Talk:MAP32: Grosse (Doom II)

The Essorg link appears to be 404. Draconio 23:22, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Obsolete German

>"Grösse" itself is an obsolete spelling of the German word "Größe"

Actually it's the other way round. The Germans have been trying to streamline their language, and remove most of the accents, and the special letter ess-zett (S-Z, the "B" looking letter that makes the "ss" sound). A lot of this probably has to do with the popularity of computers. Some Germans aren't too happy about it, seeing no reason to throw out heritage just to align their language within the parameters of English, or pragmatically, American English. So this means that "Größe" is the obsolete spelling. "Grösse" is the modern one. Or even "Groesse" if we're doing away with the umlauts (not the precious umlauts!) as well. Which they are doing, replacing with "oe" or "ue" etc.

Incidentally, in old German cursive handwriting, an s joined to a z produces the ß symbol. Their cursive Z has a tail, looks more like a 3, and the straight line is a very slanted narrow s. You can try writing it yourself if you like. That's why a B sounds like "ss", it's not a B!

Anyway that was my interesting little tour around modern German linguistic politics, but the point I'm making is you've got the obsolete one the wrong way round. Nice website for a great game, been playing Doom since not long after launch.

84.67.116.161 09:07, 1 February 2023 (CST)

Is this specific to certain words? Because I work at Nightdive and our games are all localized for EFIGS, and the German localizations, produced by current translators working over the last few years, have all contained ubiquitous use of ess-zett, requiring that character to be supported by any fonts we create or modify. Doesn't seem to me that its usage has diminished much, based on that. --Quasar (talk) 23:32, 4 February 2023 (CST)

Various German-speaking countries have attempted to get rid of the ess-zett at various time to accommodate technology that did not account for it, such as the Zurich canton of Switzerland "deprecating" it in 1935 because it did not appear on typewriters. But in the end, technology adapted to language faster than the language could adapt to primitive technology. Nowadays with Unicode there's no reason to try to get rid of ess-zett and umlauts. --Gez (talk) 07:38, 5 February 2023 (CST)