there may be more.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

3:42 AM

Got about 1/2".

tchrist

Seems to be taking a timeout at maybe 6" here. The kitties are playing Chinese Fire Drill games with the cat-flap downstairs and the backdoor upstairs.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

Oh dear.

Do you have any new kitty pictures?

tchrist

I did.

hm.

Start here:

Dec 23 '14 at 3:10, by tchrist

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

Yay!

tchrist

If you follow the chat link, there are a bunch more.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

3:50 AM

I did. They're so cute together.

tchrist

Lorin is just stunning. Honestly, everyone who sees him cannot help but comment on how beautiful he is. And Randy has noble lines and markings.

I don’t know if it shows, but he’s a spotted mackerel, not striped. And his tummy is super cute with its polka-dots.

> I use Poetica as a demo “poster child” for what’s possible in OpenType: there are 11 levels of swashes affecting mostly the capitals, and 60 different ampersands.

All (or almost all?) the lowercase also have several variants, depending on whether they are first-letter or last-letter, and some conditional variants.

Anonymous

4:06 AM

@tchrist Oh, what a nice cat! And what a nice picture! :-)

tchrist

Anonymous

If I want to show these pictures to my friends, should I link to your chat messages?

tchrist

Sure.

They’re snuggle-buddies. Those are all relatively recent.

Here, wander through these.

2

Deerhunting in the dark:

He actually took a swipe at the nose of one of them!

Dream of spring:

Good night!

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

Whoa!

tchrist

4:21 AM

Which one?

The flax?

It doesn’t look so much in the midget version on this page, but if you click twice for full size, it is rather nice. At least, I think so.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

@tchrist All of them.

I was making labels.

@tchrist Damn right.

tchrist

Depth of field on the flax is about a quarter inch, maybe less.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

Does that mean the focus only extends back a quarter inch?

tchrist

From front to back, yes.

Only enough for the one flower’s naughty bits at most, and not all of them.

The focus plane is very thin.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

:0

tchrist

4:26 AM

Well, sphere, perhaps.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

I must slumber.

tchrist

Yeah, same.

NIGHT!

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

NIGHT!

tchrist

7:10 AM

@Rob Small solace, but it could be worse. We get 2-5x the snow you get. Normally. This year has been mild. I think tonight's only our 3rd or 4th double-digit dump, and it hasn't dropped two feet of snow in one storm this year. Yet. March is always worst. But hey 300 days of sun per year. ;)

Robusto

9:02 AM

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Nice!

@tchrist It's that all Denver metro or Boulder?

imVoid

9:19 AM

I want to say, If everyone orders at same time, the shop will be overloaded.

How can I rephrase

" If everyone orders at same time" in a single or apt term?

Matt E. Эллен

10:04 AM

@imVoid there is no single word "if everyone orders at the same time". You could change "at the same time" to "simultaneously".

A Beautiful Mind

@MattE.Эллен Hello Matt, I am trying to get a fresh perspective on my problems today.

Matt E. Эллен

@ABeautifulMind that's good. I feel quite run down today

A Beautiful Mind

@MattE.Эллен What is the meaning of run down?

Matt E. Эллен

what are you doing to get a fresh perspective?

@ABeautifulMind tired and a bit ill, but not actually sick

A Beautiful Mind

@MattE.Эллен Just trying to look at what happened the past 8 years and see what I have been missing, nothing special.

Matt E. Эллен

10:13 AM

like I could do with another 8 hours sleep

A Beautiful Mind

@MattE.Эллен It's probably the effect of oxhack.

Matt E. Эллен

@ABeautifulMind maybe :D

A Beautiful Mind

@MattE.Эллен I hope I get the miracles I mentioned in the email. I will be working towards them from now.

Matt E. Эллен

good

A Beautiful Mind

My mum will be off from work the next 3 days.

Matt E. Эллен

10:27 AM

is she taking a holiday? what plans does she have?

A Beautiful Mind

No, we have no money for holidays. =) Just staying at home, do some cleaning and resting. It's CNY anyway.

Johan Larsson

For some reason I think pull requests are fun. Lots of F5 checking if anything happens with it.

Matt E. Эллен

@JohanLarsson I should go through and comment all your code, then give you a pull request ;)

Johan Larsson

where ?

Andrew Leach

Don't volunteer to document someone else's code! They might just take you up on it.

Johan Larsson

10:39 AM

Comments in code is somewhat smelly

Autogenerated stuff is pure ugly just noise

Matt E. Эллен

@JohanLarsson all over! I'm not saying it's necessary, just to get you to recompile, but with no effect

Johan Larsson

:)

Matt E. Эллен

@AndrewLeach oh! good point :-s

Johan Larsson

I tend to switch off the documentation stuff when using Stylecop.

Matt E. Эллен

we have it on for some stuff. I'm not sure how it's set up.

Johan Larsson

10:41 AM

it offers pretty finegrained control, that is nice

Matt E. Эллен

gets annoying when it fails to compile becaues a class constructor isn't documented

A Beautiful Mind

►

An inspiring song.

Matt E. Эллен

what do you expect it to say? It constructs the class

Johan Larsson

yeah noise

Robusto

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Haha, reminds me of the dentist. ^)^

Johan Larsson

10:47 AM

Something is really slow between building and the tests starts to run. Annoying.

Johan Larsson

11:32 AM

21

A: Visual studio 2012 slow unit testing

I had the same issue, using VS2012 Update 1. Based on the suggestion in http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverDS/thread/20eb50e9-3e68-4d29-bcdd-a4fc166b9c00 I disabled NetBios over TCP on my NIC. The tests now start up immediately, and procmon shows the time waiting on \MACH...