ß
Letter of the Latin alphabet; used in German / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In German orthography, the letter ß, called Eszett (IPA: [ɛsˈtsɛt]) or scharfes S (IPA: [ˌʃaʁfəs ˈʔɛs], "sharp S"), represents the /s/ phoneme in Standard German when following long vowels and diphthongs. The letter-name Eszett combines the names of the letters of ⟨s⟩ (Es) and ⟨z⟩ (Zett) in German. The character's Unicode names in English are sharp s[1] and eszett.[1] The Eszett letter is used only in German, and can be typographically replaced with the double-s digraph ⟨ss⟩, if the ß-character is unavailable. In the 20th century, the ß-character was replaced with ss in the spelling of Swiss Standard German (Switzerland and Liechtenstein), while remaining Standard German spelling in other varieties of the German language.[2]
ẞ | |
---|---|
ẞ ß | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin script |
Type | Alphabetic |
Language of origin | Early New High German |
Sound values | [s] |
In Unicode | U+1E9E, U+00DF |
History | |
Development | |
Time period | ~1300s to present |
Descendants | None |
Sisters | None |
Transliterations | ss, sz |
Other | |
Associated graphs | ss, sz |
Writing direction | Left-to-Right |
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. |
The letter originates as the ⟨sz⟩ digraph as used in late medieval and early modern German orthography, represented as a ligature of ⟨ſ⟩ (long s) and ⟨ʒ⟩ (tailed z) in blackletter typefaces, yielding ⟨ſʒ⟩.[lower-alpha 1] This developed from an earlier usage of ⟨z⟩ in Old and Middle High German to represent a separate sibilant sound from ⟨s⟩; when the difference between the two sounds was lost in the 13th century, the two symbols came to be combined as ⟨sz⟩ in some situations.
Traditionally, ⟨ß⟩ did not have a capital form, although some type designers introduced de facto capitalized variants. In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital, ⟨ẞ⟩, as an acceptable variant in German orthography, ending a long orthographic debate.[3]
Lowercase ⟨ß⟩ was encoded by ECMA-94 (1985) at position 223 (hexadecimal DF), inherited by Latin-1 and Unicode (U+00DF ß LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S).[4]
The HTML entity ß
was introduced with HTML 2.0 (1995). The capital ⟨ẞ⟩ was encoded by Unicode in 2008 at (U+1E9E ẞ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S).