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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

#4

Post by quink »

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, anyone can do whatever they want and as with the new orthography, they did. Prescriptive linguistics is useless anyway, especially over the past two decades in German-speaking regions.

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

#5

Post by faho »

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?

QWERTZ is already bad for e.g. programming with all its punctuation (typing "]" means holding altgr and pressing 9), so that would make it even worse.

Personally I'd rather use composing since that would mean I could continue ignoring "ß" like I already do (I use "ss" instead), only now I'll ignore both forms.

Note also that a capital "ß" is barely useful to begin with - no word begins with it, so the only reason to use it is to write a word in ALL CAPS.

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

#6

Post by bla2 »

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…

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".

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

#7

Post by bsimpson »

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'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.

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

#9

Post by Vivtek »

bsimpson wrote: post #7
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'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.
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