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For readers unfamiliar with German: ß is the German sharp S. It’s pronounced like a normal English “s” in situations where the letter “s” may be pronounced clos

For readers unfamiliar with German: ß is the German sharp S. It’s pronounced like a normal English “s” in situations where the letter “s” may be pronounced closer to the English letter “z.” For example: Strase -> shtrazeh Straße -> shtrasseh

syncsynchalt 3y ago
For anyone who has trouble sight-reading a ß as a beta, it may help to know the ß glyph shape is formed as a ligature of two letters: one now-archaic "long s" (ſ), followed by a "z". Americans will know the "long s" from documents such as the US constitution (every child jokes about the "Congrefs" misspelling). The name of the character (eszett) means "sz" but actually represents "ss" for tortured historic reasons that I can't recall, but which I think [1] tries to explain. More typographic trivia: The uppercase transform of "ß" is "SS", which causes bugs in code that assumes case changes won't change the character count. The language council fought for decades against recognizing an uppercase ß but eventually gave in if only to have the ability to computer-encode erroneous capitalizations, and it's been in Unicode for over a decade now: ẞ [1] https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/11/05/the-story-of-eszett-s/ https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/11/05/the-story-of-eszett...