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From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts,soc.culture.german
Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ]
Message-ID: <TMB.91May21044353@volterra.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 21 May 91 08:43:53 GMT
References: <1991May4.190533.13629@ira.uka.de> <617@mailgzrz.tu-berlin.de>
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In-reply-to: bergmann@leland.Stanford.EDU's message of 20 May 91 19:02:49 GMT

In article <1991May20.190249.12782@leland.Stanford.EDU> bergmann@leland.Stanford.EDU (Bergmann) writes:
   In article <TMB.91May20125338@volterra.ai.mit.edu> tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
   >To add to the confusion, the official substitute for writing 'sz' when
   >the special character is not available is 'ss'. As far as I can tell,
   >this was a really bad decision, since 'ss' carries with it the idea
   >that the preceding vowel is short, whereas 'sz' indicates that the
   >preceding vowel is normal or long; there is no good reason not to
   >write the 'sz' letter as 'sz' when the letter is not available.

   Hoho -- strong words! I'll give you one reason which seems good
   enough to me: the German "z" is pronounced "ts," so I, for one,
   read "dasts" when I see "dasz."  (It's even worse with words
   that are less common, e.g. "saszen.")

* German, like most other languages, uses two- and three letter
  combinations to express other sounds. It presumably doesn't bother
  you that 'c' is pronounced 'ts' or 'k' in isolation when you
  encounter it in words like 'Schnee' or 'Chemie'.

* Historically, 'sz' _was_ written as two separate letters. This
  strongly suggests that there are no significant ambiguities arising
  from writing it as two separate letters (as far as I know the change
  was mostly made for typographic reasons). Furthermore, the
  combination is visually distinctive enough that it is easy to spot.

* The convention of using 'ss' to indicate 'sz' is much worse, since
  it breaks the simple rules on which German pronunciation is based:
  you cannot determine the length of the vowel preceding the 'ss'
  anymore. Any rare pair would be better than 'ss' to indicate sharp-s
  in the absence of the special character, even 'xx', 'sx', 'qz', etc.
  'sz' just happens to be an infrequent pair, somewhat meaningful (the
  's' indicates the sound, the 'z' absence of voicing (in German)),
  historically accurate, and in agreement with usage in several other
  languages.

Sure, words like "saszen", "Fuesze", and "Uebermasz", may look unusual
at first if you are used to reading them with an umlaut and a sharp-s,
but that doesn't demonstrate that indicating an umlaut and a sharp-s
in that way intrinsically has to be confusing.

					Thomas.