Re: Proposal for German capital letter "ß"

[Martin J. Dürst]

On 2015/12/10 09:30, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

> I remember when we went through all this the first time around, encoding
> ẞ in the first place.  People were saying "But the Duden says no!!!" And
> someone then pointed out, "Please close your Duden and cast your gaze
> upon ITS FRONT COVER, where you will find written in inch-high capitals
> plain as day, "DER GROẞE DUDEN"
> (http://www.typografie.info/temp/GrosseDuden.jpg)  So in terms of
> prescription vs description, the Duden pretty much torpedoes itself.

This is an interesting example of a phenomenon that turns up in many 
other contexts, too. A similar example is the use of accents on 
upper-case letters in French in France where 'officially', upper-case 
letters are written without accents. When working on 
internationalization, it's always good to keep eyes open and not just 
only follow the rules.

However, the example is also somewhat misleading. The book in the 
picture is clearly quite old. The Duden that was cited is new. I checked 
with "Der Grosse Duden" on Amazon, but all the books I found had the 
officially correct spelling. On the other hand, I remember that when the 
upper-case sharp s came up for discussion in Unicode, source material 
showed that it was somewhat popular quite some time ago (possibly close 
in age with the old Duden picture). So we would have to go back and 
check the book in the picture to see what it says about ß to be able to 
claim that Duden was (at some point in time) inconsistent with itself.

Regards,   Martin.