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Comment by bbu | Hacker News Reader

Only sz should use ß. Ss stays ss even in German-german. Switzerland got rid of the sz/ss distinction a long time ago. So you need to be culture and word aware to do it „right“.

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'sz' for 'ß' is sometimes used to make things roundtrip-proof in capslock, e.g. on military stencils. HTML calls it 'szlig'. Also, some use "Esszet" as the name of the character. But all are wrong in that ß isn't a ligature of s and z, it is a ligature of s and s. The shape of the character stems from the fact that in fractur writing and even some grotesk fonts, 's' at the end of a word was written 's', while 's' within a word was written 'ſ'. Thus the end of a word like Fuss was written Fuſs, giving a ligature of Fuß. No 'z' anywhere.

Originally ß arose as a ligature of s and z, or rather ſ and ʒ. In many older texts, or even current fonts, the second part of the ligature is indisputably a long-tailed ʒ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F

> some use "Esszet" as the name of the character

I believe the actual name is Eszett.

Only “wrong” in light of current usage, but not historically.

By this measure, the English name of “W” would be wrong because it’s not actually a “double-U” but a “double-V”. But at the time of the letter’s formation, U and V were not yet separate letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W

The Swedes get this "right", and call it [ˈdɵ̂bːɛlˌveː].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet

Oh wow, didn’t know that!

French as well, although the elegance gained is quickly tarnished by calling y "Greek i".

In Dutch it's even more sane, the alphabet just goes V = vee, W = wee.

I always thought that German z used to look something between Ꙁ & з. ʒ looks pretty close so ſз became ß but Latin transliteration rules were ss instead. At least that's what I was taught in German class.

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