ß

ß
In German orthography, the letter ß (lowercase), called or ("sharp S"), represents the phoneme in Standard German when following long vowels and diphthongs. The letter-name combines the names of the letters of and in German. The character's Unicode names in English are sharp s and eszett. The Eszett letter is used only in German, and can be typographically replaced with the double-s digraph , if the ß-character is unavailable. In the 20th century, the ß-character was replaced with ss in the spelling of Swiss Standard German (Switzerland and Liechtenstein), while remaining Standard German spelling in other varieties of the German language.
The letter originates as the digraph as used in late medieval and early modern German orthography, represented as a ligature of (long s) and (tailed z) in blackletter typefaces, yielding . This developed from an earlier usage of in Old and Middle High German to represent a separate sibilant sound from ; when the difference between the two sounds was lost in the 13th century, the two symbols came to be combined as in some situations.
Traditionally, did not have a capital form, although some type designers introduced de facto capitalized variants.
In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital into German orthography, ending a long orthographic debate.
Lowercase was encoded by ECMA-94 (1985) at position 223 (hexadecimal DF), inherited by Latin-1 and Unicode.
The HTML entity &szlig; was introduced with HTML 2.0 (1995). The capital was encoded by ISO 10646 in 2008 at.
Usage
Current usage
In standard German, three letters or combinations of letters commonly represent (the voiceless alveolar fricative) depending on its position in a word: and . According to current German orthography, represents the sound :
when it is written after a diphthong or long vowel and is not followed by another consonant in the word stem: , [Exceptions: and words with final devoicing (e.g.)]; and
when a word stem ending with takes an inflectional ending beginning with a consonant: , .
In verbs with roots where the vowel changes length, this means that some forms may be written with , others with : .
The use of distinguishes minimal pairs such as (to rip) and (to travel) on the one hand (vs. ), and (penance) and (buses) on the other (long vowel before , short vowel before ).
Some proper names may use after a short vowel, following the old orthography; this is also true of some words derived from proper names (e.g. named after Ernst Litfaß).
If no is available in a font, then the official orthography calls for to be replaced with . Additionally, as of 2017, when capitalized, either capital or are considered equally valid in all situations (not just when the character is unavailable).
The previous rule, codified in the Orthography Reform of 1996, had been always to replace with in allcaps.
In pre-1996 orthography
According to the orthography in use in German prior to the German orthography reform of 1996, was written to represent :
word internally following a long vowel or diphthong: , ; and
at the end of a syllable or before a consonant, so long as is the end of the word stem: .
In the old orthography, word stems spelled internally could thus be written in certain instances, without this reflecting a change in vowel length: (from ), (from ), and (from ), (comparative: ). In rare occasions, the difference between and could help differentiate words: (expiration of a pass) and (appropriate).
As in the new orthography, it was possible to write for if the character was not available. When using allcaps, the pre-1996 rules called for rendering as in allcaps except when there was ambiguity, in which case it should be rendered as . The common example for such a case is ("in moderate amounts") vs. ("in massive amounts"); in this example the spelling difference between vs. produces completely different meanings.
Switzerland and Liechtenstein
In Swiss Standard German, usually replaces every . This is officially sanctioned by the reformed German orthography rules, which state in §25 E2: "" ("In Switzerland, one may always write 'ss'"). Liechtenstein follows the same practice. There are very few instances where the difference between spelling and affects the meaning of a word, and these can usually be told apart by context.
Other uses
Occasionally, has been used in unusual ways:
As a surrogate for Greek lowercase (beta), which looks fairly similar. This was used in older operating systems, the character encoding of which (notably Latin-1 and Windows-1252) did not support easy use of Greek letters. Additionally, the original IBM DOS code page, CP437 (aka OEM-US) conflates the two characters, with a glyph that minimizes their differences placed between the Greek letters (alpha) and (gamma) but named "Sharp s Small".
In Prussian Lithuanian, as in the first book published in Lithuanian, Martynas Mažvydas' Simple Words of Catechism, as well as in Sorbian (see example on the left).
For sadhe in Akkadian glosses, in place of the standard , when that character is unavailable due to limitations of HTML.
The letter appeared in the alphabet made by Jan Kochanowski for the Polish language, that was used from the 16th until the 18th century. It represented the voiceless postalveolar fricative ([ʃ]) sound. It was for example used in the Jakub Wujek Bible.
