German sharp S uppercase mapping

[Daniel Buncic]

Dear Marius, dear Ivan, dear Peter, dear all,

Thanks to Marius for the compromise idea that the ß → SS mapping could 
remain in the standard table but ß → ẞ be handled as special casing for 
German.  However, I wonder what language the standard table would be 
there for then, given that ß is used in no other language but German.

(Or if the ß → SS rule was then only applied to those few older 
non-German texts that did use ß, it would be wrong in most cases, as in 
this Polish Bible from 1846: 
https://books.google.de/books?id=W4xbAAAAMAAJ&hl=de.  Google Books, 
certainly on the basis of some ß → ss rule, gives one of the words in 
the title as “Wssystko”, but that does not make sense; the word spelled 
“Wßystko” on the title page has to be transcribed as “Wszystko” 
(‘Whole’), in the same way as e.g. the first word in the heading of 
Genesis is spelled “PIERWSZE” (‘First’), not, of course, “PIERWSSE”.)

As to the interpretation of spelling rules, one has to know that “auch” 
(‘also’) in normative dictionaries always separates a secondary form 
from a preferred one.  Equal options are separated by “oder” (‘or’) or 
merely by a comma or a slash.  In this light, see the change from the 
previous version of the rule (§25 E3) to the current one:

“Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben schreibt man SS. Daneben ist auch die 
Verwendung des Großbuchstabens ẞ möglich. Beispiel: Straße – STRASSE – 
STRAẞE.”
(‘When writing in capital letters, one writes SS. In addition to this, 
the use of the capital letter ẞ is also possible: Straße – STRASSE – 
STRAẞE.’ – 
https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/rfdr_Regeln_2016_redigiert_2018.pdf, 
p. 29)
	↓
“Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben ist neben der Verwendung des
Großbuchstabens ẞ auch die Schreibung SS möglich: Straße – STRAẞE –
STRASSE.”
(‘When writing in capital letters, in addition to using the capital 
letter ẞ, it is also possible to write SS: Straße – STRAẞE – STRASSE.’ – 
https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/RfdR_Amtliches-Regelwerk_2024.pdf, 
p. 48)

Before, capital ẞ was classified as ‘also possible’, now SS is ‘also 
possible’, and the order of the examples was also changed from “STRASSE 
– STRAẞE” to “STRAẞE – STRASSE”.  If they had meant the alternatives to 
be equal, they would have written something like “Bei Schreibung mit 
Großbuchstaben kann man ẞ oder SS schreiben” (‘When writing in capital 
letters, one can write ẞ or SS’).  It is correct that the order by 
itself does not indicate a preference, but the wording does.

Peter, can you give me an example of an implementation that would crash 
if there was a new version of CaseFolding.txt or SpecialCasing.txt? 
Wouldn’t a programmer either copy the data of the file into their 
application so that it still works if the server unicode.org is down? 
And then changing the original would have no effect until the programmer 
decides to implement the change in their application, but then it would 
be their responsibility to take care of the effects of that change 
within their application.  Or in the worst case, the application would 
download its data directly from, say, 
https://www.unicode.org/Public/16.0.0/ucd/CaseFolding.txt, but then a 
new version would just have to be stored under …/17.0.0/… and it would 
not affect the application.  How can a new version of a file like this 
directly “break existing implementations”?  Probably I am 
misunderstanding something here.

Best wishes,

Daniel

-- 
Prof. Dr. Daniel Bunčić
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Slavisches Institut der Universität zu Köln
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