3 ms·
There were ligatures for both ss and sz. The name for the sz survived for both. The modern eszett glyph usually looks like an ss ligature (long s + short s).
by peterfirefly 2y ago
There were ligatures for both ss and sz. The name for the sz survived for both. The modern eszett glyph usually looks like an ss ligature (long s + short s).
- gumby 2y ago> The modern eszett glyph usually looks like an ss ligature (long s + short s). It is literally a ligature of the long s and z. This is unsurprisingly obvious in Fraktur, given the name, but you can see it in the Roman form ß: the upper concavity of ‚s‘ opens to the right while the upper concavity of ‚z‘ opens to the left (the bottom of Fraktur Z in both cases had/has a tail like g which is how you get the bottom part of the shape). I still have a few books printed in Fraktur — each time I pick one up (which is not frequently!) it’s is very hard to read at first, but after a few pages goes back to being easy. Since this phenomenon takes a little “priming” it’s annoying to encounter a sentence or phrase of Fraktur on a shop sign or other short, random location. Another commenter linked to an explanation of why a vowel shift caused “sz” to reflect “ss”. The character form and name are fossils (something I wish German retained more of — it’s one of the things I love about English).