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The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

typography.guru

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Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#31

Post by legulere »

quink wrote: post #4

Arguments against: ß is a ligature, one of ss. ffl is a ligature, but that doesn't mean FFL should have one too. Just get rid of it. Switzerland did and they're managing just fine. Capitalisation in Unicode for German locales is just a headache, and this really doesn't help. How would one enter it on a keyboard? Argument for: ss is pretty much the same shape as SS, and Dutch has ij and IJ. It's just an optional ruling, a…

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.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#32

Post by kuschku »

tptacek wrote: post #29
bla2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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)

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#33

Post by dukoid »

Vivtek wrote: post #9
bsimpson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest maybe it should just be a ligature, but that would make it hard to type English words like crossing and German sharp-S words in the same font.

And there are double-s words in German (like "Amtssicherheit", off the top of my head) that don't use a sharp S - it's not a ligature.

There are words where the difference is actually significant, e.g. "Masse" (=mass) vs "Maße" (=dimensions)

It's also not a ligature for sz ("Amtszeit"), although it has developed from one (of the long s and the tailed z, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F )

I like that the information loss in toUpperCase() is gone now in this case, so I am all for it O:)

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#36

Post by cbmueller »

detaro wrote: post #20
cbmueller wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely true, it's not really its own letter nor is it really a ligature. It's an unique feature of the german language, which is hopefully here to stay...

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#38

Post by dukoid »

faho wrote: post #5

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…

If we have this character, I think it makes sense to have an uppercase form, turning toUpperCase() into a proper bijective mapping for German :)

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#39

Post by 1maginary »

kuschku wrote: post #18
zzleeper wrote: post #12

Interestingly, this is the opposite as what happened in Spanish [1] We had two extra letters, CH and LL that were just ligatures, so we dropped them and everyone is better off. [1] http://www.rae.es/consultas/exclusion-de-ch-y-ll-del-abeceda...

In German, ßẞ is not just a ligature. Since the recent orthographic reforms, ßẞ means a very specific sound that’s separate from s, and from ss.

> ßẞ means a very specific sound that’s separate from s, and from ss

Kinda. ⟨ss⟩ and ⟨ß⟩ are both /s/, ⟨s⟩ being /z/ for contrast, but they do affect how you read the preceding vowel.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#40

Post by microcolonel »

faho wrote: post #5

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…

I'm a big fan of ASCII German (downconversion of scharfes s and umlauts); but some people just like the way the hand orthography looked, and will do anything to hold on to it.
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