Re: Uppercase ß is coming? (U+1E9E)

From: Frank Ellermann (nobody@xyzzy.claranet.de)
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 16:18:16 CST

  • Next message: Kent Karlsson: "RE: Uppercase ß is coming? (U+1E9E)"

    Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

    >>> Der Große Duden (Leipzig, 1957, 1960, 1964) -- Figs.9 and 10
    >>> in <http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N3227.pdf>

    I've no clue in which way the GDR Duden was related to the FRG
    Duden in this time. Apparently they tried the long-s s ligature
    approach in their artwork. The contact form on the Duden pages
    didn't send me the offered copy of my submitted question, maybe
    it doesn't work or wants Javascript or something.

    > There is at least one clear example, in the picture that says
    > "MASSEMA[ß]E...Massemaße". The character which I have here
    > represented by [ß] is clearly meant to be a capital ß; it's of
    > a different shape than the lowercase ß in the same font.

    I'd conclude that the Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig, after
    they created a letter for their "capital ß" purposes about 1956,
    used it for some years in various contexts presented again and
    again in this DIN proposal.

    B 3A: contemporary usage => 3B.1 specialized (small collection)
    C 3: common => rare
    C 8: No => Yes
    C 9: No => Yes
    C 10: No => Yes

    They certainly didn't bother to be subtle in any way.

    >>> Have you read the proposal ?
    >> Yes, it's irresponsible and harmful,
    > No argument there. There *shouldn't* be such a thing as
    > capital ß. But Unicode is descriptive and not prescriptive.

    Based on obvious misrepresentations in this strange proposal ?

    > Obviously, people are using this misbegotten character, so it
    > needs to have a code point.

    Not if I get the drift of questions B3 and C3, 8, 9, and 10 in
    the submitted form correctly. Of course it would help if they
    are answered correctly and competently by the submitter.

    > Adding a new character to Unicode does not generally cause any
    > problems for older implementations -- particularly when, as in
    > this case, the character does not really change any existing
    > case mappings.

    They want the ß as lower case of their fictitious "uppercase ß".

    Once they have that they could claim that it's kind of odd if
    toupper( tolower( "uppercase ß" )) = toupper( ß ) = SS, and that
    it was "always intended" (giving the Duden 1919 source) to have
    toupper( ß ) = "uppercase ß".

    > Huh? de-CH doesn't even use ß.

    Yes, no ß => no problem with "uppercase ß".

    Frank



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