Talk:ß

message: I've gone ahead and merged Capital Esszett here. There remain a few issues not properly covered:
#We don't properly explain the alternatives SS or (historically) SZ anywhere that I've noticed (correct me if I'm wrong)
#Much of the material at Capital Esszett does not strike me as properly sourced
#How do we integrate the history of the capital form with the history of the character in general? The Hitler thing for the German orthography reform of 1944 deals with both
#I think the various lists of people who said there ought to be a capital esszett is probably overly detailed and most of them are not significant and could be eliminated.
So these are things we'll need to figure out.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:20, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: On the same note - anyone who was around at the time of the Rechtschreibreform knows there were rumors the esszett was being abolished. In fact, I've had conversations with misinformed "Reformgegner" in the mid 00s who thought it did just that. I wonder if we can find sources on that. Since I'm sure there have been simialr calls over time, we could probably integrate the abolition in Switzerland into such a section.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:52, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Was ß really abolished in Switzerland or did it fall out of use, more like the English þ that was less and less used and replaced with th until it vanished altogether? I mean, was there a pan-Swiss language regulator in that country with all its highly autonomous cantons who ruled that ß should no longer be used from day X onward? Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 16:44, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, at the latest it was recognized as not used there by the Rechtschreibreform. But I don't actually know. Our current passage on is unsourced.--Ermenrich (talk) 16:51, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  The Orthography Council's rule § 25 E2 says: "Steht der Buchstabe ß nicht zur Verfügung, so schreibt man ss. In der Schweiz kann man immer ss schreiben." That doesn't even sound like an advice not to use ß, it's a mere possibility (though one that is almost universally made use of). Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 17:12, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Merged - additional issues to tackle

message: I decided to WP:BEBOLD and (IMO) improve the markup. In articles about glyphs, it risks confusing the reader to render some cases in italic and some in regular. Since this article was last extensively edited to reach FA standard, template:char was introduced to handle these cases where we need to 'isolate' a symbol for inspection, so I have used that where I felt in appropriate. In other cases, I just used single quotes, but in almost every case where italic was being used to 'highlight' a letter, I have changed it to [IMO] a clearer form. This work took rather a lot of time so if anyone is really unhappy with my changes, I would appreciate 'discuss first, revert afterwards' even though WP:BRD says the reverse. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:52, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: LGTM. Some may want to change some or all of the char template to angbr.Spitzak (talk) 21:26, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. Hopefully I got the balance right between specific grapheme notation  and more open-ended . Where I struggled was what to do about ligatures and digraphs: are they graphemes? I came down on the side of no but I don't know what is the norm in professional practice. Anyone? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 00:29, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Regarding your question whether ligatures and digraphs are graphemes: I wouldn't take that too seriously – see next section. ◅ Sebastian 15:56, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Markup 

message: Currently, the lead section calls ß a "grapheme", but that term is only used in the lead section, and only three times, while the term “letter” is used 60 times throughout the article. 
Since “grapheme” is less well known than “letter” and doesn't even have the benefit of a clear, universally accepted definition, and because other B-class articles (sorry, couldn't find higher rated articles about comparable topics) such as Æ consistently use just “letter”, I am replacing that term with “letter”. The only passage that could be seen as a justification for its use here was “The grapheme has an intermediate position between a true letter and a ligature. It behaves as a ligature in that it has no separate position in the alphabet...”, but that is WP:OR that contradicts Alphabetical order#Ligatures. (BTW, that was a good example for LEADSEED, too – the links used there are defunct now, but seem to have been just used as a basis for the OR), and I will delete that text. ◅ Sebastian 15:56, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grapheme → letter 

message: It strikes me as potentially more useful to our readers if we explain how eszett is currently used before launching into its history. Do you agree? My main problem with moving the usage section up is that it's basically completely unreferenced now. Can we use the official rules to reference it or does that count as wp:PRIMARY?--Ermenrich (talk) 14:18, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with moving the section ahead of history; it makes no sense that it's currently even behind the Keyboards section. (Possibly the section #Is it still in use? was created because the usage section was after the historical sections.) I presume by “the official rules” you mean the Aktualisierte Fassung des amtlichen Regelwerks entsprechend den Empfehlungen des Rats für deutsche Rechtschreibung 2016, §25f and possibly the 3. Bericht des Rats für deutsche Rechtschreibung 2011–2016, page 27 , which are currently already used elsewhere (at least since 2017). Since nobody has protested against them, I don't think it likely that anyone would have a problem with that. Besides, I understand the intention of wp:PRIMARY to ensure that “Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and to avoid novel interpretations of primary sources.” Both of these are not an issue here. ◅ Sebastian 15:42, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

text: +1. This is not article History of ß, so let's move history after current use. After all, who would start an article on the Latin letter a with the details of its development from Mesopotamia to web typography instead of saying that's what we have and how we use it now? Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 16:00, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

text: I am not sure about the Orthography Council's original rules, but aren't their interpretations by dictionary makers "citable" secondary (though perhaps not strictly academic) sources? Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 16:19, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Usage before history? 

