A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 4, 2016 10:25 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563)
In reply to: A report from the documentation maintainer by farnz
Parent article: A report from the documentation maintainer

You mean "ẞ" U+1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S?

A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 4, 2016 11:42 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

It exists, yes, but all the references I can find (as a beginner in the language, not a native speaker nor resident in a German-speaking country) tell me that the use of U+1E9E is for things like advertising, where you're doing the "shouting caps" emphasis trick - thus, where an English advert might say "BIG..." the German equivalent advert would use "GROẞ" to indicate that the caps are not "real" capitals, they're shouting.

In normal writing, though, everything seems to use SS as the capital form of ß.

A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 7, 2016 18:16 UTC (Mon) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

That's at least partially also because “ẞ” isn't on German typewriters, (traditional) computer keyboards, etc.

A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 8, 2016 9:40 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

The codepoint for the uppercase “ß” was added to Unicode as a sort of precaution and to make life easier for people implementing case conversion routines. In Germany, in spite of this, uppercase “ß” isn't actually being used in practice, and in fact there is no official agreement or rule as to what the glyph should even look like (although people keep throwing around “ẞ” as if that was some sort of gospel). It would be reasonable to render U+1E9E as “SS” except for the ambiguity with “in Maßen/Massen”, or as “ß” (i.e., exactly like the lowercase “ß”) except for the bad typography of having a lowercase letter in the middle of a bunch of uppercase ones.

Generally, according to the new German orthography rules we're now supposed to write “ß” after a long vowel (or diphthong) and “ss” after a short vowel. This is not the worst part of the orthography reform but the uppercase-“ß” issue remains largely unresolved.