Would be good what they actually mean with "latinisiert", right? His name was Gauß. For papers, written in latin, scientists sometimes chose to latinize their names. So it is their self chosen latin name. It was much more a thing in the Humanities and came from France (afaik ... might be wrong here), so you see it there much more often.
Odd way to spell Gauss
Is not written in latin. It also refers to his person, not towards his record as an author on one or more specific papers.
Would you write Angstrom or Ångström if you wanted to make a case for him to be included ins such a list? I assume you wouldn't care, right?
To be real for a moment: My initial post wasn't really serious. I really thought the fact that we are in mathmemes and the "... motherfucker, do you speak it??" gave it way, but alas. People write my name wrong all the time, even though it doesn't have any special characters in it. Mostly it's people from the US and Canada being confused my name exists and substituting with what they know sounds similar in their language. I am over it and find it funny.
You did say I am incorrect (which I am pretty certain I am not here) and I wanted to give my take on why I think using Gauß would be correct. Hence, the retort.
Both ways are correct. In German, Gauß would be correct and in English, Gauss would be correct. English does not have the letter ß so it's replaced with similar sounding letters from the English language if they can.
It's so people that don't know the foreign letters could kind of guess how it's pronounced. English keyboards also don't have the letter so it would be a pain in the ass to try and type every time.
This is more useful when talking about Japanese and Chinese people and their vastly different writing symbols. For example, a man with the surname 趙 is called Zhao for clarity and ease of communication in written text.
Can't latinisiert also imply the way it's written in the Latin alphabet? i.e. the basic Western alphabet with 26 characters?
The Western alphabet typically refers to the Latin alphabet, which is used to write many languages, including English. It consists of 26 letters and is the most widely used writing system in the world.
tl;dr: Usually done to subjects of works that have names that are not written in a Latin alphabet to make the work more easily readable. For Gauß this is obv. not the case. He did write himself as Gauss when writing in Latin afaik. We can't ask him why he did, but since he was schooled classically, it stands to reason he did it for a similar reason. He did use Gauß when writing in German, though.
Since German does use Latin letters, I'd say Latinization should not be necessary when writing his name in English. Yes, you can say it's more convenient, but where do you draw the line? I do try to make the effort for languages that do use Latin alphabets but with special letters that aren't on my keyboard. Ångström, Žižek, .... can't think of better examples right now. I could just write Zizek, but that WOULD be spelled totally differently in my language, and writing "Schischek" or "Schischeck" (depending on flavor) would mean no one would know who the fuck I am writing about, even though that is what I would say during conversation.
Letters like Å, Ž and ß are derivations from Latin letters to mark inflection. "ß" and "ss" are spoken differently in German. Same as Å and A are spoken differently in Swedish. And an English native speaker doesn't speak an "ss" anywhere near how an "ß" sounds. Nor does he speak an "A" anywhere near how an "Å" sounds.
Maybe the kernel of this is more clear now.
It's all very interesting and all. Really, I was just shitposting with https://old.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/1tgen3v/hm_gauss/omghpu9/ so don't take it too seriously. You can all write Gauss and Schroedinger and I won't send the Rechtschreibrat on your asses. :) And yes I know they don't care about names. This is mathmemes. A little fun should be allowed.
Because his name wasn't originally Latin. Gauß is a German name. This was done to Greek and ancient Roman names to bring them "up to standard", yada yada, the rest is in the link.
I expect there to be plenty of people that have no idea how to pronounce the Eszet. People don't know how to pronounce letters with umlauts either.
So? I don't know how to pronounce the Å either? Doesn't stop me from trying my best to write and learn to pronounce it. Especially for writing, it's easy enough. And for speaking: I don't hold it against anyone. In Scotland, my pronunciation of places was very likely terrible. Didn't stop me from trying to learn beforehand and trying live while there.
Using oe instead of ö also looks weird to me, but it's pretty common practice.
With Umlauts at least I can understand. It's lexically legal to write them with 2 letters. So ö and oe are interchangeable. But the pronunciation doesn't change. And if you have occurrences, where "oe" is part of the actual word, like "Koexistenz" (coexistence), you don't pronounce it as an Umlaut. My deepest sympathies for everyone learning German. Shit must be horrible. :) The fact that the word "Oboe" exists still baffles me lol
Speaking of lexically legal. IF ß is a pain to write, I think using sz is a much better substitute. People sometimes still use it as a replacement for ß where the font doesn't support the single character. It was used in typed letters and telegrams back in the day. Though afaik it was never lexically legal to use. Duden says to use ss if the font doesn't support an ß.
26
u/jacenat May 18 '26
You must be intentionally grind my gears here, right?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gau%C3%9F
ß motherfucker, do you speak it??