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Do I blame Lyle or Michael R. for not providing a translation, forcing me to google for German translations to get the joke?
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Steve Ballmer has retired to Bank of America and is practicing his Developers, Developers, Developers speech.
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Neither, I suggest ... This is an example of "graphic translation" , performed by a person not familiar to the German "sharp S" , which looks too much like a B
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F
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That used to be how I would describe a yellowjacket.
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Not sure if helps, but Google translate says that "Weiẞer" in German is "white" in English; while "weiber" in German is "woman" in English.
As to "mulatschak", best Google gives me is that it's Hungarian for "I'm having fun".
Any native speakers want to help us out?
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https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleAIGoneWild/
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No, that's the WTF, which I get. Knowing that they translate to "women" and "white" makes it funny.
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"hey, where are all the Weiẞer WEIBER at?" - Cleavon Little, Blazing Saddles
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Well now I feel stupid for not thinking of that line myself. You win this round, O.S.H.
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For non-German speakers, Weiber is the plural of Weib, an old timey word and these days considered less flattering to say at least. So the term "Meinklang Weiber" translates roughly to "Meinklang b****es".
Admin
Oh, okay, it could also be translated to "Mainklang's b****es" ofc.
It's important to use the correct replacement characters for sharp S and umlauts in German, otherwise often the meaning of a word will change (and it's obviously pronounced completely different as well). So ß becomes sz, ä becomes ae, ö becomes oe and as expected ü becomes ue. German to my knowledge is the only language that has a complete set of replacement characters for ASCII long before the character set was invented, so not using them correctly makes you sound like a fool at best :-)
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With the latest updates of german (neue Rechtschreibreformen for those who want to learn more, but i don't know which one exactly it was. Maybe 1996?), ß should be replaced with ss
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Blame me. I had to google wieb myself, so I should have recognized the need to explain non-English and obscure English vernacular. Mea Culpa.
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That is not 100% correct. In 1996 there was a reform yes, and in Germany only there was a push beside the reform that ß is shorten to ss for character sets without ß but that wasn't applied to the standard-German versions (Austrian/Swiss). By that point most communication forms already had ß and there was no point to change everything in legacy systems. Plus ss obviously leads to a ton of grammar issues, mostly caused by the rather bad reform itself. However most native speakers will recognize both, so I would recommend using the one everyone is familiar to avoid an endless confusion over grammar and typos.
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Okay, in german class at school we learn that "ß" is just a contraction of "ss".
Admin
The Eszett ligature consists of long-s ſ and round-s, just imagine an arch from the top right of the ſ connected to the top right of the s (Fraktursatz). It signifies a ss that is not to be hyphenated, such cases use ſſ. For example, "Klaſſe" (Klasse = class) is Klaſ-ſe, while Grußwort (greeting word) is not Gruſ-ſword, but Gruſſ-wort and therefore Gruß-wort. Yes, it is that simple: Cannot trucate s-s? Use Eszett. At the end of a word, using ss (as suggested by most of the recent german spelling reforms) makes no sense: Riss (rip) cannot ever be Ris-s, so Riß is the correct (and traditional, "old") spelling. It has nothing to do with "vowel length", otherwise "Geständniss" (confession) would have been correct, but it isn't - "Geständnis" is correct, with only one s. The "vowel length" does not depend on if you use s, ss or ß, only partially otherwise.Some handwriting, as well as certain older fonts, used ſ and ʒ to create ß (very prominently seen on street signs in Berlin), and therefore the name Eszett (es and zett are s and z). A capital ẞ has been present for decades already on computers (usually press Caps Lock and ß, next to 0, to get it). That capital Eszett is also shown on some older DUDEN dictionaries. I have one from the 1960s, I think, titled DER GROẞE DUDEN, and note that ẞ is not B, so it's not "der grobe Duden" (the rough Duden), but "der große Duden" (the big / great Duden). The replacement to use ss instead of ß is quite common, and makes sense especially in capital letters (DER GROSSE DUDEN). However, in some circumstances, you actually use sz instead of ß in order to not confuse it with ss, in cases both spellings might be correct, but you intendedly want to express that an ß is to be used, you just don't have one. A good example is teletype: "ueberfall mittagstrasze" (assault Mittag street) where obviously Mittagstraße is the intended spelling, because sz does hardly appear in any german word, and if it does, you'll recognize it: glueckszahl (lucky number) is not Glückßahl, but Glückszahl).
