On 12/9/2015 9:52 AM, Gerrit Ansmann
wrote:
After
the German spelling reform in 1996, "ß" then became a letter of
its own, and words containing the letter "ß" are no longer
equivalent to words containing an "ss" combination instead of
the "ß". So, for instance, "Maße" and "Masse" are not equal. In
fact, "Maße" translates to "measurements" while "Masse"
translates to "weight".
Actually, you had the very same problem with “Masse” and “Maße”
before the spelling reform.
The true difference after the spelling reform
is that the pronunciation of the two is now systematically
different, with the former having a short vowel and the latter a
long vowel. Before the reform, the choice of spelling depended on
other factors, but now a fairly systematic correspondence exists.
Because of that correspondence, the use of SS as a capital form
might begin to "sound wrong", so to speak, to people who grew up
with the new spelling. Will have to see whether that suspected
effect translates into an actual tendency to avoid the "SS" style
uppercase. Whether this happens by a decision to avoid the use of
ALL CAPS, or by using the capital sharp s or by simply not
uppercasing the sharp-s even in an ALL CAPS context. The first
would be hard to observe, but examples of the other two strategies
were reasonably common and many were documented in the run-up to
the encoding of the capital sharp s.
A./
Received on Wed Dec 09 2015 - 13:22:50 CST