Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Marcel Schneider]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2015 10:56:50 -0800, Leo Broukhis  wrote:

> This prompts a question: for case conversion bijectivity in fr_FR
> locale, should there be "invisible accents"? E.g.
> déjà -> DE(combining invisible acute accent)JA(combining invisible
> grave accent) -> déjà
> whereas in fr_CA locale, it is simply
> déjà -> DÉJÀ -> déjà

In fr_FR locale, it is, too. Thank you for your courtesy, invisible diacritics 
are indeed a very good idea if undiacriticized uppercase were really an actual 
need. But since your proposal is about case *conversion*, it's meant for *new* 
text, as opposed to historical editing. Introducing a mechanism to get accents 
off the caps without altering lowercase, is twice useless. First because 
undiacriticized uppercase is far from being an ideal, it's a mere second best 
that grew usual for a time but should have no more place. Second because it 
mainly would become useful in case conversion of *existing* all-caps that 
obviously has been written without the new invisible accents.

Eric's finding 
[http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2015-m12/0041.html] that 'E' was 
always diacriticized but 'A' wasn't always, illustrates partly the pragmatic 
second-best solution of avoiding the accent on top when it often breaks away on 
lead typography letters, and partly the dislike of such on-tip accents which 
some people considered as "ugly". But in turn this dislike could have been the 
product of simply seldom seeing the accent on the tip of the 'A'. Fortunately 
all these byways are now past and useless.

Subsequently, I feel the need to stronly underscore Ralf Herrmann's conclusion 
on 23 Jan 2011 in the blog post that Asmus linked to 
[http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2015-m12/0036.html]:



The capital Eszett is now used more every day. It is included in several 
Windows 7 fonts and more and more type designers are designing a capital Eszett 
for newly released typefaces. I would like to finish with a quote about the 
capital Eszett from 1879, which I consider as true today as it was then:

 

“Indeed—it is a new character; but maybe this newness is the only thing you can 
hold against it.”

 

(Original quote: „Allerdings – es ist ein neues Zeichen; vielleicht ist aber 
die Neuheit das Einzige, was sich dagegen vorbringen lässt.“)

 


[/quote]

IMHO the full achievement of Unicode is to be able to not only reproduce 
inherited practice, but above all, to enhance the actual one.

Best regards,

Marcel

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Leo Broukhis]

This prompts a question: for case conversion bijectivity in fr_FR
locale, should there be "invisible accents"? E.g.
déjà -> DE(combining invisible acute accent)JA(combining invisible
grave accent) -> déjà
whereas in fr_CA locale, it is simply
déjà -> DÉJÀ -> déjà

Leo

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 9:35 PM, Marc Blanchet  wrote:
> On 9 Dec 2015, at 23:32, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>
> On 2015/12/10 09:30, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>
> I remember when we went through all this the first time around, encoding
> ẞ in the first place. People were saying "But the Duden says no!!!" And
> someone then pointed out, "Please close your Duden and cast your gaze
> upon ITS FRONT COVER, where you will find written in inch-high capitals
> plain as day, "DER GROẞE DUDEN"
> (http://www.typografie.info/temp/GrosseDuden.jpg) So in terms of
> prescription vs description, the Duden pretty much torpedoes itself.
>
> This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many other
> contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters
> in French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written
> without accents.
>
> while in Québec, upper-case letters are written with accents. l10n…
>
> Marc.
>
> When working on internationalization, it's always good to keep eyes open and
> not just only follow the rules.
>
> However, the example is also somewhat misleading. The book in the picture is
> clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited is new. I checked with "Der
> Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I found had the officially
> correct spelling. On the other hand, I remember that when the upper-case
> sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode, source material showed that it
> was somewhat popular quite some time ago (possibly close in age with the old
> Duden picture). So we would have to go back and check the book in the
> picture to see what it says about ß to be able to claim that Duden was (at
> some point in time) inconsistent with itself.
>
> Regards, Martin.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Martin J. Dürst]

Hello Marc,

On 2015/12/10 14:35, Marc Blanchet wrote:


This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many
other contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on
upper-case letters in French in France where 'officially', upper-case
letters are written without accents.


while in Québec, upper-case letters are written _with_ accents. l10n…


They are written with accents also quite often in France, but the French 
just don't notice :-).


Regards,   Martin.

Aw: Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Jörg Knappen]

Since the captial sharp s is easily available to the public, I see it popping up everywhere in

German publications, mostly in an all caps environment. I have a small collection of it (on paper).

 

The use of the capital sharp s in German is not only a historical artefact, it is recent and modern.

 

--Jörg Knappen

 

Martin Dürst wrote:



However, the example is also somewhat misleading. The book in the
picture is clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited is new. I checked
with "Der Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I found had the
officially correct spelling. On the other hand, I remember that when the
upper-case sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode, source material
showed that it was somewhat popular quite some time ago (possibly close
in age with the old Duden picture). So we would have to go back and
check the book in the picture to see what it says about ß to be able to
claim that Duden was (at some point in time) inconsistent with itself.

Regards, Martin.
 

Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Andreas Stötzner]

Am 10.12.2015 um 08:57 schrieb Jörg Knappen:

> The use of the capital sharp s in German is not only a historical artefact, 
> it is recent and modern.

some illustrations for that:
https://www.facebook.com/versaleszett/?fref=ts



Mit freundlichen Grüßen –

Andreas Stötzner






___

Andreas Stötzner  Gestaltung Signographie Fontentwicklung
 
Haus des Buches 
Gerichtsweg 28, Raum 434
04103 Leipzig
0176-86823396

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Hans Meiser]

Actually, MS Word offers an option to keep or drop accents when converting 
lower case to upper case in its spell checker options. I comprehend to the 
Turkish translation. They've got two different letter "i", one with and one 
without the dot ("ı"). But that's all not pointing to the direction of what I'm 
up to.

I'm not suggesting to change the Unicode table. The table is fine.

What I'm suggesting is to change the glyph (the rendered outcome) to something 
that's resembling two capital letters "S".

Here's a hyperlink to an image depicting of what I'm suggesting:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9zifh1imef0re9/SS.png

So, no matter whether the glyph will change - the rules and algorithms will be 
retained.

It's quite like Richard (Wordingham) wrote yesterday: "It's a font decision, 
not a Unicode decision". Yet, Unicode needs to lead the way so font designers 
may then amend their fonts accordingly.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Gerrit Ansmann]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2015 11:19:36 +0100, Hans Meiser  wrote:


After all, the "ß" is just a ligature of "ss" (or, to be precise: a ligature of "sz", originating 
from old German fonts - see hyperlink below), so I suggest the rendered outcome of the capital "ß" to be just the same: 
A ligature of two capital "S".


It’s not that simple. Briefly:

• The ß has completed its transition from a ligature to a standalone letter at 
least hundred years ago. For example, in fraktur typesetting (or more 
precisely, typesetting with a long s), one spelt “ſzeniſch” and “laſziv” – not 
“ßeniſch” and “laßiv”.

• History is not necessarily a good argument at how things should be done, 
otherwise we would have to be VVRITINC LIKE THIS.

• As already mentioned, from readability’s point of view, a properly designed 
capital ß is less obstrusive than SS.

For more details, see the links in my first reply, in particular 
http://j.mp/versaleszett.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Hans Meiser]

After all, the "ß" is just a ligature of "ss" (or, to be precise: a ligature of 
"sz", originating from old German fonts - see hyperlink below), so I suggest 
the rendered outcome of the capital "ß" to be just the same: A ligature of two 
capital "S".

Here's a hyperlink to an old German font (notice the lower case "s" and "z"):
http://www.myfont.de/fonts/infos/5602-Koch-Fette-Deutsche-Schrift.html

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Frédéric Grosshans]

Le 10/12/2015 05:32, Martin J. Dürst a écrit :
A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters in 
French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written 
without accents.
Actually, the official body in charge of this (Académie Française) has 
always recommended upper-case letters with accents , but the school 
teachers teach the other way, and accents on capital letters was 
technically challenging (in printing, writing machines and keyboard), so 
many people think the official recommendation is to drop them, and that 
is anyway complicated. But I often get question from non technical 
people on how I type É, œ, or Œ, which shows that they are natural.


(French language Wikipedia has more details on this 
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_des_majuscules_en_fran%C3%A7ais , 
including the fact that the rules in Switzerland are different.)


Frédéric

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Marcel Schneider]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2015 11:45:22 +0100, Frédéric Grosshans wrote:

>Le 10/12/2015 05:32, Martin J. Dürst a écrit :
>> A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters in 
>> French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written 
>> without accents.

We are welcome to look up the most official website of France:

http://www.elysee.fr/

We learn that *actually* uppercase letters are diacriticized. But the footer 
shows that by the time, diacritics were cut away. 
The change is on-going, from "caps always undiacriticized" to "all-caps 
diacriticized and titlecase caps undiacriticized" and further to "always 
diacriticized" as recommended in one of the 'official' options.

>Actually, the official body in charge of this (Académie Française) has 
>always recommended upper-case letters with accents , but the school 
>teachers teach the other way, 

That is old school. Actual school books teach to always diacriticize the 
diacriticized letters, stating that there is strictly *no* rule not to do so. 
But admittingly, switching from old school to new school isn't really 
straigtforward.

>and accents on capital letters was 
>technically challenging (in printing, writing machines and keyboard), 

Right, it was. Keyboard: This is why last year, the government placed an order 
for a complete computer keyboard layout at the French Standards body. Making 
such a keyboard layout easy to use, that's the challenge today. It's lastly 
been addressed (but that's not yet official).

>so many people think the official recommendation is to drop them, and that 
>is anyway complicated. But I often get question from non technical 
>people on how I type É, œ, or Œ, which shows that they are natural.

Many people dislike accents on capitals, and they really avoid them. But they 
grow fewer and fewer. Most people like the accents and are eager to place them. 
(Guess I'm a part of.) For everybody to see how to, and how important it is, 
here is one more fine website (in French):

http://accentuez.mon.nom.free.fr/


Related to the thread's subject, there is a beta feedback item I sent by the 
time, but it was buried in a mass of other beta feedback. May I recall it here, 
to look whether some part could be useful?

