Re: Why blackletter letters?

Am 11.09.2013 14:56, schrieb Gerrit Ansmann:
>> Your page draws my attention to "ſch". To typeset this as "ſ ch" in
>> circumstances where spacing-out (positive tracking; German:
>> "gesperrt") is used for emphasis has always irritated me, but I guess
>> that's just how it's mostly been done ... do you have more
>> information on this? How often was the entire "ſch" kept together in
>> such circumstances?
>
> I do not know of a single historical example where ſch was kept as one
> and I consider it rather unlikely that one exists. And yes, this
> aspect of the rules is indeed very strange and illogical, but so were
> a lot of other rules at that time.

Maybe this wasn’t as strange at that time as it seems today. There was
no standard of German pronunciation before 1898, when Theodor Siebs
published his /Deutsche Bühnenaussprache/. And in broader dialects of
North Germany ⟨sch⟩ is still pronounced as a sequence of two phonemes
/sk/ or /sx/ (cf. spellings like /Skipper/ for /Schiffer/).

Charlie
Received on Wed Sep 11 2013 - 08:29:53 CDT