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A comment on The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography. Parent comment

Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or... by int_19h on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @03:20AM (#14694151)
It certainly does provide some extra flavors for poets to play with.

It also makes translations to other languages hell, when noun genders are used for allegoric purposes.

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Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or... by throwaway91111 on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @11:58AM (#14696579)
> when noun genders are used for allegoric purposes

Ugh, really? How disappointing.

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Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or... by int_19h on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @06:27AM (#14701243)
Just to give an example, consider this short poem:

https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Ein_Fichtenbaum_steht_einsam

Now try translating this to a language where the tree names are gendered differently, such that e.g. both are male, or both are female.

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Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or... by smsm42 on Friday July 07, 2017 @06:41PM (#14722773)
That is exactly what happened to the Russian translation:

https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0_%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%...

In Russian, both words are female.

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Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or... by int_19h on Friday July 07, 2017 @07:29PM (#14723042)
Yeah, Russian is the one I was thinking of.

Although it's actually more complicated, because there's more than one Russian translation, and this problem was tackled in different ways. Lermontov just did a straightforward translation, changing the implied meaning. Tutchev and Fet both changed the pine to another tree such that the word is male: cedar or oak (in the latter case, this also required changing the described environment in which it grows).

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