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It's actually a ligature for "sz" - at least it used to be. You probably won't find many german words that have an actual "sz" in them.
But there are some – e.g. Auszeit . And at the same time, we use ß in locations where it'd otherwise be ss. While it started as a ligature, its current usage doesn't fit that.
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It started out as a ligature of ſ and ʒ, forms of s and z that don't exist anymore today in German. And it became a letter like æ did. Also this happened at a time where z was pronounced differently from how it is pronounced today.
> It started out as a ligature of ſ and ʒ I know that, but again prescriptive linguistics vs. descriptive and descriptive definitely says ss.
Edit: OK nevermind. Other comments and wikipedia discuss this.
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Take the words Maße (measurements, sizes) and Masse (weight, mass). There’s hundreds more of such examples. ß and ss have a different effect on surrounding letters (the a in Maße is short, the one in Masse is long)
You're right! It's a good job there are no words in English where one spelling encompasses many meanings, of which some could even be contradictory, which would have to be inferred from context. That would be so bad !
But for good or bad, it is part of the language. People used to it consider replacing it with 'ss' as ugly. Because of custom, and also because a double consonant almost always indicates a short vowel, whereas a single 's' indicates a soft s. Only ß actually represents the intended pronunciation.
f course w'd gt by witout it. Bt Englis wld similry srvive vs fewr lttrs, so y nt ablsh 1/2 t lphbt?
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How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?
Take the words Maße (measurements, sizes) and Masse (weight, mass). There’s hundreds more of such examples. ß and ss have a different effect on surrounding letters (the a in Maße is short, the one in Masse is long)
As a german, I see this as a step in the wrong direction. The sharp S is a PITA to begin with, so I'd rather abolish it completely. Now there's a whole bunch of complications coming from this - how do I type this? To type lowercase "ß", I press the key above "p" (in the same position as with qwerty) and "ü" (to the right of it), which will do "?" when pressed together with shift. So do we move "?" somewhere else? QWE…
As a learner/non-native speaker of German, please don't abolish the only way to tell the vowel length of an unfamiliar word.
Making an uppercase version of a lowercase ligature was bad idea from the get go.
I suggest to type designers who want to add this symbol to do an SZ or SS ligature.
Caveat: I studied typography in another life.
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As a German, I disagree with you. German's not English, even though you might prefer if it was. Others don't. It's fine that it uses the letters it ended up with historically. This change fixes an internal inconsistency, your reply seems fairly irrelevant. It feels like replying to some bugfix in, say, Ruby with something like "I never liked Ruby anyhow".
How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?
Icelandic maintains this useful distinction. I feel like English spelling would need at least half a dozen more letters to disambiguate. As it is, English is actually a not great choice for a global language because it's so unphonetic.
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I think you meant it the other way 'round? long/short, I mean. Otherwise I totally agree, ß is important to distinguish phonetics.
It is important but you are marking the wrong thing, you could make it Māsse and Masse if you really cared.
Languages are the products of a sort of evolutionary processes. Rarely do the conventions appear to be the best possible solution at first sight. But it isn't uncommon for convincing arguments to appear later, showing that some seemingly arbitrary rules are almost beautifully constructed to make languages efficient. Not only do common words tend to be shorter than uncommon ones; I've also seen examples of word pairs that would be dangerous to confuse to be further apart in spelling and pronunciation than statistics would suggest (I believe sailing was the example I saw: single words can mean life or death, and are often spoken under difficult circumstances).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take the words Maße (measurements, sizes) and Masse (weight, mass). There’s hundreds more of such examples. ß and ss have a different effect on surrounding letters (the a in Maße is short, the one in Masse is long)
You're right! It's a good job there are no words in English where one spelling encompasses many meanings, of which some could even be contradictory, which would have to be inferred from context. That would be so bad !