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From: dorai@titan.rice.edu (Dorai Sitaram)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts,soc.culture.german
Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ]
Message-ID: <1991May21.151413.20279@rice.edu>
Date: 21 May 91 15:14:13 GMT
References: <1991May4.190533.13629@ira.uka.de> <617@mailgzrz.tu-berlin.de> <TMB.91May20125338@volterra.ai.mit.edu>
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In article <TMB.91May20125338@volterra.ai.mit.edu> tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
>degenerated into two little dots. The German sharp-s, a character
>that looks sort of like a beta, similarly, is simply a ligature
>between an 's' and a 'z'.

Really?  The old fraktur script (cf. Greek) provides two ways of
writing an s: one long like an f that starts syllables, the other more
like the regular s to end syllables.  The sharp-s ligature is formed
from the long f-like s followed by the short one.  There is no z
anywhere in the picture.

>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.

The use of ss for sharp-s could be confusing for the reasons you
state: it suggests falsely that the preceding vowel is short.
However, using sz is not unambiguous either.  There are several cases
where sz is used simply because it ends a word/syllable, regardless of
whether is the preceding vowel is long -- e.g., Grusz -- or short --
e.g., Flusz.  Thus, ss and sz szuck in different ways -- as the astute
P.G. Wodehouse observes, "what you gain on the swings you lose on the
roundabouts."  What's the merit in that?

(If you could legislate such that sz is used only when the preceding
vowel is long, and ss is used everywhere else -- word/syllable end or
no --, you _might_ be in business.)

--d

PS:  Uebrigens, wer ist der PGW des Deutschen?