Or a non-name example: "Buße" (repentance)
vs "Busse" (buses). But then, non-name examples are far less likely to
remain ambiguous in context.
A reason why Jukka's original example – like most proper name examples –
was better than mine is that it's truly minimal in that context will
really not help /and/ the pronunciation is identical. I wrote "most"
because there's gotta be variation in the pronunciation of a surname
like Rößler. Note though that those names would, if invented today, all
get an unambiguous spelling with either "ss" (preceding short vowel) or
"ß" (preceding long vowel or diphthong); you have a lot of unusual_{from
today's point of view} letter doubling in names.
Minimal pairs for “ß” vs. “ss”, not involving proper names,
are extremly rare; in fact, I only know the two mentioned
in this very note. Between ordinary words and proper names
(or place names), you can, of course, find more minimal pairs,
e. g., “Füßen” (a declension form of “Fuß” = foot) and “Füssen”
(a town in Bavaria).
Interesting would be a non-name minimal pair whose components have
identical pronunciation. Perhaps none is in ordinary use (otherwise we'd
know?), though one can come up with compound words like
"Maißtier"/"Maisstier". Not that they make much sense, plus this one
actually fails the pronunciation test. But some construction along those
lines ought to be possible (and easy, with a corpus). And there probably
/is/ an uncontrived example if we allow a pairing with a geographical
name, similar to what you're mentioning.
Of course in my worldview, all-caps writing is deprecated :-) I might
have never written a ß-"SS" outside of this exchange. Which isn't to say
that I don't laud efforts at precision, at popularizing a capital ẞ, or
at orthographic reform in general :-)
Stephan
