Re: s-j combination in Unicode?

>> It's hard to come by an actual minimal pair.
>
> MASSE - mass or measurements? See, not hard at all.
[and]
> With the new orthography, "ss" vs. "ß" affects the pronunciation of
> the preceding vowel. It's irritating to see "SS" because you have to
> override that rule when you know that the word in lowercase was
> pronounced differently.

Well, this pretty much summarizes why I think "SS"-for-"ß" looks
distracting. So since I very much agree with such sentiment, I should
probably not have given a mild defense of this practice in the first place.

But where are all those other examples? Now – aside from "come by"
meaning "come across" :-) (which is, in all fairness, not what I meant
earlier), let's now ask how frequent this is, really. I don't encounter
that much all-caps text in the first place (which to me looks stupid,
independently), and "MASSE" is variant #3 in this thread of the double
example that Otto Scholz just gave ("Körpermassen" (Switzerland), "IN
MASSEN"), obviously terribly likely to appear in an all-caps context.
Remind me real quick, I must have forgotten about all those popular,
bestselling all-caps physics books teaching about mass and measurements
– the comparative discussion of beer and female bodies was probably in
the appendix about SI units :-) which I must have skipped.

>> And it's not like capitalization is otherwise invertible – the
>> capitalization bits contain information as well, after all.)
> Besides the point a bit. Even thought it's true that mixed case
> carries information that's lost in all upper or all lowercase, the
> issue is a bit different, as not focused on one letter.

Text being all-caps is a property applied to the word level (for
emphasis) or to the paragraph level. The minimal unit it applies to is
(normally) the word. (@"normally": What to do with word-internal capital
letters, as eg in certain Gaelic names is another question.) You're
right to point this out, but "SS"-as-capital-ß really only occurs in an
all-caps writing context, which has the capitalization property applied
to entire words.

Stephan
Received on Sat Feb 16 2013 - 12:44:16 CST