I think you meant it the other way 'round? long/short, I mean.

Otherwise I totally agree, ß is important to distinguish phonetics.

It is important but you are marking the wrong thing, you could make it Māsse and Masse if you really cared.

I don't think speakers of the language that invented Worcester Sauce are in a position to give prescriptive logical advice to other languages.

Languages are the products of a sort of evolutionary processes. Rarely do the conventions appear to be the best possible solution at first sight. But it isn't uncommon for convincing arguments to appear later, showing that some seemingly arbitrary rules are almost beautifully constructed to make languages efficient. Not only do common words tend to be shorter than uncommon ones; I've also seen examples of word pairs that would be dangerous to confuse to be further apart in spelling and pronunciation than statistics would suggest (I believe sailing was the example I saw: single words can mean life or death, and are often spoken under difficult circumstances).

> I don't think speakers of the language that invented Worcester Sauce are in a position to give prescriptive logical advice to other languages.

Of course they are. They didn't invent it, and even if they did they could still be right on _this_ argument.

>Not only do common words tend to be shorter than uncommon ones; I've also seen examples of word pairs that would be dangerous to confuse to be further apart in spelling and pronunciation than statistics would suggest

And there's a whole bunch of counter-examples for that. One is the german "zwei" (the number 2) and "drei" (3). The german military commonly uses "zwo" for 2 because those two are so easily confused.

It's not like our languages are willfully poorly designed, but there's still a bunch of bad decisions in there, and we might be in a position to fix it, especially when it comes to things like spelling (which is mostly decreed from on high, since what schools teach matters most).

Or Maesse, which is closer to what it sounds like anyway.

Which would be equivalent to Mässe, though. And then you'd have another letter you may want to abolish.

You're right! It's a good job there are no words in English where one spelling encompasses many meanings, of which some could even be contradictory, which would have to be inferred from context. That would be so bad!

There's no reason for sarcasm, especially not with such misplaced sarcasm. Nobody is arguing that the ß is required for the future of humanity, or that German is somehow different, or even superior, to English, and requires this letter to do its magic.

But for good or bad, it is part of the language. People used to it consider replacing it with 'ss' as ugly. Because of custom, and also because a double consonant almost always indicates a short vowel, whereas a single 's' indicates a soft s. Only ß actually represents the intended pronunciation.

f course w'd gt by witout it. Bt Englis wld similry srvive vs fewr lttrs, so y nt ablsh 1/2 t lphbt?

I don't know whether you're a native English speaker or not, but you certainly reason like one. I started learning English when I was 6 years old and have had very few problems with it. My wife started learning it when she was 39. She's having a horrible time trying to wrap her head around all the inconsistencies, the incredible amount of stuff that has to be inferred from context and the utter lack of pronunciation rules.

See "read" with a different pronunciation depending on tense (/riːd/ vs. /red/).

So, you’re saying we should actually make German a worse language just for your own convenience? No thanks.

as somebody else already said in this thread: this argument is irrelevant, it works just fine w/o the ß in Switzerland.

By that argument, PHP works just fine. I still prefer haskell, or even Java.

And I’ll prefer a natural language that tries to be as unambigous as possible, and with as little exceptions as possible, while being as expressive as possible.