On this page: http://www.unicode.org/review/pri297/feedback.html, we find:

There is further a point I got unfortunately not sooner aware of. 
It’s about uppercasing of the German ß. Looking at the properties 
of U+00DF in ucdxml.nounihan.flat.xml, I found that uc="0053 0053"
only. In the meantime, German usage begins to shift towards 1E9E, 
as I already reported and suggested updating the NamesList and 
Code Charts annotation for this character. IMO there should be 
an applications Settings checkbox: “☑ ẞ as uppercase for ß”. 
I don’t know if it’s already implemented. However, since U+1E9E 
is now a part of most current fonts and is on keyboard thanks 
to the new German standard layouts, defining uppercase as uc="1E9E" 
might seem appropriate to avoid loosing the ß in text files. 
If the custom setting requires uppercasing U+00DF to double U+0053, 
the cf="0073 0073" value can be used to perform that.

To understand the issue, it is necessary to remember that 
the uppercase latin letter SZ has been created and encoded 
on behalf of the German Standards body DIN to ensure that 
personal data are correctly stored and rendered. As in German, 
the ß is a distinctive part of orthography and is needed in names 
(if a person’s name is Straßer or STRAẞER, writing STRASSER or 
STRASZER is false because these are other names, equally borne),
not having an uppercase ß made much trouble and lead to some 
confusion. Today, fortunately this time is past, and 
the char props may be updated. All what is needed is already 
in the UCD except the new uppercase as a value of the uc property 
for U+00DF.

Therefore I suggest that Unicode takes advice from 
the German Standards body (DIN) whether to set 
this property to its new value. 

[/quote]

Best regards,

Marcel 

Re: Aw: Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

  
  
Bing is pathetic. It treats the letter as if it didn't exist

Google maps it to the lowercase, neither allows you to find sites
that use just that character.

A./
  

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Philippe Verdy]

2015-12-10 5:32 GMT+01:00 Martin J. Dürst :

> This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many other
> contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case
> letters in French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are
> written without accents. When working on internationalization, it's always
> good to keep eyes open and not just only follow the rules.
>

Please define "officially". If you consider the official French Academy,
capitals MUST carry their accents. And most official institutions strongly
support accents (inclucing the Imprimerie Nationale in its official
typographic recomandations: it is the official printer of official
publications for almost all national institutions, including all legal
texts).

Do you have any single example of capitals without accents? I know there
are other commendations by private or semi-private companies but only for
limited scopes of use: "La Poste" for addresses on envelops (where you
theoretically also must use any punctuation,including hyphens, commas,
abbreviating dots, but where you also have to use abreviations in many
cases for city names and street names). La Poste is not really an official
lingusitic institution, its needs there are only for printed address
labels. And La Poste is no longer a monopole in France for postal services,
other private postal services have their own recommandations and don't care
about the historic recommandations made by La Poste.

There are other recommandations used in various databases (e.g. the FANTOIR
database made by municipalities and the French casatre for fiscal
purposes), but the scope of use is not really for the French language
itself, but for simple searches in that database. Here again there's no
lowercase letters, and accents are frequently omitted. This is in fact a
legacy inherited after several decenials of use of computers on systems
that initially had no support of Unicode, and when many systems used
various incompatible charsets, frequently undocumented: in those databses,
basic ASCII still rules, but there are more modern formats adding other
fields with more exact distinctions of case and accents.

Even before computers, the French typewriters had capitals with accents.
Accents started disapearing in the 1970's with modern computers,
unfortuantely using softwares made in US and ignoring the French
requirements. Accents are back today, but still not on French keyboards for
PC, due to lack of support in default keyboard layouts (notably on
Windows): they are present on virtual keyboards for smartphones, on
keyboards for Mac, on layouts for Linux.

Only Microsoft is very late on restoring accents on a supported layouts for
Windows (it would then convince keyboard manufacturers to restore the
missing accents on the keycaps).

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Eric Muller]

On 12/10/2015 2:45 AM, Frédéric Grosshans wrote:

Le 10/12/2015 05:32, Martin J. Dürst a écrit :
A similar example is the use of accents on upper-case letters in 
French in France where 'officially', upper-case letters are written 
without accents.
Actually, the official body in charge of this (Académie Française) 


They actually mandate "Académie *f*rançaise".  And "Imprimerie 
*n*ationale" (for Philippe; even if imprimerienationale.fr has forgotten 
that).


has always recommended upper-case letters with accents , but the 
school teachers teach the other way, and accents on capital letters 
was technically challenging (in printing, writing machines and keyboard),


Thanks to gallica.fr and archive.org, it is easy to see what actually 
happened until the middle of the 20th century. What I have seen is that 
in both cold and hot metal, until the end of the 19th century, one only 
and always sees É È Ê Ë Ç Œ Æ; on small caps, one can sometime find À  
Ô Ù. That matches all the descriptions of the "casse parisienne" and 
"police" (how many "a", "b", "c", etc in a font) I have seen in 
typography manuals. Around the beginning of the 20th century, one start 
to see books without accented capitals (and unfortunately books with 
inconsistent use of the accented capitals).


Eric.

