Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by germanier on Monday July 03, 2017 @07:20PM
(#14692186)
The idea for a capital ß is pretty old and goes back to the 19th century. One edition of the DDR Duden had a capital ß on its cover. German ID cards only use capital letters and need to distinguish ß and ss. It has nothing to do with millenials.
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by kazinator on Monday July 03, 2017 @07:51PM
(#14692355)
> goes back to the 19th century
Yes, and so that indicates people are reviving a problem that their great grandparents didn't bother with.
> German ID cards only use capital letters and need to distinguish ß and ss
Are these newly introduced? If not, why hasn't it been a problem so far? If they are newly introduced, why do they only use capital letters?
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by germanier on Monday July 03, 2017 @08:02PM
(#14692425)
The 1988 passports had capital letters and used ß as well, not sure what was used before. International standards (namely ICAO Doc 9303, starting in 1980) strongly recommend capital letters but I don't know the reasoning.
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by Tomte on Monday July 03, 2017 @11:23PM
(#14693307)
The idea is old, yes. But except from the one singular example, noone ever used it. It has no place in the language.
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by germanier on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @04:34AM
(#14694430)
It is not one singular example. Speakers of German have used that letter occasionally for the last 120 years or so and there was a debate to introduce it the whole time.
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by Tomte on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @06:45AM
(#14694969)
Show an example of more than ten years ago, please.
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by germanier on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @10:14AM
(#14695986)
Well, one is the first picture in the featured article (it is from 1910). I collected some more here: http://imgur.com/a/NaFgA
And any German passport (at least those issued after 1988, don't know about what was used before).
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by 3131s on Monday July 03, 2017 @11:30PM
(#14693334)
That can be said about every feature of every language at some point in time.
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by Tomte on Monday July 03, 2017 @11:38PM
(#14693372)
Sure. Language changes and that is good.
It's not good when an unelected body decides on language changes, without that change already extant and in use by a significant part of the speakers.
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by germanier on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @04:42AM
(#14694467)
This body was (on the German side) put in place by the Kultusministerkonferenz. Their recommendation don't "change" the language (and never could do so). It just says what administration and schools have to use. Everybody else is free to do whatever they want (and many publishers have their own version of the rules).
The changes that were made before (such as the ones in 1996, 1901, or 1876) were made by similar bodies.
Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by tom_mellior on Monday July 03, 2017 @07:25PM
(#14692211)
This article: https://typography.guru/journal/capital-sharp-s-designs/ (linked from the featured article) shows some designs with corners and stuff. Some of them look less ugly than others. But in all examples except the Backstein one the letter still stands out like an ugly thing that doesn't go well with the rest of the font. More work is needed.
The strange thing is that it looks indistinguishable from the lower case one.
It's as though they have taken the lower ß and tweaked its font metrics to make an capital version, and not actually invented a proper upper case character.
For all we know, the examples shown could just be a of a lower ß taken from a different font.
They should have changed something substantial in the glyph, like added a corner, or loop or whatever; some feature that the lower case one doesn't have.
How about borrowing a Chinese radical: ⻏ ?
That's can't be, of course; this whole thing is part of some initiative to save Germany from cultural invasion.
GRÜ⻏ GおTT!