Another excellent Cecil column here– just one thing about the last paragraph: German fraktur script wasn’t abandoned because the “script had come to be associated with German militarism” – it was abolished by Adolf Hitler in 1933 and replaced by standard Roman type as part of his modernization campaign – you know, the one that also came up with Autobahns, the Volkswagen, blitzkrieg, and concentraion camps…
The end of Fraktur was indeed ordered by A.H., but not in 1933 but in January 1941. The order was signed by Martin Bormann, but Hitler was behind it; already in 1934, in a speech to a Party conference, he had denounced Fraktur as Jewish (don’t ask me why) and what not. He also banned the German handwritten script, known as Suetterlin. See, for example, www.bfds.de (in German).
But does anyone know what exactly kept the Germans (and Austrians) from undoing this act of cultural vandalism after the war?
The convention of having a distinct character for a terminal “s” isn’t Latin at all–it follows Greek usage. Can’t reproduce the Greek characters here, but as you know there’s a special character for sigma when it’s at the end of a word.
The convention held in French and, later, in English because it did convey some useful information. The short s, the one used for terminals, was used when the s was to be pronounced, and the long one for silent ones, which is why double-s clusters were usually composed of a long and a short character.
However, as Cecil says, the convention was fairly haphazard; better-educated writers and publishers–those with some Greek, evidently–observed it fairly strictly, but you wouldn’t find that kind of care exerted in the popular press.
When I was a kid,we went on a field trip to The Hartford Courant,the oldest published paper in the US.It was a long time ago because I can remember watching the typesetters use lead removeable type to set up the page.They still have copies of their papers from the 1700’s and someone asked why they used “F” instead of “S”.The answer we got was s was used much more than f and when they ran out of the s typeset,they used f.Sounded as good as any explanation I ever heard.
Foundf a bit fufpiciouf to me.
But on a similar note, I’ve heard that the “esszet” (the double-s symbol in the German alphabet that looks a bit like a capital B) is used less and less frequently these days due to the Internet – using “ss” instead creates less problems with characger recognition between different machines. The same vague rumor says that more Germans are using “ae”, “oe”, and “ue” instead of their umlauted equivalents for much the same reason.
Anyone know any more about this?
Huh? What did they do for the letters that are used more frequently than s?
The guy at the Courant was bullshitting you; “f” and long “s” are two different characters. (I’ve just spent weeks collating different editions of a play printed in 1728, looking for typos, so I know this stuff.)
Long “s” was used because people used to write “s” that way. Period.
As to Germans reducing use of special characters due to the Internet, that should have peaked by now. Any computer modern enough to use the real Internet (as opposed to old versions of CompuServe, AOL, and the like) will display them correctly, and any German computer can readily type them.
If you have the symbol font, normal sigma and final sigma appear below.
s V
Unless, of course, you’re on a standards-compliant browser. In that case, they appear below.
σ ς
Lauri Itakannas writes:
While it’s true that Hitler officially banned Fraktur, his order didn’t have much effect. As http://www.waldenfont.com/products/gbp/history.asp
notes, “relatively few publications had actually switched by the end of the war in 1945… In the following years, German printers and type designers looked for new directions that were not reminiscent of Germany’s militarist past, and eventually developed a style similar to the Bauhaus designs of the 1920’s. During the next forty years, Fraktur became closely and solely associated with the Third Reich. All Fraktur printing was treated with suspicion.” I was thinking of postwar developments when I said that Fraktur had become associated with German militarism.
The German s thingy is even in standard Windows ASCII, without needing Unicode or special fonts: ß (described by Charmap as “Latin Small Letter Sharp S”). Likewise umlauted vowels. So the Internet thing shouldn’t be that big a deal. Keyboards might be slightly problematic, but I imagine that keyboards sold in Germany would be designed to produce these characters somehow.
Achernar, is the font tag not supported in the official standards? Why wouldn’t symbol font work on them?
I’m so very psyched that I started a thread that attracted the attention – and wisdom – of the Perfect Master himself. And I didn’t realize that roman letters really became standard after the end of the war.
Once again, my faith in Uncle Cecil is proven to be well placed!
Chronos, I refer you to a previous ATMB thread on the matter. The Font tag is technically supported, though deprecated, but Symbol is not a recognized font.
Eewww! Never put “standard” and “Windows” in the same frame.
All the characters used in Western-European languages are in the 256-character set ISO-8859, which is implemented on all modern computers in the Western-European language area (i.e., Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, most of Africa, and the New World).
ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and contains only 128 characters. ISO-8859 starts with ASCII and adds another 128 characters. Unicode starts with ISO-8859 and adds many thousands more.
One of the problems is that the accented letters may not translate correctly via e-mail. I have a few people in Europe who send me e-mails in which the accented letters get translated incorrectly. I have yet to determine if the problem is with their e-mail program, my e-mail program, one of the mail servers, or the fact that they use Windows and I use MacOS. It’s probaby a combination of several factors.
Internet e-mail was designed back in the 70’s to be able to pipeline through all sorts of e-mail systems. As a result, it’s rather free-and-easy when it comes to certain disciplines. (Indeed, it isn’t strictly supposed to take anything but plain 7-bit ASCII without special handling.)
Programs like Outlook Express (I know – ecchh!) and Netscape/Mozilla, written for the Web era, are somewhat more likely to work correctly, because programmers were becoming more sensitive to such questions by the 90’s. (Note that I’m not saying that they’re the best e-mail programs. Just that they’re more likely to be conscious of this particular problem area than some more venerable programs are.)