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   Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (neal@social.gompa.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:13:47 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

   TIL English was capitalizing nouns also around the same time that German started doing it in the 17th century as a trick for creating emphasis in text. It apparently didn't take hold in English and mostly went away (except for title case) by the 19th century. What made it stick in German but not English?

   • Embed this notice
     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (neal@social.gompa.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:13:43 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana
     • Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     @bkuhn @richardfontana You might be on to something. German never went through the change that English and Dutch went through where compounding fell out of favor. So the word salad that is German benefits more from the emphasis than English did.

     As for the ſʒ thing, I'm happy that it's gone in English. I wish it had gone away in German too. The ß glyph is confusing.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:13:45 JST Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana

     I'm not even an amateur linguist, but I wonder if it's that capitalized nouns help w/ following German word order in writing.
     e.g.:

     Ich habe mein Handy verloren. (I lost my mobile device.),

     IMO, it helps to see the object jumping up there capitalized in the middle. I dunno, it always helps me as an intermediate German speaker.

     What always fascinates me is how English lost its ſ & German kept its ß.

     ſ stuck around until mid-1800s!

     Cc: @neal @richardfontana

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     Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:41 JST Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana

     @neal what I'm saying is strange is — when I was 13 or 14 years old — hacker culture shibboleths were universal to all age groups.

     I think maybe that just no longer exists?

     I am reminded of meeting an arrogant 16 year old at an Ubuntu conference circa 2008. Two of us were talking about distributions before Ubuntu & the kid scoffed & said “Linux didn't even exist in the 1990s”.

     Sure teenagers say stupid stuff but I realized then cross-age-group hacker culture may have ended.

     @richardfontana

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (neal@social.gompa.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:43 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana
     • Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     @bkuhn @richardfontana I don't think that's so strange. Pictograms of all kinds have contextual meanings, and emoticons have been the same. Contemporary emoji have different meanings on contexts, groups, age brackets, and societies.

     That said, I'm not particularly aware of "computer geek" interpretations.

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     Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:44 JST Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana

     @neal

     What's so strange to me, and maybe this is the point, but emoji meanings have become micro-shibboleths tied to very specific age groups.

     Are there computer geek specific emoji interpretations?

     @richardfontana

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     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (neal@social.gompa.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:46 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana
     • Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
     • Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     @bkuhn @richardfontana @jbqueru I think Emoji is generally the way to go these days...

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     Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:47 JST Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana
     • Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru

     @neal

     So, do l33t h4ck3rs just throw in a few Cyrillic characters these days to look cool?

     And, what does it mean to be l33t in a Unicode world? 🤔

     Perhaps:
     “The days of being k-rad l33t ended when characters stopped being ‘char’s”

     Those 2600 magazine folks were total characters anyway!

     Cc: @richardfontana @jbqueru

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     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (neal@social.gompa.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:48 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana
     • Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
     • Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     @bkuhn @richardfontana @jbqueru Sure, I can read it. It's weird but intelligible. For the most part, it works like you'd expect.

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     Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:50 JST Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana
     • Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru

     @neal

     Фасцинатинг

     (Does it actually make sense at all to just write an English word in Cyrillic in any event?)

     I've actually been thinking about this lately as I finally watched _The Americans_, which converts a bunch of English names to Cyrillic as part of its opening credits.

     But not Noah Emmerich. Never Noah Emmerich.

     Cc: @richardfontana @jbqueru

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     Richard Fontana (richardfontana@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:51 JST Richard Fontana

     in reply to

     • Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
     • Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     @bkuhn Indeed, among other things small caps has a standard use in legal scholarship journals adhering to the #problematic Bluebook format (I forget what offhand but titles of books are one example) @neal @jbqueru

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     Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora: (neal@social.gompa.me)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:51 JST Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana
     • Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
     • Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     @richardfontana @bkuhn @jbqueru The Sᴍᴀʟʟ Cᴀᴘs style is also how Cyrillic is always written. They don't have true diminutive forms like most Latin letterforms have.

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     Richard Fontana (richardfontana@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:52 JST Richard Fontana

     in reply to

     • Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
     • Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     @bkuhn isn't that because ſ is only lowercase? @neal @jbqueru

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     Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:52 JST Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana

     & apparently in official documents one wrote proper names in “Sᴍᴀʟʟ Cᴀᴘs” font. So, the Commonwealth's name is “Mᴀssᴀᴄʜᴜsᴇᴛᴛs” and not Maſſachuſetts.🤔

     Meanwhile, TIL that Leslie Lamport did not invent Sᴍᴀʟʟ Cᴀᴘs for LaTeX,. It's apparently been “a thing” since 1516? 😳 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps#History> Welp, I knew its invention date within ± ½ a millennium. 🤷

     & @richardfontana notes it's 3-swash for Maſſachuſetts, so I had it wrong bf. anyway.
     🤦…q.e.d.: I should put down the ſ & back away slowly…

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     Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:53 JST Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana
     • Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru

     Er, wait, what? Massachusetts doesn't have a swash s 😲!

     Ok, I am clearly going to hurt someone if I don't stop swinging this ſ around. After all, it has that hook on the end, it's more dangerous than a tire iron!

     Cc: @neal @richardfontana @jbqueru

     (Image downloaded from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/First_Articles_of_the_1780_Massachusetts_Constitution.jpg )

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     Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 14:27:55 JST Bradley M. Kühn — 🔜 FOSDEM

     in reply to

     • Richard Fontana

     @neal

     I dunno. I love ß in German. And as someone who once lived in Maſsachusetts and enjoys the baſs sound in my headphones, but not a baſe tone, I long for the return of swash s.

     @richardfontana