ß

The ß — Eszett or scharfes Es (sharp es) if spelled out — is a letter used only in the German alphabet. It represents the ligature "ss" under certain conditions (cf. the letter W, which represents a ligature, too: "double u"). "ß" is unique among the letters of western alphabets in that it has no majuscule (upper-case form); "SS" must be used in an all-caps environment. Nowadays many people simply use the lower-case glyph in all-caps environments too, but this is considered typographically wrong.

Table of contents

1 Origin
2 Usage
3 ß and β
4 Miscellaneous
5 See also

Origin

[es'tset] is a phonetic circumscription of how the two letters "s" and "z" are pronounced in German. This is meant to reflect that ß derives from a ligature of the long or medial "s ("ſ") and "z". Though the modern name, the increasingly more common way of referring to this is scharfes S (sharp S), in reference to its phonetic characteristics.

There is some controversy on whether this is correct. In the past, some influential scholars, most notably Jan Tschichold in 1940 ("Herkunft und Form des ß in der Fraktur und der Antiqua"), have argued that the letter actually derives from the long "s" and the short or terminal "s" (now the conventional minuscule letterform). Such a ligature certainly existed for example in Old French handwriting, and in English, perhaps most famously in the original typography of the United States Declaration of Independence, in the spelling of such words as "neceſsary", "diſsolve", and "Congreſs". Tschichold also presents a speculation for the evolution of ß in Fraktur type. He concludes that the naming "sz" is entirely incorrect.

Though many have accepted this view, others have since argued that it is too simplistic (and, specifically, that the Fraktur forms speculated on by Tschichold do not exist), for example, Max Bollwage in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1999. As, in any case, "ß" derives from a ligature, the discussion has to focus on historical orthography, and in fact, in old texts both the "ſz" and the "ſs" writing can be found. Typically, in Blackletter typefaces like Gothic or Fraktur, the ligature "long s + z" is used (see illustration). On the other hand, in Antiqua types as used in modern scripture, the composition of "ß" as "long s + terminal s" seems graphically more plausible, depending on the particular font implementation.

Usage

In today's German orthography, "ß" (like other "simple" consonants) is used after a long vowel, while "ss" (like other "doubled" consonants) is used after a short one. Both represent the sound /s/; a solitary "s" has the value /z/ (although this is devoiced at the end of a word). For example, Fuß (/fu:s/, German for "foot") has a long vowel, while Fluss (/flUs/, meaning "river") has a short vowel (cf. the difference of engl. "c(e)" and "ss" in "mice" and "miss").

Before the German spelling reform in 1998, the rule was that "ss" must never be used at the end of a syllable and be replaced by "ß", even if it followed a short vowel. In other words, "ss" was only used when hyphenation would occur between the two s's. As a result, Fluss was formerly spelled Fluß, even though the plural has always been Flüsse (hyphenated Flüs-se). The new rule alleviates this irregularity in accord with the orthography of other consonants, which are single after a long vowel and double after a short one; for example, Wal /va:l/ with a long "a" and Ball /bal/ with a short one.

The spelling reform affected those proper names that describe things (nowadays) situated outside a German-speaking country. Therefore "Rußland" (Russia) became "Russland" and "Preßburg" (Bratislava) became "Pressburg".

If it were to be assumed that the word Fluss had already been spelt Fluss before the ß character existed, but were written in Fraktur writing with the distinction between the long s and the terminal s, then Flüsse would be rendered Flüſſe, while Fluss would be written Fluſs. This seems to support the view that ß might not, after all, derive from an ſz ligature and was part of the fuel in the aforementioned controversy about its origin.

Before the reform the Duden encouraged the use of "SZ" in cases where "SS" would produce an ambiguous result, as with "IN MASZEN" (in limited amounts) vs. "IN MASSEN" (in massive amounts).

This new usage of "ß" is now standard in Germany and Austria. Switzerland officially abolished the use of "ß" in the 1930s, but most Swiss publishing houses still use it.

ß and β

"ß" should not be confused with the lowercase Greek letter beta ("β"), which it closely resembles, particularly to the eyes of non-German readers, but to which it is unrelated. Indeed the resemblance is not close enough to enable substitution of the one with the other in typeset material without the result looking extremely unprofessional. The differences are:

β reaches below the line while ß does not.
β connects the vertical part on the left with the end of the horizontal near the bottom; ß does not.
β uses Greek rules of stroke thickness (slanted strokes are thinnest), ß uses Latin rules (horizontal strokes are thinnest).

However, such substitution once was common when describing beta test versions of application programs for older operating systems, such as classic Mac OS, whose character encodings did not support easy use of Greek letters.

Miscellaneous

When ordering German words alphabetically, the collation rules say that "ß" should be treated as if it were a double "ss". Some people sort it like a single "s" but this is not recommended. So, for example: "Ruß" < "Russe" < "rußen" < "Russland"

The ß is also used by some in romanizing the Sumerian language.

The HTML entity for "ß" is ß. Its codepoint in the ISO 8859 character encoding versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16 and identically in Unicode is 223, or DF in hexadecimal.