<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 5:51 AM, Harald Alvestrand <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:harald@alvestrand.no">harald@alvestrand.no</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">The conclusion seems to be that eszett and ss ARE equivalent in Switzerland and Austria, but are NOT equivalent in Germany.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>[1] "dass" ranked 22nd: <a href="http://www.vistawide.com/german/top_100_german_words.htm">http://www.vistawide.com/german/top_100_german_words.htm</a></div><div>[2] "daß" ranked 29th but counting "dass" separately: <a href="http://german.about.com/library/blwfreq01.htm">http://german.about.com/library/blwfreq01.htm</a></div>
<div>[3] "daß" ranked 29th: <a href="http://www.wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/html/wliste.html">http://www.wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/html/wliste.html</a></div><div><br></div><div>markus</div></div>