Re: Aw: Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

  
  
On 12/9/2015 11:57 PM, "Jörg Knappen"
  wrote:


  

  Since the captial sharp s is easily available to the
public, I see it popping up everywhere in
  German publications, mostly in an all caps environment. I
have a small collection of it (on paper).
   
  The use of the capital sharp s in German is not only a
historical artefact, it is recent and modern.

  


Thanks for the info. Any way you could scan / photograph them and
share them via a picture sharing site?

Also, here's a nice writeup in English:
http://typography.guru/journal/germanys-new-character/

A./

  

   
  --Jörg Knappen
   
  Martin Dürst wrote:
  

  However, the example is also
somewhat misleading. The book in the
picture is clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited
is new. I checked
with "Der Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I
found had the
officially correct spelling. On the other hand, I
remember that when the
upper-case sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode,
source material
showed that it was somewhat popular quite some time ago
(possibly close
in age with the old Duden picture). So we would have to
go back and
check the book in the picture to see what it says about
ß to be able to
claim that Duden was (at some point in time)
inconsistent with itself.

Regards, Martin.
 

  

  


  

AW: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Dreiheller, Albrecht]

Just have a look at
U+1E9E  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S
in the block Latin Extended Additional
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1E00.pdf

Kind regards

Von: Unicode [mailto:unicode-boun...@unicode.org] Im Auftrag von Hans Meiser
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 9. Dezember 2015 13:26
An: unicode@unicode.org
Betreff: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"


Currently there is a vast problem trying to determine the lower case equivalent 
of a capitalized German word like "MASSE".


This is due to the fact that an orthographic rule exists to convert lower case 
letter "ß" to upper case letters "SS". So after converting a word from lower 
case to upper case one cannot unequivocally determine the original lower case 
word because the conversion is only surjective.


This issue exists because the letter "ß" originally was but a ligature of the 
small letter "sz" (using a legacy German font) which over time became a 
ligature of "ss".


After the German spelling reform in 1996, "ß" then became a letter of its own, 
and words containing the letter "ß" are no longer equivalent to words 
containing an "ss" combination instead of the "ß". So, for instance, "Maße" and 
"Masse" are not equal. In fact, "Maße" translates to "measurements" while 
"Masse" translates to "weight".


This is a particular problem in electronic data processing - like, for 
instance, SQL data queries. Given above rule, "Maße" will become "MASSE", just 
like "Masse" becomes "MASSE" when converting a word to uppercase. But there is 
no way back to distinguish one from the other.


I read that the UNICODE group is already striving for a solution to this 
problem and that they are searching for a capital letter equivalent of "ß".


My proposal is to introduce a capital letter equivalent of "ß" that's 
resembling two capital "S" letters: "SS".


So the capital letter equivalent of "ß" would look like "SS" but was in fact a 
separate code point. Converting words from lower case to upper case and back 
will then become bijective, auto correction will become easier and the (false) 
ANSI SQL stopgap of declaring "ß" and "ss" to be equal can be dropped.

Your feedback is appreciated.

Axel Dahmen - Germany

Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Hans Meiser]

Currently there is a vast problem trying to determine the lower case equivalent 
of a capitalized German word like "MASSE".


This is due to the fact that an orthographic rule exists to convert lower case 
letter "ß" to upper case letters "SS". So after converting a word from lower 
case to upper case one cannot unequivocally determine the original lower case 
word because the conversion is only surjective.


This issue exists because the letter "ß" originally was but a ligature of the 
small letter "sz" (using a legacy German font) which over time became a 
ligature of "ss".


After the German spelling reform in 1996, "ß" then became a letter of its own, 
and words containing the letter "ß" are no longer equivalent to words 
containing an "ss" combination instead of the "ß". So, for instance, "Maße" and 
"Masse" are not equal. In fact, "Maße" translates to "measurements" while 
"Masse" translates to "weight".


This is a particular problem in electronic data processing - like, for 
instance, SQL data queries. Given above rule, "Maße" will become "MASSE", just 
like "Masse" becomes "MASSE" when converting a word to uppercase. But there is 
no way back to distinguish one from the other.


I read that the UNICODE group is already striving for a solution to this 
problem and that they are searching for a capital letter equivalent of "ß".


My proposal is to introduce a capital letter equivalent of "ß" that's 
resembling two capital "S" letters: "SS".


So the capital letter equivalent of "ß" would look like "SS" but was in fact a 
separate code point. Converting words from lower case to upper case and back 
will then become bijective, auto correction will become easier and the (false) 
ANSI SQL stopgap of declaring "ß" and "ss" to be equal can be dropped.

Your feedback is appreciated.

Axel Dahmen - Germany

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Gerrit Ansmann]

My proposal is to introduce a capital letter equivalent of "ß" that's resembling two capital 
"S" letters: "SS".


Actually, the capital ß is already included in Unicode (ẞ) because it was and 
is used as a separate letter (not looking like SS), though only rarely. It is 
now realised as a proper distinguishable letter in many fonts, which is 
arguably the best solution. I have a keyboard with this letter. Moreover, the 
Germany authority on spelling (Rat für Rechtschreibung) stated that it will 
acknowledge an individual letter if it gets established in use.


