Somme additional information 1. The Umlaut
In German the supralinear e may be used as a variation of the diaeresis above a, o, and u. Though it is old fashioned, indeed, it is still understandable, and might be used for invitation cards and the like. I don’t know a modern font with it, but I got at least one book, in which the supralinear e is used. It was published in 1830. 2. The long s It has been abandoned from the Roman alphabet in Germany in the mid of the 19th century. 3. The Eszet In many fonts the Eszet is clearly recognizable as a ligated long- and round s. In – I think all – European languages the double s was written that way very frequently since the 13th century. It seems to have been invented in Italy. Later z has been borrowed from Greek to write the voiceless s in most European languages. So in Fraktur, for example, the long s was ligated with the (long) z, maybe to indicate the voicelessness or possibly for typographical reasons only. Usually there is no ß on Swiss typewriters, because in Swiss pronounciation there are many syllable-boundaries between the two s-parts of the common German ß. BTW “sharp s “ is a primary school name, which shall mean “voiceless”, but a voicelesses satellite-phoneme’s pronounciation definitely cannot be sharpened. Gerd
