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Archiver > GEN-DE > 1997-10 > 0875769483
From: <>
Subject: Re: Convert your. keyboard to German or other
Date: 2 Oct 1997 05:18:03 GMT
Jim Eggert () wrote:
: In article <> (DWAT6911) writes:
: > I was in a German chat room two nights ago. One lady reported that u
: > with an umlaut will become ii under the new system.
: I've read an officially-released description of the German spelling
: reform. There is no indication that the umlauts will disappear or be
: replaced. The lady in the chat room is incorrect.
Imagine that... :)
[...]
: "s,ss,sz \ss 225 167 223 ß germandbls sharp s, ess-tset
[...]
: 850 refers to the IBM code page. IBM code page 437 is for these
: characters identical, except it lacks the sharp s. IBM code page
Actually, 225 in CP-437, the beta, makes a decent ess-zet. It's been used
for that for a long, long time on DOS machines, which is probably why they
put it there in 850. BTW, it might be better to call it s-z ligature,
since that's what it is - "sharp s" is actually a sound, not a symbol,
though many people, Germans in particular, are very loose with the term
(much like with "Umlaut"). You'll note that the code for it in HTML is
ß. What basically happened with it is that the old fraktur type,
like many older typefaces, used a lot of ligature between particular pairs
of characters, and the s-z combination used the long 's' (often looks like
an 'f' or an integral sign). If you look at fraktur text, you'll see that
the ess-zet is literally just an ess ('s') and a zet ('z') put together.
The s-z ligature was then borrowed as a separate character into the modern
character set with hardly any alteration, such that it's kind of like a
little fraktur fossil. What I never could understand is why they don't
expand it as "sz" nowadays instead of "ss", but go figure.
Ben Buckner
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