Further reading:

• http://www.versaleszett.de/
• http://german.stackexchange.com/a/8960/2594
• http://j.mp/versaleszett
• http://www.typografie.info/3/page/wiki.html/_/fachbegriffe/grosses-eszett



After the German spelling reform in 1996, "ß" then became a letter of its own, and words containing the letter "ß" are no longer equivalent to words containing 
an "ss" combination instead of the "ß". So, for instance, "Maße" and "Masse" are not equal. In fact, "Maße" translates to 
"measurements" while "Masse" translates to "weight".


Actually, you had the very same problem with “Masse” and “Maße” before the 
spelling reform.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

  
  
On 12/9/2015 9:52 AM, Gerrit Ansmann
  wrote:


  After
the German spelling reform in 1996, "ß" then became a letter of
its own, and words containing the letter "ß" are no longer
equivalent to words containing an "ss" combination instead of
the "ß". So, for instance, "Maße" and "Masse" are not equal. In
fact, "Maße" translates to "measurements" while "Masse"
translates to "weight".

  
  
  Actually, you had the very same problem with “Masse” and “Maße”
  before the spelling reform.
  


The true difference after the spelling reform
  is that the pronunciation of the two is now systematically
  different, with the former having a short vowel and the latter a
  long vowel. Before the reform, the choice of spelling depended on
  other factors, but now a fairly systematic correspondence exists.
  
  Because of that correspondence, the use of SS as a capital form
  might begin to "sound wrong", so to speak, to people who grew up
  with the new spelling. Will have to see whether that suspected
  effect translates into an actual tendency to avoid the "SS" style
  uppercase. Whether this happens by a decision to avoid the use of
  ALL CAPS, or by using the capital sharp s or by simply not
  uppercasing the sharp-s even in an ALL CAPS context. The first
  would be hard to observe, but examples of the other two strategies
  were reasonably common and many were documented in the run-up to
  the encoding of the capital sharp s.
  
  A./
  
  

  

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2015 19:55:24 +
Hans Meiser  wrote:

> I see.
> 
> Yet, the u+1E9E doesn't quite look like two capital "S". So any
> program implementing a conversion conforming to Unicode will
> currently display/print in a wrong result: "MAßE" instead of the
> correctly converted result "MASSE".

While the default simple uppercasing of "maße" will yield "MAßE", the
default full uppercasing will yield "MASSE".

I am not aware of a useful definition of 'conforming to Unicode' that
applies to either transformation.

> Both would be correctly encoded
> as u+004D u+0041 u+1E9E u+0045. Yet, AFAIK, the current glyph would
> currently be considered an error.
> 
> Proposal: Shouldn't the glyph be amended to match the natural
> language?

No, the glyph corresponds to *a* natural form of German, as opposed to
Standard German - which some would argue was not a natural language!
Now, it may be argued that U+00DF has the same glyph as U+1E9E when
next to a capital letter, but that is a font decision, not a Unicode
decision.

One could therefore define an uppercasing transformation that was a
conformant Unicode process, and agreed with default uppercasing on NFD
strings except for U+00DF, but differed by mapping U+00DF to U+1E9E.
One might not notice any error in the printed output of this process,
any more than one would notice U+006F LATIN SMALL LETTER O being
transformed to U+041E CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER O.

Richard.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Gerrit Ansmann]

On Wed, 09 Dec 2015 20:55:24 +0100, Hans Meiser  wrote:


Yet, AFAIK, the current glyph would currently be considered an error.


See it like this: The point of spelling rules is to easy reading. However, the 
use of SS for capital ß is rather obstrusive, as it is not exactly frequent in 
everyday texts and if it is used, even professional designers and typesetters 
do it more often wrong than correct and produce something like FUßBALL. On the 
other hand, a well-designed capital ß is not even noticed by many readers.

Finally, as I already said, the institution that decides about right and wrong 
in German orthography implicitly encourages you to use the capital ß if you 
prefer it.


Proposal: Shouldn't the glyph be amended to match the natural language?


Nothing of this is really natural. If you go by what most people do, you would 
have to write FUßBALL. Also, I hypothesise that languages which passed a 
certain level of alphabetisation do not exhibit natural spelling changes beyond 
the single-word level anymore, as spelling dogmatists get too dominant – just 
look at the English orthography. After this point, you can only have 
centralised changes like the spelling reforms.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Philippe Verdy]

2015-12-09 22:45 GMT+01:00 Richard Wordingham <
richard.wording...@ntlworld.com>:

> On Wed, 9 Dec 2015 19:55:24 +
> Hans Meiser  wrote:
>
> > I see.
> >
> > Yet, the u+1E9E doesn't quite look like two capital "S". So any
> > program implementing a conversion conforming to Unicode will
> > currently display/print in a wrong result: "MAßE" instead of the
> > correctly converted result "MASSE".
>
> While the default simple uppercasing of "maße" will yield "MAßE", the
> default full uppercasing will yield "MASSE".
>

Full uppercasing rules are normally locale-sensitive, and thus there should
exist a specific rule for German not yielding this result (see for example
the rules for Turkish dotless i vs dotted i).

