A Delicate Character
POSTED BY Verena Dreikauß
July 22, 2011
Languages can be confusing. Having a letter in your surname that only exist in your mother language makes things abroad even more difficult. Recently I was deposing a cheque and the friendly teller behind the counter had suddenly a huge question mark written all over his face while processing. To redeem him from his distress I asked if there was a problem. He frowned more and said that the names weren’t identical. Showing him my German ID made things even worse because it had a third way of spelling. Finally he turned the screen and pointed out the problem: As it turned out, my account surname ended on a ‘b’ and not like in my ID on ‘ss’, or like on the cheque on ‘ß’ – yes, the problematic but lovely Eszett.
Back in the old days, most texts in German have been printed in Blackletter, a font style like Guttenberg has used for his Bible print. The German Eszett [ʔɛsˈt͡sɛt] has once been a ligature of that font for ‘ss’ and ‘sz’. The lowercase ‘s’ existed in two versions: the standard s and the so called long s ( ſ ). – which was often misinterpreted for an f. When during the 18th and 19th century more texts have been set in an Antiqua font, typesetters and printers were looking for a uniform replacement of the Blackletter Eszett. Despite dozen of proposals for an alternative, a common decision wasn’t made until the early 20th century when the Typographic Society of Leipzig announced the so-called Sulzbacher Form as the new standard in Roman type.
But the problem with that character isn’t its appearance, it is the non-exictence of a majuscule. Blackletter fonts were commonly set in sentence or lower case, so the need for capitals was out of question. Therefore in Roman fonts, the Eszett was generally transformed into a double s for printed characters. Though my heard is bleeding when I have to write my surname with ‘ss’ at the end when using uppercase, Typographers and myself cringe when a lowercase ß is used in an uppercase context. It looks ugly. Inconsistent. Destroying the type face. And abroad often misread as a ‘B’.
Undergoing an orthography reform in 2006, the Eszett has been banded from many German words and transformed into double s – in order to make writing easier. But the majuscule issue stayed and caused problems especially with peoples’ surnames on official documents like passports. Remedy came in 2008 when the form of a capital ß was proposed and declared in 2010 by ISO and the Council for German Orthography as the new Standard for name writing – but “use on one’s own will”. So, should that make things easier now?
Links: The German Eszett
Back in the old days, most texts in German have been printed in Blackletter, a font style like Guttenberg has used for his Bible print. The German Eszett [ʔɛsˈt͡sɛt] has once been a ligature of that font for ‘ss’ and ‘sz’. The lowercase ‘s’ existed in two versions: the standard s and the so called long s ( ſ ). – which was often misinterpreted for an f. When during the 18th and 19th century more texts have been set in an Antiqua font, typesetters and printers were looking for a uniform replacement of the Blackletter Eszett. Despite dozen of proposals for an alternative, a common decision wasn’t made until the early 20th century when the Typographic Society of Leipzig announced the so-called Sulzbacher Form as the new standard in Roman type.
But the problem with that character isn’t its appearance, it is the non-exictence of a majuscule. Blackletter fonts were commonly set in sentence or lower case, so the need for capitals was out of question. Therefore in Roman fonts, the Eszett was generally transformed into a double s for printed characters. Though my heard is bleeding when I have to write my surname with ‘ss’ at the end when using uppercase, Typographers and myself cringe when a lowercase ß is used in an uppercase context. It looks ugly. Inconsistent. Destroying the type face. And abroad often misread as a ‘B’.
Undergoing an orthography reform in 2006, the Eszett has been banded from many German words and transformed into double s – in order to make writing easier. But the majuscule issue stayed and caused problems especially with peoples’ surnames on official documents like passports. Remedy came in 2008 when the form of a capital ß was proposed and declared in 2010 by ISO and the Council for German Orthography as the new Standard for name writing – but “use on one’s own will”. So, should that make things easier now?
Links: The German Eszett
