Eszett

[Peter Dambier]

Sorry to repeat, but I am afraid it got lost down deep in discussion.

There is no eszett.

In latin writing it always used to be "<s><z>"

In german typesetting the typesetter digs in his lettercase and replaces
"<s><z>" with the ligature "<sz>" just as he replaces "<c><h>" with "<ch>" and
"ff" with "<f><f>". That is purely a typesetting issue. The ligature is
in german book making what for the english the kapital at the begin of
a page is. It used to be big, handcrafted and colored and no two of them
look the same.

With electronic typesetting the typesetter lost his job like the man
in the english railway train who engaged the brakes.

Ignore the swiss about <sz>. They don't have it and that is correct
except replacing <s><z> with <s><s> is awfully wrong.

There is no difference in pronunciation between "s" and "sz" except
at school we were in the need of an umbrella because from some 80
teachers there was one very old man who did pronounce the "sz" correctly.

It is the same with "g" and "ch". The "g" like "gang" is sometimes
pronounced "sch" like "sheriff" because we cannot pronounce it "g"
like "George" and actually "Georg" becomes "Schorch" and "ch" should
only pronounced in a toilet in the first place.

So we have a lot more ligatures. Of coarse there do not exist any
uppercase ligatures because only the first character of a ligature
ever becomes uppercase end then the ligature is broken and becomes
the two original letters. Why should the <sz> become different?

Because polititians don't understand it and there are no more
typesetters to protest.

Kind regards
Peter


Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> Hello Shawn,
> 
> I think doing a cross-check on whether we really did the right thing 
> with ß (eszett) is a good idea.
> 
> On 2009/07/11 8:41, Shawn Steele wrote:
>> I shudder at bringing this up, but it’s come up a few times in different threads and different contexts recently.  (Yes, some by me, others not).  I believe that the current plan of changing the IDNA2003 eszett behavior is a bad idea.  Even worse, I believe the drafts have arrived at this position as an accident of the evolution of the process and not well-reasoned behavior.
>>
>> My understanding of the situation (I’m going to oversummerize, and no, I’m not going to go re-read all the eszett archives, I only have a week before vacation ☺)
>>
>>
>> ·         The working group decided that mappings were bad (this thread is eszett, not mappings).
>>
>> ·         Germany realized that with no mappings they’d have an orphaned letter, eszett, and they really want to be able to type fußball at the UI level.
>>
>> ·         The working group agreed that interfering with fußball was unhealthy and so eszett ß was added.
>>
>> ·         A tremendous amount of discussion reintroduced mappings.
>>
>> ·         German feedback indicated that mappings were solved the eszett case.
>>
>> ·         The eszett continues to remain a breaking change from IDNA2003.
>>
>> There are some words in German (like fußball) that SHOULD be spelled with an eszett.  There are even a few words that become homographs if the eszett isn’t used.
>> It should also be pointed out that in other German speaking locales, the ss is preferred,
> 
> ss is preferred in Switzerland. ß is preferred in Austria.
> 
>> and even in Germany it is used as an alternate spelling in some contexts.
> 
> What contexts?
> 
>> SS or ss is often used instead of ß for stylistic reasons if nothing else.
> 
> SS is always used when upper case is needed. Can you explain where you 
> think that ss is used for 'stylistic reasons'?
> 
>> I believe that the logic used to add eszett was sound at the time since mappings were prohibited, however with the reemergence of mapping that logic is no longer sound, nor is it even the request of the group that made the initial suggestion.
>>
>> Additionally there are some problems with eszett being distinct in a mapping environment.
>> It is 99% linguistically equivalent to ss (or SS),
> 
> What do you mean by 99% linguistically equivalent? In the new German 
> orthography, the difference between ß and ss is a very clear phonetic 
> difference (long preceeding vowel for ß, short preceeding vowel for ss).
> 
> Regards,   Martin.
> 
>> and “anyone” who registered an ß domain would probably also register the ss version.  Certainly at the moment IDN still doesn’t have 100% adoption, so the ss form is more common in a domain name.
>>
>> As I mentioned I don’t think the original request for the eszett is still valid in the current context, and I believe it was withdrawn.
>>
>> Lastly, it’d be an unnecessary breaking change, and really bad for fußball.de to go somewhere other than fussball.de.  You’ll even note that fussball.de uses the brand with ss (granted, likely initially because of ASCII limitations), despite being a .de domain.
>>
>> Please revert the eszett behavior.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> - Shawn
>>
>> 
>> http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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> 

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