I don't think these locale-sensitive rules are irrevocably stable as more
locales can be added at any time for some languages needing specific pairs.
The stabilized properties are for locale-neutral mappings only, in generic
contexts where the language is not known (including for standard
normalizations, or for the locale-neutral "root" collations and the
associated DUCET).

Even for the same language, these rules cannot be hardcoded in a stable
way, orthographies are evoluting over time, unless you use a locale
identifying the orthographic rule precisely (and the associated rulesets
are checked and corrected to reach a stable consensus: if there's an
evolution or variants, use another locale identifier) and that specific
orthography is entirely known (this is difficult for historic orthographies
or when there's no recognized language academy or national institution
fixing the rule to use for some country or region, but even these
institutions are working in their current working time and limiting their
scope to some applications, they will not reforme the history).

> I am not aware of a useful definition of 'conforming to Unicode' that
applies to either transformation.

I am not aware of a useful definition of 'conforming to Unicode' that
> applies to either transformation.


So if you look for an example look at how this is made for Turkish.
Basically this is just a matter of tailoring for specific locales.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Michael Everson]

On 9 Dec 2015, at 20:57, Gerrit Ansmann  wrote:

>> Proposal: Shouldn't the glyph be amended to match the natural language?
> 
> Nothing of this is really natural. If you go by what most people do, you 
> would have to write FUßBALL.

In my new edition of the first German translation of “Alice’s Adventures in 
Wonderland”, the editor and I made sure that the cakes said “Iẞ MICH!” and not 
“Iß MICH!”. :-) 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Michael Everson]

On 9 Dec 2015, at 22:57, Asmus Freytag (t)  wrote:
> 
>> In my new edition of the first German translation of “Alice’s Adventures in 
>> Wonderland”, the editor and I made sure that the cakes said “Iẞ MICH!” and 
>> not “Iß MICH!”. :-) 
> 
> And the correct spelling (modern) would have been "Iss mich" (or capitalized 
> version as in your case).

Well, we were updating from the 1869 Fraktur orthography to one suitable for 
the modern era. We did not use the Schlechtschreibung, in terms of our 
dissatisfaction with it, and in consideration of the timelessness of the 
Victorian text. 

Our choice of “Iẞ MICH!” as opposed to “Iß MICH!” or “ISS MICH!” was based on 
good orthographic practice often found in Germany, regardless of whether it is 
official or not. Please note that “official” and “correct” are not the same 
things. 

It is OBVIOUS that if Maße and Masse are distinguished in lower-case then it is 
advantageous to users and their data if they upper-case to MAẞE and MASSE.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 12/09/2015 06:49 PM, Hans Meiser wrote:

Yes, they do it wrong because (1) they don't know better and (2) they let their 
software convert lower case text into upper case (a feature nearly every 
typographic software provides).

Yet, if we let the majority of illiterate people decide what's right and what's 
wrong we could as easily decide to have 2 + 2 = 5.

Here's an official text of the correct today's rules on how to write a capital 
"ß" (it's in German):

http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/doppel-s-und-scharfes-s


I remember when we went through all this the first time around, encoding 
ẞ in the first place.  People were saying "But the Duden says no!!!"  
And someone then pointed out, "Please close your Duden and cast your 
gaze upon ITS FRONT COVER, where you will find written in inch-high 
capitals plain as day, "DER GROẞE DUDEN" 
(http://www.typografie.info/temp/GrosseDuden.jpg)  So in terms of 
prescription vs description, the Duden pretty much torpedoes itself.


~mark

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

  
  
On 12/9/2015 3:49 PM, Hans Meiser
  wrote:


  Yes, they do it wrong because (1) they don't know better and (2) they let their software convert lower case text into upper case (a feature nearly every typographic software provides).

Yet, if we let the majority of illiterate people decide what's right and what's wrong we could as easily decide to have 2 + 2 = 5.

Here's an official text of the correct today's rules on how to write a capital "ß" (it's in German):

http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/doppel-s-und-scharfes-s





   In Dokumenten kann bei Namen aus Gründen der Eindeutigkeit
auch bei Großbuchstaben das ß verwendet werden.
  Für den im internationalen Standard-Zeichensatz „Unicode"
(ISO/IEC 10646) verzeichneten Großbuchstaben für das ß gibt es
derzeit noch keine allgemein verwendete Schriftform. Er ist
nicht Gegenstand der amtlichen Rechtschreibregelung.
  
HEINZ GROßE
  

The last line (bullet), placed somewhat ambiguously, is intended
  as example to the first paragraph cited here and shows the small
ß being used for ALL-CAPS names, because for names one can
  never predict the original spelling (for words, except in the
  small number of minimal pairs) it's generally possible for the
  human reader. 

The translation of the second paragraph is:


  For
  the international
  standard character set "Unicode" (ISO / IEC 10646)
  registered capitals
  for the SS, there are currently no
  commonly used in
writing. It is not part of the
  official spelling rules.
 
