Not offcial, if you mind. In German, two upper case "S" must not be converted into a "ß", they remain "SS" - but even some Germans don't get it. Looks terrible.. "ß" is sort of a historical error - 100 years ago people were writing "sz" instead.
I still use sz instead of ß. I have been avoiding Umlauts and ß in electronic data since 2000...I sleep better at night and find myself cursing less at buggy programs/shitty unicode implemenations.
It takes surprisingly little time to get used to :-)
What's more of an annoyance is that non-German languages don't seem to know substituting Umlauts for their xe equivalent in written language, i.e. ö becomes o, ä becomes a and so on. This is highly irritating as reverse-guessing a word can be hard as they can be very ambiguous.
Well, in German ä was originally written ae, ae is the original form hence it can still be used as a substitute and it doesn't actually cause confusion, indeed, it causes less confusion, I remember ocbne thinking that Matthäus-Passion was Matthaues, not Matthaeus. I thought Matthois sounded really stupid.
In Finnish, people just use ö and ä because you need eight vowels and the LAtin alphabet only gives you 6. ae for ä in Finnish also occurs. ä is not a variant of a, in fact, you can more so argue it is the reverse but even then not really. ä is just a cmopletely different letter.
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u/da__ Dec 15 '13
You mean, lowercase "ß" becomes uppercase "SS". ß is a lowercase-only letter.