Re: Uppercase ß
> The ALL-CAPS "SS" really has little to recommend it, intrinsically. > It is de-facto a fall-back; one that competed with "SZ" as used in > telegrams (while they still were a thing). Well, the status of `ß' is indeed complicated, and the radical solution used in Switzerland has certainly benefits. > Not being able to know how to hyphenate MASSE without knowing the > meaning of the word is also not something that I consider a > "benefit". I don't see much difference to the English example of `re-cord' vs. `rec-ord'. And Swiss people won't start to use `ẞ' just for getting the right meaning... > Uppercase forms for `ß' have been kicking around in fonts for a long > time as was documented around the time that the character was > encoded. Yes, and it was never successful. The introduction of `ẞ' into Unicode a few years ago was mainly driven by experts, not something that had big popularity before. > With changing environment (starting with influence from Anglo-Saxon > use of type and not ending with the way the character is treated in > relation to phonetics) I've been expecting to see usage evolving; > and not necessarily driven by software engineers. Yes, let's see how everything will evolve. Regardless of that, software should support the status quo as good as possible. Werner
Re: Uppercase ß
>> * `ß' is never used in Switzerland; it's always `ss' (and `SS'). >> [...] > > So the Swiss don't have that issue. What do they do for names? Foreign names containing `ß' are treated as-is, AFAIK. It's similar to using, say, accents in some foreign names in English. >> For such cases, `GESCHOSS' is a much better uppercase version >> since it covers both dialectic forms. ... and Swiss people would use the same uppercase version... > I don't see the claimed benefit; [...] > > Users who will end up "resolving" this would be those who grew up > only with the revised orthography. Indeed. >> I very much dislike the approach that just for the sake of >> `simplistic standardization for uppercase' the use if `ẞ' should be >> enforced in German. [...] > > Hmm, don't see anyone calling for that in this discussion. Well, I hear an implicit ”Great, there is now an `ẞ' character! Let's use it as the uppercase version of `ß' everywhere so that this nasty German peculiarity is finally gone.“ Maybe it's only me... Werner
Re: Uppercase ß
> Overlooked in this discussion is the fact that the revised > orthography of 1996 introduces for the first time a systematic > difference in pronunciation for the vowel preceding SS vs. ẞ (short > vs. long). As users of the old orthography age out, I would not be > surprised if the SS fallback were to become less acceptable over > time because it would be at odds with how the word is to be > pronounced. I'm also confidently expecting the use of ALL CAPS to > become (somewhat) more prevalent under the continued influence of > English usage. It's not that simple. * `ß' is never used in Switzerland; it's always `ss' (and `SS'). Even ambiguous cases like `Masse' are always written like that. This means that for Swiss users `ẞ' is even more alien than for most German and Austrian users. In particular, there doesn't exist a `unity SS' in Swiss German at all! For example, the word `Maße' if capitalized to `MASSE' is hyphenated as `MA-SSE' in Germany and Austria (since `SS' is treated in this case as a unity). However, the word is hyphenated as `MAS-SE' in Switzerland, since `ss', as a replacement for `ß', is *not* treated as a unity. * There are dialectic differences between northern and southern Germany (and Austria). Example: `Geschoß' vs. `Geschoss', which means exactly the same – and both orthographies are allowed. For such cases, `GESCHOSS' is a much better uppercase version since it covers both dialectic forms. I very much dislike the approach that just for the sake of `simplistic standardization for uppercase' the use if `ẞ' should be enforced in German. It's not the job of a language to fit computer usage. It's rather the job of computers to fit language usage. Werner
Re: Uppercase ß
> When looking for the lowercase ß LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S U+00DF > in a MacOS Character Viewer, it does not give the uppercase version, > for some reason. Yes, and it will stay so, AFAIK. The uppercase variant of `ß' is `SS'. `ẞ' is to be used mainly for names that contain `ß', and which must be printed uppercase, for example in passports. Here the distinction is important, cf. Strauß vs. Strauss → STRAUẞ vs. STRAUSS Since uppercasing is not common in typesetting German text (in particular headers), the need to make a distinction between words like `Masse' (mass) and `Maße' (dimensions) if written uppercase is rarely necessary because it can usually deduced by context. Werner
Re: Aw: Re: LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S officially recognized
> No, the hyphenation oddity involving the addition of letters with > hyphenation (or, to be more precise, to suppress letters in > unhyphenated words) never affected the letter s. I'm not sure that this is really true. As far as I know, `sss' in Swiss German was handled similar to other triplet consonants before the 1996 spelling reform. In other words, you would have written Abschlussatz (`closing sentence') instead of Abschlusssatz , and which would have been hyphenated as Abschluss-satz Werner
Re: LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S officially recognized
> > Is it possible to design fonts that will render ẞ as SS? > > > > So we could choose between ẞ and SS by just selecting the proper > > font, without changing the text itself. > > I think, and others agree, that this is a bad thing. Those who want > SS can simply use 'S' and 'S', ẞ was encoded for those who wanted to > use a capital form of ß. They would be annoyed if they found that > the typeface they wanted subverted their intentions. It's even more complicated. Take for example the word `Straße' (street), which gets capitalized as `STRASSE'. In Germany and Austria this word gets hyphenated as `STRA-SSE' (since hyphenation is not influenced by the ß→SS substitution). However, in Switzerland it gets hyphenated as `STRAS-SE', since Swiss German doesn't use ß; instead, `ss' gets treated as a normal double consonant. Werner