--- Google Translate
or
  

     For
  capital letter for the sharp s listed in the
  international standard
character set "Unicode"
  (ISO / IEC 10646)
  
   there is currently
no commonly used written form. It is not subject to the
  official spelling rules.
                                                               
                                                      -- with my
edits

So the claim that this contains the "correct today's rule" on
the spelling of a capital "ß" is worded misleadingly. The fact
is that while there are rules for what to do with a "ß" in the
context of ALL-CAPS, there are, in fact no rules for dealing
with "a capital 'ß'". 

Ironically, Google decides to capitalize the example. Since that
"translator" is based on pattern matching, supposedly, one
wonders what constituted the input that drove that particular
outcome.

A./
  
  

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Asmus Freytag (t)]

  
  
On 12/9/2015 1:11 PM, Michael Everson
  wrote:


  On 9 Dec 2015, at 20:57, Gerrit Ansmann  wrote:


  

  Proposal: Shouldn't the glyph be amended to match the natural language?



Nothing of this is really natural. If you go by what most people do, you would have to write FUßBALL.

  
  
In my new edition of the first German translation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, the editor and I made sure that the cakes said “Iẞ MICH!” and not “Iß MICH!”. :-) 


And the correct spelling (modern) would have been "Iss mich" (or
capitalized version as in your case).

A./

  

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/






  

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Hans Meiser]

Yes, they do it wrong because (1) they don't know better and (2) they let their 
software convert lower case text into upper case (a feature nearly every 
typographic software provides).

Yet, if we let the majority of illiterate people decide what's right and what's 
wrong we could as easily decide to have 2 + 2 = 5.

Here's an official text of the correct today's rules on how to write a capital 
"ß" (it's in German):

http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/doppel-s-und-scharfes-s

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Martin J. Dürst]

On 2015/12/10 09:30, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:


I remember when we went through all this the first time around, encoding
ẞ in the first place.  People were saying "But the Duden says no!!!" And
someone then pointed out, "Please close your Duden and cast your gaze
upon ITS FRONT COVER, where you will find written in inch-high capitals
plain as day, "DER GROẞE DUDEN"
(http://www.typografie.info/temp/GrosseDuden.jpg)  So in terms of
prescription vs description, the Duden pretty much torpedoes itself.


This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many 
other contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on 
upper-case letters in French in France where 'officially', upper-case 
letters are written without accents. When working on 
internationalization, it's always good to keep eyes open and not just 
only follow the rules.


However, the example is also somewhat misleading. The book in the 
picture is clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited is new. I checked 
with "Der Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I found had the 
officially correct spelling. On the other hand, I remember that when the 
upper-case sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode, source material 
showed that it was somewhat popular quite some time ago (possibly close 
in age with the old Duden picture). So we would have to go back and 
check the book in the picture to see what it says about ß to be able to 
claim that Duden was (at some point in time) inconsistent with itself.


Regards,   Martin.

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Marc Blanchet]

On 9 Dec 2015, at 23:32, Martin J. Dürst wrote:


On 2015/12/10 09:30, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

I remember when we went through all this the first time around, 
encoding
ẞ in the first place.  People were saying "But the Duden says 
no!!!" And

someone then pointed out, "Please close your Duden and cast your gaze
upon ITS FRONT COVER, where you will find written in inch-high 
capitals

plain as day, "DER GROẞE DUDEN"
(http://www.typografie.info/temp/GrosseDuden.jpg)  So in terms of
prescription vs description, the Duden pretty much torpedoes itself.


This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many 
other contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on 
upper-case letters in French in France where 'officially', upper-case 
letters are written without accents.


while in Québec, upper-case letters are written _with_ accents. l10n…

Marc.

When working on internationalization, it's always good to keep eyes 
open and not just only follow the rules.


However, the example is also somewhat misleading. The book in the 
picture is clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited is new. I 
checked with "Der Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I found 
had the officially correct spelling. On the other hand, I remember 
that when the upper-case sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode, 
source material showed that it was somewhat popular quite some time 
ago (possibly close in age with the old Duden picture). So we would 
have to go back and check the book in the picture to see what it says 
about ß to be able to claim that Duden was (at some point in time) 
inconsistent with itself.


Regards,   Martin.

Re: AW: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 06:16:35PM +0100, Frédéric Grosshans wrote:
> * use your own casing rule and add a ZWNJ (zero width non joiner character)
> such that ss↔SS and ß↔S+ZWNJ + S.

Wouldn’t ZWJ be a more logical choice given that he wants to “join” both
S’s into a single character.

Regards,
Khaled

Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Hans Meiser]

I see.

Yet, the u+1E9E doesn't quite look like two capital "S". So any program 
implementing a conversion conforming to Unicode will currently display/print in 
a wrong result: "MAßE" instead of the correctly converted result "MASSE". Both 
would be correctly encoded as u+004D u+0041 u+1E9E u+0045. Yet, AFAIK, the 
current glyph would currently be considered an error.

Proposal: Shouldn't the glyph be amended to match the natural language?

