Of course nobody is going to fault you for succumbing to such practicalities, and it's perfectly fine to use substitutions when necessary.

But there's something to be said for preserving a few aspects of the diversity of cultures, as each one acts as its own preserve of centuries of wisdom. Hey, it's the German language that gave you Uber (the name). Which should actually be Über, but I digress. (and it'll be Over soon enough, anyway).

We've come a long way with making unicode universally available, and there's really no reason to give up now when it's almost done. It's not a big issue for German, but cultures with non-latin script would rightfully be offended if forced to abandon it for ASCII, in the same way that the world would be poorer if all restaurants were replaced by McDonald's.

Agreed on that, but culture to me goes a lot further than exchanging messages on the net.

I'm thinking of France here, which has something called the 'Academie Francaise' (apologies for butchering the c-cedille in this context, the accent aigu 'e' in cedille and acedemie). The only effect this seems to have had is some token re-inforcement of French as a 'world language', but in practice it became a 'come up with French words for words where we already have a perfectly good one that everybody the world over understands but which isn't French'.

If that's culture then I'd much more concentrate on the content than on the form and remove these artificial barriers. Which of course will lead to more and bloodier wars ;)

Unicode is great, it made all languages equal. But I don't see the point of artificially making the problem worse by introducing new glyphs, that's the wrong message to send. We should aim for simplification within limits (not to go down to carricature) and if German got by so far without the 'capital sharp S' I see absolutely no reason to introduce it in the modern age. It's a step back, a small one, but still.

I find introducing "new" unicode glyphs for characters that have historically been in wide use is extremely useful, as people working with historical texts no longer need to use workarounds to express them. See [1] for an example of the kind of characters you find in historical texts. Having an official way of representing anything that's actually (or has been) in use makes sense. Whether that's the same as recommending it for widespread adoption is a different question. Several German-speaking countries have dropped the ß from their orthography, but still agree on what the ß character should look like and how to represent it in text.

Now, emoji, OTOH, just feels to me like unnecessarily polluting the character space. I'd much rather have a capital ß in the codespace than some smiling poo family.

[1] http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15327r-n4704-medieval-punct....

I have never understood the idea of protecting a language against foreign words. I think languages naturally strive to be as expressive as possible and will adopt words accordingly.

However, I think it is important to note that the ẞ is not a letter they just made up. Heck, even the picture in the article shows an old book cover, which uses this never standardized letter. To me this is just correcting a previous oversight and formally allowing (not forcing) people to use the 'capital sharp s', for example in print, where they want to typeset a title in capitals.

I can see a lot of trouble coming from this. Sort order for one. If a language this old didn't need a glyph up to 2017 it can be done without, especially if the use case is limited to all caps words. But I guess in that case you could convert its occurrence to SS first and then do the sort.

Actually I was a bit surprised when I learned that Unicode only added a codepoint for it in 2008 (and even rejected an earlier proposal). While the spelling rules have said for some time to replace it with "SS" the glyph was used quite often, including official documents such as passports.

For sorting there is standard (DIN 5007). Replacing ß with ss is correct (even in the lower case variant). The other letters are more fun: ä is replaced with a for sorting, except if you sort a list of names. In that case you need to replace it by ae. Probably not something international software is aware of. The Austrian sorting of names is different and other languages that have the same glyph (e.g. Swedish) also have other rules (e.g. by placing ä at the very end of the alphabet).

> Probably not something international software is aware of.

Collation rules that vary by locale exist for this reason, and all major programming languages and OS'es support this. Of course whether the software you use does this or not depends on the developers writing the software.

Thanks for the term, I wasn't aware of it. This looks to be a standard problem in DBMSs at least. While not all of the rules I mentioned seem to be shipped by default, it looks fairly straightforward to add them. I just remember our development team moaning quite a bit after I added the requirement to sort names differently.

Funny you mention Swedish. Let's all bond over the shared experience of "why tf is this using latin1_swedish_ci collation?"

Actually there was a time where many typefaces actually included a capital sharp s and the letter was in somewhat common use, cf. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fes_%C3%9F, especially the second section. Limited availability of a glyph and no way of representing the letter in any digital text encoding probably meant it fell out of use and was more or less forgotten.

> I'm thinking of France here, which has something called the 'Academie Francaise' (apologies for butchering the c-cedille in this context, the accent aigu 'e' in cedille and acedemie).

Actually, German has the Council of the German Language, which is what did this standardization effort of the new ẞ

In my language omitting diacritics can change the meaning a lot. "Ji ilgėjosi savo sūnų" vs. "Ji ilgėjosi savo šunų". Many lazy compatriots of mine would write "Ji ilgėjosi savo sunu“. It may be obvious from the contexts, but without it you could interpret it either as the first one ("She was missing her sons") or as the other one ("She was missing her dogs").

This lazy way of writing had some valid technical reasons in the past (like phones not supporting diacritics), but these have long been solved.

P.S: if you think gendered nouns are hard, try language where almost everything is gendered: nouns, verbs, adjectives. In English: "I saw a nice boy walking"/"I saw a nice girl walking". In Lithuanian: "Mačiau gražų vaikiną einantį"/"Mačiau gražią merginą einančią".

And then there is this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/51/91/e2/5191...

Sure, languages are about communication. As long as the other person understands what you are trying to get across, you're probably fine.

However, orthography does serve an important part in getting your point across. German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure. The Umlauts serve a similar purpose to make it easier to differentiate words.

For instant messaging this probably does not matter too much, but what about books, technical reports, etc.? What's to gain from not using "proper" orthography in them, which might give the reader more hints about the sentence structure and hence its meaning?

Schöne Grüße ;)

> German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure.

For Germans, maybe. And maybe for Germans it is a bit harder to read an English text where only proper names and the first word of a sentence is capitalized. But I routinely forget to capitalize even proper names (especially with companies, days of the week, names of months and such), and I've never felt that having upper case for the first letter of each noun made German any easier to parse, I'm mostly blind to 'case' and have to really remind myself that 'I' in English is with a capital letter.

In Dutch this is even stronger, we do not capitalize most of those except for proper names and the first letter of a sentence.

> and the first letter of a sentence.

Except for digraph IJ, which needs both I and J capitalised, e.g., IJsselmeer.

> I'm mostly blind to 'case' […]

Most people aren't though. Leaving out capital letters where they should be jars the reader's flow. Let each language have its idiosyncrasies; it makes life more interesting.

I've seen Greek, Russian and even Arabic written with Latin letters on the internet for convenience. So ss for ß or the other way round is only a minor inconvenience, if even that. By the way, typing ij as two letters is the official way to do it; only in handwriting and occasional signage will you see it written as one glyph. I have no idea why the ij digraph/ligature ended up in Unicode, really.

It's probably for round-tripping with old single byte character sets. In this case, with Dutch VT220 character encodings.