Admin
When i was at school, we only learned ss as a replacement for ß. Looks like since the 1996 reform the sz replacement is more like "forbidden" to use and will only appear on really old street signs (or in old books). That always looks really strange to me.
The reforms from 2004, 2006, 2011 and 2018 only changed different rules, but the 2017 one introduced the capital ß and since 2024 this is the preferred version for capitalized texts.
I'm not sure what you mean by standard german? Hochdeutsch? That's the one with the Rechtschreibreformen in germany. In swiss german i think they only ever use ss and don't have the ß. And in austria it looks like they don't substitute it, but otherwise accepted the german Rechtschreibung as a base.
Version management is hard for long-running and distributed systems like natural languages
Admin
Not necessarily. It may be using a non standard definition of "byte" which does not have 8 bits. Admittedly, their definition of "byte" would have to have about a billion bits in it.
Admin
That is not correct, you should now start to reevaluate everything you learned there cause who knows what else is completely wrong ;-)
The 1996 "Rechtschreibreform" proposed the ss replacement of eszet for when characters sets don't have an eszet, but it was not a hard rule. It was a left-over from the idea to replace eszet completely with ss but that was sabotage back then by the Germans with the reason that it makes Göthe, ehm sorry, Goethe unreadable (no, not making that up, some German politics and writers ended up turning a well designed reform into a mess that resulted in a worst language than before).
If you think about it a second, it would work because a lot of words would end up having conflicts, like Maße and Masse, just to name one that comes to mind out of many.
Admin
The first standardized German version was the Swiss one with their first published state dictionary in German speaking regions. The Austrian variant followed, which became the imperial German because German regions where under the control of the Habsburg monarchy (which originated ironically from Switzerland). The Habsburger didn't care much about unifying the language beyond their borders, the empire was always multi-cultural, so there was no point.
There were multiple unsuccessful attempts in Germany, including one by the German dictator Hitler but in the end after WW2 everything tuckered along with two stand German variants and whatever whatever region preferred to do. Germany itself has no stand German, they only have a privately owned book called Duden, they use as a reference. It's similar to how Java is not standardized but hopefully following proprietary docs by Oracle.
Now in '96 there was an attempt to unify and reform German into a single version but it was a disaster. Basically the previously planned out and designed proposal by experts was picked apart and stitched together like a Frankstein's version of German. In the end it was a worst illogical mess than before and what followed were multiple iterations over the same reform from '96 (I guess that's the confusion about "multiple reform", there was only one).
In all countries using a standardized version of German, the standard has priority over whatever was incorporated after '96. So basically you have the same mess as before with tons of German variants, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciations in Germany and two standard German variants.
However all countries agree that you are not allowed to replace ß with ss except when the CHARACTER SET doesn't have an alternative. So in the end with everything running under UNICODE for decades now, the ß => ss rule pretty much never applies. But there is no rule that you should not use sz anymore, hence I recommend it to all non-German speakers to this day. It's just valid no matter what.
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It's even worse: Germany doesn't actually have a single standardized ruleset for spellings. Different publishers (such as Duden, Brockhaus, Wahrig, Mildenberger, Cornelsen etc.) contain different "rules", changing them with every new edition, and even newspapers and magazines now have their own internal rules about spelling ("home spelling"), picking things from different dictionaries (of different editions) as well as older rules ("pre-reform") they find suitable. This is also completely legal, as the federal constitutional court ruled in (I think) 1997: "The federal countries decide about the correct spelling." The decision also stated that no individual is forced to use it (applies even to pupils in school!), but it seems to be mandatory for the state (and its officials). So now you have 16 federal countries, not having clearly decided what is the "correct" spelling in their realm, as well as privately owned schools that can decide freely about which dictionary they want to use. Most people actually don't care anymore. Things the reform could have simplified have been overcomplicated, and now the german language is a mess... jus`t imagine thatt be Done to the Enlish langwish!
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Germany without a standards body for something? Of course there ist the Institut für deutsche Sprache (IDS). It's just not as international as the french institute de la langue française and younger than the swiss and austrian counterparts.
If there only is a rule to replace ß with ss in some circumstances and no rule to replace it with sz, then it is not allowed to replace it with sz. At least that's what the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung (including all six countries) agreed to in 2024: use the reform of 1996 and replace the previous standard of 1901.
Admin
It's so nice that english is a fully standardised language.
Or is it standardized...?