History
Origin and development
As a result of the High German consonant shift, Old High German developed a sound generally spelled or that was probably pronounced and was contrasted with a sound, probably pronounced (voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant) or (voiced alveolar retracted sibilant), depending on the place in the word, and spelled . Given that could also represent the affricate , some attempts were made to differentiate the sounds by spelling as or : . In Middle High German, simplified to at the end of a word or after a long vowel, but was retained word internally after a short vowel: vs. and .
In the thirteenth century, the phonetic difference between and was lost at the beginning and end of words in all dialects except for Gottscheerish. Word-internally, Old and Middle High German came to be pronounced (the voiced alveolar sibilant), while Old and Middle High German continued to be pronounced . This produces the contrast between modern standard German and . The former is pronounced and comes from , while the latter is pronounced and comes from .
In the late medieval and early modern periods, was frequently spelled or . The earliest appearance of ligature resembling the modern is in a fragment of a manuscript of the poem Wolfdietrich from around 1300. In the Gothic book hands and bastarda scripts of the late medieval period, is written with long s and the Blackletter "tailed z", as . A recognizable ligature representing the digraph develops in handwriting in the early 14th century.
By the late 1400s, the choice of spelling between and was usually based on the sound's position in the word rather than etymology: tended to be used in word final position: , ; tended to be used when the sound occurred between vowels: . While Martin Luther's early 16th-century printings also contain spellings such as , early modern printers mostly changed these to : . Around the same time, printers began to systematically distinguish between (the, that [pronoun]) and (that [conjunction]).
In modern German, the Old and Middle High German is now represented by either or, if there are no related forms in which occurs intervocalically, with : and .
Standardization of use
The pre-1996 German use of was codified by the eighteenth-century grammarians Johann Christoph Gottsched (1748) and Johann Christoph Adelung (1793) and made official for all German-speaking countries by the German Orthographic Conference of 1901. In this orthography, the use of was modeled after the use of long and "round"-s in Fraktur. appeared both word internally after long vowels and also in those positions where Fraktur required the second s to be a "round" or "final" s, namely the ends of syllables or the ends of words. In his Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854) Jacob Grimm called for or to be written for all instances of Middle and Old High German etymological (e.g., instead of from ); however, his etymological proposal could not overcome established usage.
In Austria-Hungary prior to the German Orthographic Conference of 1902, an alternative rule formulated by Johann Christian August Heyse in 1829 had been officially taught in the schools since 1879, although this spelling was not widely used. Heyse's rule matches current usage after the German orthography reform of 1996 in that was only used after long vowels.
Use in Roman type
Although there are early examples in Roman type (called Antiqua in a German context) of a -ligature that looks like the letter , it was not commonly used for . These forms generally fell out of use in the eighteenth century and were used in Italic text only; German works printed in Roman type in the late 18th and early 19th centuries such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte's did not provide any equivalent to the . Jacob Grimm began using in his (1819), however it varied with word internally. Grimm eventually rejected the use of the character; in their (1838), the Brothers Grimm favored writing it as . The First Orthographic Conference in Berlin (1876) recommended that ß be represented as - however, both suggestions were ultimately rejected. In 1879, a proposal for various letter forms was published in the Journal für Buchdruckerkunst. A committee of the Typographic Society of Leipzig chose the "Sulzbacher form". In 1903 it was proclaimed as the new standard for the Eszett in Roman type.
Until the abolition of Fraktur in 1941, it was nevertheless common for family names to be written with in Fraktur and in Roman type. The formal abolition resulted in inconsistencies in how names such as Heuss/Heuß are written in modern German.
Abolition and attempted abolitions
The Swiss and Liechtensteiners ceased to use in the twentieth century. This has been explained variously by the early adoption of Roman type in Switzerland, the use of typewriters in Switzerland that did not include in favor of French and Italian characters, and peculiarities of Swiss German that cause words spelled with or to be pronounced with gemination. The Education Council of Zurich had decided to stop teaching the letter in 1935, whereas the Neue Zürcher Zeitung continued to write until 1971. Swiss newspapers continued to print in Fraktur until the end of the 1940s, and the abandonment of ß by most newspapers corresponded to them switching to Roman typesetting.
When the Nazi German government abolished the use of blackletter typesetting in 1941, it was originally planned to also abolish the use of . However, Hitler intervened to retain , while deciding against the creation of a capital form. In 1954, a group of reformers in West Germany similarly proposed, among other changes to German spelling, the abolition of ; their proposals were publicly opposed by German-language writers Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt and were never implemented. Although the German Orthography Reform of 1996 reduced the use of in standard German, Adrienne Walder writes that an abolition outside of Switzerland appears unlikely.
