Fwd: Re: German sharp S uppercase mapping

[Asmus Freytag]

On 12/16/2024 1:19 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso via Unicode wrote:
> --- Forwarded from Steffen Nurpmeso<steffen at sdaoden.eu> ---
> Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2024 22:18:26 +0100
> Author: Steffen Nurpmeso<steffen at sdaoden.eu>
> From: Steffen Nurpmeso<steffen at sdaoden.eu>
> To: Daphne Preston-Kendal<dpk at nonceword.org>
> Subject: Re: German sharp S uppercase mapping
> Message-ID:<20241216211826.Dt3h2MaC at steffen%sdaoden.eu>
>
> Daphne Preston-Kendal via Unicode wrote in
>   <939AFA07-02CA-4980-B202-6374A3E99F62 at nonceword.org>:
>   |On 2 Dec 2024, at 11:19, Marius Spix via Unicode<unicode at corp.unicode.o\ |rg> wrote:
>   ...
>   |wrong in the first place.[.]
>
> The thing is the reforms of the last republican century went into
> the wrong direction.  For example around 1900 there was "Oele sind
> ölig", which today looks odd but isn't it a more aesthetic
> experience than having an uppercase Umlaut.  Necessarily the dots
> above etc scratch at some upper baseline, astronomic.  This is not
> a music sheet of Bach (or other opulent classical composer).
> There was Kenntniss "Knowledge" as-you-speak which was mutilated
> to Kenntnis but remained Kenntnisse in plural for only technical
> reasons.
> Thran became Tran, that is surely because the people started using
> solely the Tran of Switzerland, Ovomaltine it is, is it, and then
> you say "aaaah, beautiful, Tran!!", instead.  Same for Werthe,
> which became Werte,  ...

Sounds like a perfect argument based on conservatism for the sake of it. 
When typesetting required paper, extremely tight layouts were common to 
conserve resources. With very limited leading, there was little space to 
place diacritics on top of capitals. The solutions weren't universal, 
but for the umlaut it was not that rare to find a font that placed a 
small e *inside* the capital letter.

Nowadays, the designs tend to much larger interline spacing and there's 
no penalty for placing an accent or umlaut on top of a capital letter. 
So, the rationale for using a 'e' whether next to or as part of the 
capital letter shape have evaporated. Instead, since the times of the 
discussion in 1925 cited in an earlier message, the sentiment that a 1:1 
correspondence between lowercase and uppercase letter is not only normal 
but desirable has only increased.

All languages change over time and spelling tends to shed redundant or 
inoperative letters, if and when they are no longer useful. That firmly 
applies to the old-style th or tz in German, where the 'h' or 't' were 
removed, respectively. These serve no particular purpose, unlike the 
silent 'k' in English "knight", which distinguishes the word from 
"night", at least in writing.

> ... which is only understandable if you have no
> value left except money, it necessarily must be Werthe in all
> other thinkable occasions. And then really, necessarily there is
> not only eszett which is no(t) (longer) sz as the name es-zett
> implies (wrongly referred to in Unicode, likely with malicious
> anti-german intention), but a dedicated character, and it is
> absolutely necessary to provide uppercase font mappings that bring
> it all to the top regarding intransparent obviousness, and with
> LiberationMono font i know which of ßẞ is, actually, uppercase.
> Or make it ſs.  I am fine with that.  It is better than todays
> world where so-called academic intellectual elite magazines which
> run their text through automatic spell checkers produce more typos
> and "hanging in the nowhere" sentences that police allows.
> Other than that this is solely a polemic private opinion for sure.

The remainder of your post unfortunately descends into irrelevant and 
opinionated editorializing, so there's little constructive to add to in 
a reply.

A./
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