It's hard to come by an actual minimal pair.
MASSE - mass or measurements? See, not hard at all.
[and]
With the new orthography, "ss" vs. "ß" affects the pronunciation of
the preceding vowel. It's irritating to see "SS" because you have to
override that rule when you know that the word in lowercase was
pronounced differently.
Well, this pretty much summarizes why I think "SS"-for-"ß" looks
distracting. So since I very much agree with such sentiment, I should
probably not have given a mild defense of this practice in the first place.
But where are all those other examples? Now – aside from "come by"
meaning "come across" :-) (which is, in all fairness, not what I meant
earlier), let's now ask how frequent this is, really. I don't encounter
that much all-caps text in the first place (which to me looks stupid,
independently), and "MASSE" is variant #3 in this thread of the double
example that Otto Scholz just gave ("Körpermassen" (Switzerland), "IN
MASSEN"), obviously terribly likely to appear in an all-caps context.
Remind me real quick, I must have forgotten about all those popular,
bestselling all-caps physics books teaching about mass and measurements
– the comparative discussion of beer and female bodies was probably in
the appendix about SI units :-) which I must have skipped.
And it's not like capitalization is otherwise invertible – the
capitalization bits contain information as well, after all.)
Besides the point a bit. Even thought it's true that mixed case
carries information that's lost in all upper or all lowercase, the
issue is a bit different, as not focused on one letter.
Text being all-caps is a property applied to the word level (for
emphasis) or to the paragraph level. The minimal unit it applies to is
(normally) the word. (@"normally": What to do with word-internal capital
letters, as eg in certain Gaelic names is another question.) You're
right to point this out, but "SS"-as-capital-ß really only occurs in an
all-caps writing context, which has the capitalization property applied
to entire words.
Stephan