message: I have yet to see any reference to this term in the secondary literature. Can anyone confirm this isn't a Wikipedia-ism?--Ermenrich (talk) 19:39, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: So far I've found this reference on a blog but that doesn't strike me as a reliable source. It's claim  also contradicts the information I've seen on its use in Roman type. The usage of "Sulzbacher form on deWiki also isn't sourced. I have a suspicion it isn't a real term unless someone can point to its use in secondary lit - it doesn't show up in either of the Gutenberg-Jahrbuch articles I've read recently, even when they discuss the shape of Eszett.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:23, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  It seems Sulzbacher Form is a traditional term among typographers. This web page has a scan from 1903 in which the Zeitschrift für Deutschlands Buchdrucker uses it. For more uses by typographers, see for instance typografie.info, typography.com and typography.guru. And Michael Everson who was responsible for many script/character additions to Unicode uses it in his recent proposal to add a Middle Scots letter that visually resembles some designs of ß. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 20:49, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

text:  P.S.: We already reference Mark  (2006) who uses the term Sulzbacher Form and also shows the scan from the Zeitschrift für Deutschlands Buchdrucker of 1903. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 02:56, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for that link, , I can use that to add citations where there currently are none hopefully!--Ermenrich (talk) 15:40, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Fortunately we don't have a template that's named after me yet. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 18:08, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Someone had better start working on that ;-).--Ermenrich (talk) 18:39, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Sulzbacher form" 

message: ẞ	ß
Could anyone explain the purpose of the first box in the article (reproduced right). The image box that follows it would come up a lot better in search engines. It just looks like clutter to me but regular editors of this article may see a value in it? (If it must stay, then surely it should contain serif as well as sans-serif samples? And a caption?) --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:41, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that it looks better - I think that the old image predates the official capital form. Misunderstood. I believe the first image is just to illustrate the standard letter forms, in line with other articles on letters.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:55, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Picking A at random, the layout is rather different. Not necessarily better, but certainly different and arguably more informative. But I'll drop it. (Most articles have oddities that made sense ten years ago and have just become part of the furniture and nobody even notices them any more. I thought that this might be one such.) --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:34, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, if you have an improvement don’t let me stop you!—Ermenrich (talk) 22:54, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opening image? 

message: can you please discuss and give the reasoning why you think this page should be moved to Sharp S? I personally disagree and doubt you can find many sources that support such a move.--Ermenrich (talk) 12:53, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: "Eszett" might be a better name than just the character, but I do not think "sharp S" is widely used.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:01, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Or none of the above. The symbol itself is somewhat recognised outside Germany (in street signs in movies, like , which give clue as to its purpose), but its formal names hardly at all. Just leave it alone and let the redirect system handle the very few [I suspect] cases where people search using the formal name. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 13:26, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Undiscussed move 

message: It is pretty obvious that Windows case-insensitive filenames are why a standard organization that resisted for 100 years gave in in the year 2004 and said a capital ß is a real character that required an encoding. Difficult to find a source though, but pretty easy to document that lots of software assumed "uppercase" would result in the same number of code points and also that it would assume the new code points are different than the "lowercase" ones. This is also why there is a capital ÿ. Spitzak (talk) 18:54, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Look, you need to find a source that actually states that capital eszett was primarily developed or necessary because of computers - so far you've provided WP:UNSOURCED text, then provided a source that does not say that this is why a capital developed, and most recently a source that does not even mention ß at all. What you're doing appears to be WP:original research and WP:synthesis, neither of which are allowed. The fact that this appears to be obvious to you does not mean it is so, and if it is so obvious you should be able to produce a source that says so. Sources that happen to mention issues with capitalizing ß in word processing (or general assumptions made by programs when capitalizing text) are not replacements for an actual source stating that those issues caused the adoption of a capital form (particularly when people have been talking about developing one for over a hundred years).--Ermenrich (talk) 21:48, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Role of computers in requiring a capital ß 

message: Currently the article title is the lowercase version of the letter, could we change it to the uppercase? It's small but it's like having the article for Ÿ be ÿ imo. Aoscf77 (talk) 23:30, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Just a small suggestion