From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Mon May 07 2007 - 12:42:32 CDT
Adam Twardoch wrote:
> Today, "ß" is no more a ligature of "ſs" than "ä" is a ligature of "ae".
> The transition process from "ae" to "ä" has been completed about 200
> years ago, and the transition process between "ſs" to "ß" is happening
> now. Encoding the uppercase "ä" as "A ZWJ <sups> E" (or something like
> that) would make as little sense as encoding the uppercase "ß" as "S ZWJ
> S".
> I strongly believe that "SS" is an anachronic, still-in-use but
> slowly-to-vanish poor man’s solution to write the uppercase "ß".
I suspect, and indeed hope, that you are right. But this is why I consider the proposed
uppercase eszett a 'half-begotten' character. The proposal is explicit that the standard
orthographic casing for ß is SS, and the new character is proposed on the understanding
that it will not interfere with existing implementations of that standard casing.
I was mainly joking when I earlier suggested that maybe we should encode a new lowercase
character too, with a clean case mapping to the new uppercase eszett. But having a single
lowercase character with two different uppercase mappings, one currently standard and
enshrined in existing casing rules and implementations, one that might one day become
standard and require some kind of overriding implementation, seems to me a bit of a
standardisation and software development nightmare.
John Hudson
-- 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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