[OFFTOPIC] The (hi)story of the letter "ß"

[Dajana]

A little explanation why I write this post here.
Yesterday's rug::b was at bitcrowd (thank you for hosting!!!) and unfortunately their neighbours needed their good nights sleep. After 22:00 they became more and more annoyed by the volume of our voices. So in the middle of the lightning talks, where Florian wanted to add even more knowledge to his talk "Unicode, a 💌", we needed to leave (quietly).

Just before that I asked if the audience would be interested in the history of the very unusual letter ß. And here I am now writing down what I wanted to tell you yesterday.

There are a lot of theories about the origin of the letter ß and you can read about some of them on Wikipedia. I will give you the one my grandmother taught me and that I think is a very reasonable one.

German is the only language that uses the letter ß. Our script (italic) writing differed for a long time from our typed letters. The S as we know it was only used in prints. In writing it was more of a pointed arrow up. Here's a picture of the script alphabet called Sütterlinschrift

Now have a look at the little "s" and the little "z" (2nd row ;)). If you put both of them together you have the today's "ß", which is a unique letter in the German alphabet. Interesting, yet simple explanation. Thanks for reading. Have a wonderful day.

[Daniel Bovensiepen]

Dear Dajana,

thanks for the explanation. As Florian apparently had talked about Unicode in your last meeting and you mentioned the ß. It is probably worth mentioning that in Unicode the capital letter ẞ was actually defined at a point in time when this letter was not even part of the formal german orthography. I always found it quite interesting how technology influence culture, here we actually see that technology has created a fact to a question discussed for more than 100 years and after around 2 years in the Unicode standard it became actually official to use ẞ in specific cases in the german language.

Regards

Daniel

--
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RUG-B" group.
To post to this group, send email to ru...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rug-b+un...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rug-b?hl=de or http://www.rug-b.de
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RUG-B" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rug-b+un...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Florian Gilcher]

Hi Dajana,

_thanks_ for that beautiful explanation :).

Hi Daniel,

The Unicode proposal for LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S is a treat to read, by the way :).

Best,

Florian

[1]: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2888.pdf

[José Tomás Albornoz]

this is just great!

thanks for sharing!