Query on UTF-32 encodings for letters

[Georg Bauhaus]

Paul Koning wrote:

> Then take i, which upcases to I with dot.  Turkish has i with and
> without dot, and the dot is preserved when you change case (in either
> direction). 

And AFAICT, the dot can be quite important, because when spoken,
the difference between ı and i can mean quite different things,
much like the distinction between "year" and "your".

> Would you map eszet (in German) to ss?  Or to sz?  Or neither?  Modern
> usage does the former; 1930-ish usage the latter.

Not very often even in the 30s.

Some more things into the pit: Almost never was there
an s followed by a z representing a sharp s in German.
You can go back to the middle ages (1100 or so) and find some
interesting spellings. But then you could also argue that
we should consider matching p with b and d with th
(as in English). See da consonant? :-)

There have been some debates about ß, e.g. when 
Switzerland discussed the issue in the 1960s. Technically,
it's not an eszet, and the Unicode databases doesn't say
otherwise.

00DF; F; 0073 0073; # LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S

In the 1930s printers (at least science) used mostly what is now used
again as official spelling: two s for a sharp s (now: when the preceding
vowel is short). Swiss printers always use two s, which is
one of the reasons why you will hardly ever find ß in Wirth's
writings.

In books around 1900 you can see the origin of sharp s,
long s followed by small s:
Most typographers and experts from related
professions will explain that sharp s has its origin
in this combination: a (then) normal s, long shape, same as you
can find in older English texts, followed
by a "Schluss-S" (final s, "normal" shape, ending a word.
Exceptional details omitted.)

Connect the upper end of the long s to the upper
end of the small s and you get sharp s. It's a ligature. (I will
omit the story about how handwriting has created the notion
of an "eszet".) This explains why "Straße" matches "STRASSE".
"STRAßE" is kind of silly computerese. (Straße is German (de_DE)
for street, so I think it is a common name in computer programs.)

For a nice view, see
http://www.queries.de/selbst/typografie.html

Georg