Development of a capital form
Because had been treated as a ligature, rather than as a full letter of the German alphabet, it had no capital form in early modern typesetting. Moreover, allcaps was not normally used in Fraktur printing. There were, however, proposals to introduce capital forms of for use in allcaps writing (where would otherwise usually be represented as either or ). A capital was first seriously proposed in 1879, but did not enter official or widespread use. The Orthographic Conference of 1903 called for the use of in allcaps until a capital letter could be proposed. Historical typefaces offering a capitalized mostly date to the time between 1905 and 1930. The first known typefaces to include capital were produced by the foundry in Leipzig, in 1905/06. at the time widely advocated the use of this type, but its use nevertheless remained very limited.
The preface to the 1925 edition of the dictionary expressed the desirability of a separate glyph for capital :
The was edited separately in East and West Germany during the 1950s to 1980s. The East German of 1957 (15th ed.) introduced a capital , in its typesetting without revising the rule for capitalization. The 16th edition of 1969 still announced that an uppercase was in development and would be introduced in the future. The 1984 edition again removed this announcement and simply stated that there is no capital version of .
In the 2000s, there were renewed efforts on the part of certain typographers to introduce a capital, . A proposal to include a corresponding character in the Unicode set submitted in 2004 was rejected. A second proposal submitted in 2007 was successful, and the character was included in Unicode version 5.1.0 in April 2008. The international standard associated with Unicode (UCS), ISO/IEC 10646, was updated to reflect the addition on 24 June 2008. The capital letter was finally adopted as an option in standard German orthography in 2017.
Representation
Graphical variants
The recommendation of the Sulzbacher form (1903) was not followed universally in 20th-century printing.
There were four distinct variants of in use in Antiqua fonts:
without ligature, but as a single type, with reduced spacing between the two letters;
the ligature of and inherited from the 16th-century Antiqua typefaces;
a ligature of and , adapting the blackletter ligature to Antiqua; and
the Sulzbacher form.
The first variant (no ligature) has become practically obsolete. Most modern typefaces follow either 2 or 4, with 3 retained in occasional usage, notably in street signs in Bonn and Berlin. The design of modern tends to follow either the Sulzbacher form, in which (tailed z) is clearly visible, or else be made up of a clear ligature of and .
Use of typographic variants in street signs:
The inclusion of a capital in ISO 10646 in 2008 revived the century-old debate among font designers as to how such a character should be represented. The main difference in the shapes of in contemporary fonts is the depiction with a diagonal straight line vs. a curved line in its upper right part, reminiscent of the ligature of tailed z or of round s, respectively. The code chart published by the Unicode Consortium favours the former possibility, which has been adopted by Unicode capable fonts including Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Courier New, Dejavu Serif, Liberation Sans, Liberation Mono, Linux Libertine and Times New Roman; the second possibility is more rare, adopted by Dejavu Sans. Some fonts adopt a third possibility in representing following the Sulzbacher form of , reminiscent of the Greek (beta); such a shape has been adopted by FreeSans and FreeSerif, Liberation Serif and Verdana.
Keyboards and encoding
In Germany and Austria, a 'ß' key is present on computer and typewriter keyboards, normally to the right-hand end on the number row.
The German typewriter keyboard layout was defined in DIN 2112, first issued in 1928.
In other countries, the letter is not marked on the keyboard, but a combination of other keys can produce it. Often, the letter is input using a modifier and the 's' key. The details of the keyboard layout depend on the input language and operating system: on some keyboards with US-International (or local 'extended') setting, the symbol is created using (or ) in Microsoft Windows, Linux and ChromeOS; in MacOS, one uses on the US, US-Extended, and UK keyboards. In Windows, one can use . On Linux works, and for uppercase.
Some modern virtual keyboards show ß when the user presses and holds the 's' key.
The HTML entity for is &szlig;. Its code point in the ISO 8859 character encoding versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16 and identically in Unicode is 223, or DF in hexadecimal. In TeX and LaTeX, \ss produces ß. A German language support package for LaTeX exists in which ß is produced by "s (similar to umlauts, which are produced by "a, "o, and "u with this package).
In modern browsers, "ß" will be converted to "SS" when the element containing it is set to uppercase using text-transform: uppercase in Cascading Style Sheets. The JavaScript in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox will convert "ß" to "SS" when converted to uppercase (e.g., "ß".toUpperCase()).
See also
long s
Notes
References
German language
Latin-script ligatures