Cheers,
Axel



From: Dreiheller, Albrecht <albrecht.dreihel...@siemens.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 9, 2015 4:59 PM
To: Hans Meiser; unicode@unicode.org
Subject: AW: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"


Just have a look at

U+1E9E  LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S

in the block Latin Extended Additional

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1E00.pdf

Latin Extended Additional
Latin Extended Additional Range: 1E00 1EFF This file contains an excerpt from 
the character code tables and list of character names for The Unicode Standard, 
Version 8.0
Read more...<http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1E00.pdf>




Kind regards



Von: Unicode [mailto:unicode-boun...@unicode.org] Im Auftrag von Hans Meiser
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 9. Dezember 2015 13:26
An: unicode@unicode.org
Betreff: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"



Currently there is a vast problem trying to determine the lower case equivalent 
of a capitalized German word like "MASSE".



This is due to the fact that an orthographic rule exists to convert lower case 
letter "ß" to upper case letters "SS". So after converting a word from lower 
case to upper case one cannot unequivocally determine the original lower case 
word because the conversion is only surjective.



This issue exists because the letter "ß" originally was but a ligature of the 
small letter "sz" (using a legacy German font) which over time became a 
ligature of "ss".



After the German spelling reform in 1996, "ß" then became a letter of its own, 
and words containing the letter "ß" are no longer equivalent to words 
containing an "ss" combination instead of the "ß". So, for instance, "Maße" and 
"Masse" are not equal. In fact, "Maße" translates to "measurements" while 
"Masse" translates to "weight".



This is a particular problem in electronic data processing - like, for 
instance, SQL data queries. Given above rule, "Maße" will become "MASSE", just 
like "Masse" becomes "MASSE" when converting a word to uppercase. But there is 
no way back to distinguish one from the other.



I read that the UNICODE group is already striving for a solution to this 
problem and that they are searching for a capital letter equivalent of "ß".



My proposal is to introduce a capital letter equivalent of "ß" that's 
resembling two capital "S" letters: "SS".



So the capital letter equivalent of "ß" would look like "SS" but was in fact a 
separate code point. Converting words from lower case to upper case and back 
will then become bijective, auto correction will become easier and the (false) 
ANSI SQL stopgap of declaring "ß" and "ss" to be equal can be dropped.

Your feedback is appreciated.

Axel Dahmen - Germany

Re: AW: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Frédéric Grosshans]

For more information on the capital sharp s (ẞ) (converting Maße to 
MAẞE), you can also look at Wikipedia 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E (more details in the 
german version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E ) and 
Andreas Stötzner 2004 proposal to Unicode 
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2888.pdf


Your proposal to have a character which look exactly like SS is 
problematic on many grounds, and could only have been introduced in 
Unicode as legacy character if it existed in character sets before the 
1990s. Introducing it know would cause much more problem than it solves 
(e.g. allowing spoofing, making the encoding ambiguous, violating 
stability of the casing rules, etc.). If you want to have reversible 
casing distinguishing ss↔SS and ß↔SS   using ẞ, you can (in your 
software) bend the Unicode standard in one of the following ways:

* make font where ẞ looks like SS (I’m not sure it is Unicode conformant)
* use your own casing rule and add a ZWNJ (zero width non joiner 
character) such that ss↔SS and ß↔S+ZWNJ + S. Both capital version should 
look the same. But doing so, you violate Unicode casing, and you may 
have problem when ZWNJ is also used in German typography to prevent 
wrong ligatures (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner)).


  Fred

Le 09/12/2015 16:59, Dreiheller, Albrecht a écrit :


Just have a look at

U+1E9ELATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S

in the block Latin Extended Additional

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1E00.pdf

Kind regards

*Von:*Unicode [mailto:unicode-boun...@unicode.org] *Im Auftrag von 
*Hans Meiser

*Gesendet:* Mittwoch, 9. Dezember 2015 13:26
*An:* unicode@unicode.org
*Betreff:* Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

Currently there is a vast problem trying to determine the lower case 
equivalent of a capitalized German word like "MASSE".


This is due to the fact that an orthographic rule exists to convert 
lower case letter "ß" to upper case letters "SS". So after converting 
a word from lower case to upper case one cannot unequivocally 
determine the original lower case word because the conversion is only 
surjective.


This issue exists because the letter "ß" originally was but a ligature 
of the small letter "sz" (using a legacy German font) which over time 
became a ligature of "ss".


After the German spelling reform in 1996, "ß" then became a letter of 
its own, and words containing the letter "ß" are no longer equivalent 
to words containing an "ss" combination instead of the "ß". So, for 
instance, "Maße" and "Masse" are not equal. In fact, "Maße" translates 
to "measurements" while "Masse" translates to "weight".


This is a particular problem in electronic data processing - like, for 
instance, SQL data queries. Given above rule, "Maße" will become 
"MASSE", just like "Masse" becomes "MASSE" when converting a word to 
uppercase. But there is no way back to distinguish one from the other.


I read that the UNICODE group is already striving for a solution to 
this problem and that they are searching for a capital letter 
equivalent of "ß".


My proposal is to introduce a capital letter equivalent of "ß" that's 
resembling two capital "S" letters: "SS".


So the capital letter equivalent of "ß" would look like "SS" but was 
in fact a separate code point. Converting words from lower case to 
upper case and back will then become bijective, auto correction will 
become easier and the (false) ANSI SQL stopgap of declaring "ß" and 
"ss" to be equal can be dropped.



Your feedback is appreciated.

Axel Dahmen - Germany