IDNA2008: concerns about inconsistent mappings, and german sharp s

Markus Scherer markus.icu at gmail.com
Thu Dec 11 18:17:09 CET 2008


On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 5:51 AM, Harald Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no>wrote:

> The conclusion seems to be that eszett and ss ARE equivalent in Switzerland
> and Austria, but are NOT equivalent in Germany.
>

I find that statement flies against both the history of the sharp-s ligature
and against recent evidence: The 1996 orthography reform changed the sharp-s
vs. ss spelling of many very common words, including one of the 30 most
frequent words (daß->dass, ranking according to sources below), which shows
that there is so little difference between the two spellings that the
committees felt they could change when to use which.

[1] "dass" ranked 22nd:
http://www.vistawide.com/german/top_100_german_words.htm
[2] "daß" ranked 29th but counting "dass" separately:
http://german.about.com/library/blwfreq01.htm
[3] "daß" ranked 29th: http://www.wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/html/wliste.html

markus
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