Uncreative Labs

Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 114 Location: ~/

Until today I had mistakenly believed that my username was the Greek letter Beta (β). It is not. It is actually the German letter Eszett (sharp S), which is a ligature of the Roman / Latin letters f and s. This is especially clear in a font such as Palatino Linotype (a beautiful typeface) -- copy the subject line of this post into e.g. Notepad and change the font to Palatino Linotype. You will then see what I mean!

Why does this matter? It matters because I thought that ß was the Greek equivalent to the Roman / Latin B when I originally chose ß for my username.

Oh well. :p

edit: I love how phpBB has converted the Unicode characters in my subject into their HTML character entity equivalents! :/ The first character in the subject line is the German letter Eszett (sharp S), the second is the inequality sign, and the third is a lowercase Greek letter beta.

edit #2: See question #12 ("I am seeing &#nnnn; sequences output instead of what I typed!") on http://www.phpbb.com/support/documents.php?mode=faq

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 377 Location: Stuttgart, Germany

The eszett is slowly getting weeded out of the German alanguage Smile

We had a spelling reform in 1998 which is the only accepted correct spelling since 1/1/2005. Witrhy the new spelling rules, the eszett is replaced by an 'ss' in many cases. Many people ( like me ) use a mixture of the spelling rules, as I got taught the old way in grades 1 through 4 ( when you learn all that spelling stuff ) but beginning in grade 5 they expected us to know the new rules that we had never been taught. Resistance aagainst that reform is so hard ( especially from the older folks 40+ ) that they'll partially undo it to make the confusion even greater... Embarassed

Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 114 Location: ~/

I want to learn German some day! Smile