From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon May 07 2007 - 14:36:15 CDT
On 5/7/2007 10:42 AM, John Hudson wrote:
> Adam Twardoch wrote:
>
>> Today, "ß" is no more a ligature of "ſs" than "ä" is a ligature of
>> "ae". The transition process from "ae" to "ä" has been completed
>> about 200 years ago, and the transition process between "ſs" to "ß"
>> is happening now. Encoding the uppercase "ä" as "A ZWJ <sups> E" (or
>> something like that) would make as little sense as encoding the
>> uppercase "ß" as "S ZWJ S".
>
>> I strongly believe that "SS" is an anachronic, still-in-use but
>> slowly-to-vanish poor man’s solution to write the uppercase "ß".
>
> I suspect, and indeed hope, that you are right. ...[but] having a
> single lowercase character with two different uppercase mappings, one
> currently standard and enshrined in existing casing rules and
> implementations, one that might one day become standard and require
> some kind of overriding implementation, seems to me a bit of a
> standardisation and software development nightmare.
>
The 'nightmare' is not with the characters, but with the potential that
officially sanctioned rules might change. There's absolutely nothing
that can prevent such a change, even if it were not to involve new
characters. For example, assume that the solution of using 'SZ' in
contrast to 'SS' became official. It would equally invalidate all
software and throw confusion even into (fuzzy) search and sorting, with
the potential of dragging lower case 'sz' into the fray.
That's why the proposers, correctly in my opinion, did not base their
proposal on speculation on the direction of potential future reform, but
limited themselves to documenting the existing usage, which clearly can
be supported and deserves to be supported.
I remember writing before somewhere that I think their proposal should
be accepted as presented.
A./
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