From: Marnen Laibow-Koser (marnen@marnen.org)
Date: Fri May 04 2007 - 09:45:09 CST
On May 4, 2007, at 9:20 AM, Frank Ellermann wrote:
> Andrew West wrote:
>
>> Well you obviously haven't taken a look at the front cover of Der
>> Große Duden (Leipzig, 1957, 1960, 1964) -- Figs.9 and 10 in
>> <http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N3227.pdf>
>
> I did, and the number of "capital ß" presented in this memo is zero.
> If I'd write GROSZES@ESZETT.INVALID on a tombstone the "@" is still
> an "@" and not a "capital @".
Wrong. There is at least one clear example, in the picture that says
"MASSEMA[ß]E...Massemaße". The character which I have here
represented by [ß] is clearly meant to be a capital ß; it's of a
different shape than the lowercase ß in the same font.
>
>> Have you read the proposal ?
>
> Yes, it's irresponsible and harmful,
No argument there. There *shouldn't* be such a thing as capital ß.
But Unicode is descriptive and not prescriptive. Obviously, people
are using this misbegotten character, so it needs to have a code point.
> misrepresenting an ordinary ß
> in various contexts of capital letters as a fictitious "capital ß".
Certainly some of the examples in this proposal do that.
>
> The interesting glyph on these pages is the old long-s z ligature,
> not the (roughly) long-s Z ligature used as "ß". Everybody is free
> to use a slighly larger version of lower case letters or a slightly
> smaller version of upper case letters for some nice visual effects,
> but that's no new character.
Well, yes it is. This is not merely a font difference.
[...]
> Sure, existing implementations will have to be upgraded.
No. Adding a new character to Unicode does not generally cause any
problems for older implementations -- particularly when, as in this
case, the character does not really change any existing case mappings.
> As a kind
> of conspiracy trying to get rid of de-DE + de-AT in favour of de-CH
> it would be amusing.
Huh? de-CH doesn't even use ß.
>
> Frank
Best,
-- Marnen Laibow-Koser marnen@marnen.org
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