German sharp S uppercase mapping
Asmus Freytag
asmusf at ix.netcom.com
Sun Dec 1 23:50:14 CST 2024
On 11/30/2024 4:44 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> Doug Ewell via Unicode wrote in
> <PH0PR03MB66061D162A125F81B97F312ECA2B2 at PH0PR03MB6606.namprd03.prod.outl\
> ook.com>:
> |Thanks to Asmus for saying what I had planned to say, except that his \
> |was better-worded, more carefully put together, and more authoritative.
> |
> |Casing for text meant for human readers should follow current local \
> |conventions.
> |
> |Casing for text meant for machine processing (file systems, databases, \
> |etc.) must remain stable, even when local conventions change.
>
> Sorry that makes totally no sense to me.
Because you probably have never considered what havoc would be caused by
changing in mid-stream anything about the processing of identifiers and
similar strings that are not text, but unambiguous references to
domains, files or other resources.
(You can make some changes when you create a new domain and set rules
for it for the first time, but that's about it).
> I would, however, not bring in uppercase sharp S for quite some
> time. But at some time, or when really the SS would be banned "in
> all Germans" which are used as official languages, sooner that is,
> then the current Unicode data would be just wrong.
Good luck banning SS in "all Germans".
You probably did not consider the fact that German written in
Switzerland only uses ss and SS and therefore banning SS would be more
than confusing. It would needless compromise a well accepted local
orthography.
German written in Germany has undergone a transition, and as partially
as a result of / but mostly in parallel to that transition, we see a
secondary shift in capitalization away from a typewriter / telegraph
inspired fallback to a more natural way of writing where all letters
have a case pair and casing is reversible.
The same cannot be said for Swiss German. There's not been a similar
transition, which would have needed to start with lower case usage. As
long as the Swiss don't use ß, I can't see them banning "SS".
A./
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