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   elilla&: flinta* cruising aachen public top (elilla@transmom.love)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Jul-2025 17:29:12 JST elilla&: flinta* cruising aachen public top

   in reply to

   • schratze
   • Jens Finkhäuser
   • Rocketman

   @slothrop @jens @sotolf @schratze @elexia generally it's very difficult for people to change from the orthography they were taught as schoolchildren, and sweeping orthographical updates are consolidated when a new generation grows into them.

   "pilôto" (pre-1970) feels quaint and historical to me, but I struggle to make myself write "voo" (current) rather than "vôo" (pre-1990), and probably will write "vôo" through the decades I have left. while for my children "vôo" is as historical as "pilôto".

   if a literate community doesn't periodically update their orthography to the phonology, though, it ends up in a situation like English, where they still write the words the way they were spoken 500 years ago, and then every child has to learn to reproduce 500 years of phonetic developments and call them "spelling rules". and nobody wants their orthography to become as outdated as English. so we ought to be grateful for (phonetic) spelling reforms, even though they trigger a flag in the pattern-matching features of our brains that child us worked so hard to calibrate back when we learned to read.

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rocketman (slothrop@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Jul-2025 17:29:14 JST Rocketman

     in reply to

     • schratze
     • Jens Finkhäuser

     @elilla @jens @sotolf @schratze @elexia regarding orthography, I used to be REALLY GOOD at it in school.

     Then came the Rechtschreibreform of 1996, followed by various revisions. I couldn’t keep up, and eventually decided to give up, seemingly along with everyone else

     (Wikipedia says that the multiply-reformed orthography “von den meisten Verlagen aber nur in Form von daran orientierten Hausorthographien angewendet [wird].”)

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     Rocketman (slothrop@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Jul-2025 17:29:15 JST Rocketman

     in reply to

     • schratze
     • Jens Finkhäuser

     @elilla @jens @sotolf @schratze @elexia I recall making this argument during a conversation with friends on the Berlin S-Bahn - forcefully enough for bystanders to give us concerned looks 😂

   • Embed this notice
     elilla&: flinta* cruising aachen public top (elilla@transmom.love)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Jul-2025 17:29:16 JST elilla&: flinta* cruising aachen public top

     in reply to

     • schratze
     • Jens Finkhäuser
     • Rocketman

     @jens @sotolf @slothrop @schratze @elexia

     like all dictionaries, the Duden is a record of how people speak, not a manual of how to speak. it's fieldwork, not a book of manners. if a word is in Duden with gender blah, it means they found that word in their corpus (currently at some 6.7B items) being used with gender blah. not that some language God-King has decided on first principles that the gender shalt be blah.

     that's why it has all of die, das, der for Cap, in this order; it means "we found out people are using all three genders for Cap, in this order of frequency". you will notice that my little Mastodon poll reproduced the same statistical results (though people's self-perception when asked is always less reliable than a statistical observation of the language they produce when you're not looking, including our own).

     that also goes to stylistic labels like "umgangssprachlich". from Duden's own documentation,

     > Was manchen Benutzern normalsprachlich – weil dem eigenen vertrauten Lebens- und Sprachalltag entstammend – erscheint, ist für andere schon „umgangssprachlich... Angaben zum Sprachstil, zur Sprachebene, sind immer wertend und damit oft subjektiv. Dies gilt bis zu einem gewissen Grad auch für die Angaben in Duden online, obgleich sie sich auf eine Fülle statistisch ausgewerteten Materials berufen können.

     you will notice that people in this very thread were describing "der Cap" with emotionally-laden pejoratives, despite "der Cap" being present in what you just called "the bible". that is the kind of thing it means when a form is marked "standard" or "proscribed" in a dictionary. it does not mean "the language God-King has decreed thou shalt not use this form". it means "although this form occurs in our observations, some speakers show bigotry if you use it".

     (the one exception is orthography, since writing is not really language but an artificial method of recording language, and therefore unlike language can be planned by someone who makes up the rules. then, yes, a dictionary like Duden acts like a repository of examples of how these rules are applied, and can make suggestions (in Duden's own words, „Empfehlungen“) about tricky or ambiguous cases, based on first principles. this is a consequence of writing being a second-order notation system. something linguistic proper like syntax, morphology or phonetics works differently; the patterns are not designed, they are discovered.)

   • Embed this notice
     Jens Finkhäuser (jens@social.finkhaeuser.de)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Jul-2025 17:29:18 JST Jens Finkhäuser

     in reply to

     • schratze
     • Rocketman

     @elilla @sotolf @slothrop @schratze @elexia Germans sure love their rules, and when it comes to language, the Bible is Der Duden.

     If it's not in that Bible, it's sin.

   • Embed this notice
     elilla&: flinta* cruising aachen public top (elilla@transmom.love)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Jul-2025 17:29:19 JST elilla&: flinta* cruising aachen public top

     • schratze
     • Jens Finkhäuser
     • Rocketman

     @sotolf @jens @slothrop @schratze @elexia

     yeah but in my experience Norwegians don't pick one variation to arbitrarily deem the "right" one and refuse to engage with you if you deviate from it even a bit, unlike Germans. like treating a different gender for a word as something between a mortal sin and personal offence.

     might just be the type of Norwegian I've met ofc, I never lived in Norway.