Re: Uppercase ß is coming? (U+1E9E)

From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 15:41:22 CST

  • Next message: Marnen Laibow-Koser: "Re: Uppercase ß is coming? (U+1E9E)"

    Michael Everson wrote:

    >> But I still don't think it is anything other than a glyph variant of SS.

    > It is a glyph variant of SS only in the same way that ß is a glyph
    > variant of ss.

    I don't think that follows at all, Michael, because in the German orthography -- what I'm
    now tempted to call a pseudo-bicameral alphabet -- ß and ss are clearly distinct in the
    lowercase state, but they are not distinct in the uppercase state. I happen to think they
    should be distinct in the uppercase state -- as, clearly, the inventors of the uppercase
    eszett thought also -- but they're not.

    So the options are to encode the uppercase eszett as a quasi-uppercase letter explicitly
    excluded from the standard German orthography, or to devise a means to enable this as a
    display variant of the standard German orthography.

    > I prefer character encoding for this; I understand you think otherwise.

    It is more the case that I have not seen a good argument as to why character encoding is
    better, and I can see numerous implementation problems with such an encoding that can be
    bypassed by dealing with it as a display issue. I'm not dead set against the encoding, I
    just don't see what the overriding benefit is.

    John Huson

    -- 
    Tiro Typeworks        www.tiro.com
    Gulf Islands, BC      tiro@tiro.com
    We say our understanding measures how things are,
    and likewise our perception, since that is how we
    find our way around, but in fact these do not measure.
    They are measured.   -- Aristotle, Metaphysics
    


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