LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S officially recognized

[Otto Stolz via Unicode]

Hello,

on 03.07.2017 19:01, Otto Stolz via Unicode wrote:
> Since German ist the only language using “ß” (if I am not mistaken), […]

Am 2017-07-03 um 20:15 Uhr hat Gerrit Ansmann geschrieben:
> Some old Sorbian (blackletter) orthographies also employed the ß. It was 
> also used at the beginning of words where it was capitalised to Sſ at 
> the beginning of sentences or similar.

I was referring to contemporary writing systems. Indeed, several
east European languages (including, e. g. Latvian) were written
in blackletter, with German sound-letter correspondence, before
they developped their own writing systems.

Thanks for pointing to this particular uppercasing rule.

I have not thought of Yiddish, though. This used to be written
with Hebrew letters (plus some particular ligatures). Usually,
it is transliterated into the Latin script according to the
YIVO rules of 1936. In Germany, there is an alternative tran-
scription in use, defined by Ronald Lötzsch in 1990. The latter
has the “ß” also in the beginning of words. However, there is
no upper-case equivalent, as Yiddish has no case distinction,
hence all Yiddish letters are transcribed to lower-case Latin,
even in the beginning of a sentence.

> I am not aware of all-caps being 
> used (which was very rare in blackletter in general).

The only word to be printed in blackletter all-caps was
– as far as I know – “der HERR”, or “der HErr”, meaning
“the Lord” (in texts from the bible). In general, blackletter
capitals are not designed for all-caps, so that would look
disgustingly. Thence the form “HErr“ which is a bit more
readable.

Best wishes,
   Otto