Xref: utzoo comp.fonts:2535 soc.culture.german:4357 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mintaka!ai-lab!life!tmb From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: comp.fonts,soc.culture.german Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ] Message-ID: Date: 21 May 91 19:38:43 GMT References: <1991May4.190533.13629@ira.uka.de> <617@mailgzrz.tu-berlin.de> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 18 In-reply-to: dorai@titan.rice.edu's message of 21 May 91 15:14:13 GMT In article 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. No, it is a ligature of the "f"-like "s" and a "z" (that's why it's called an "ess-zett"). The "s" that ends a word in Fraktur looks more like the Roman "s", and I have never seen it word internal in German.