Is it true Gemany is going through Spelling Reform now? To drop umlauts and the " ß "

Absofreakinlutely not! It’s a ligature of the old-style ‘medial s’ and the ‘final’ form we all use today.

For example, we can look at the German words for ‘river’ and ‘street’. At one point, they were, or could be, written:

Fluße - Straße

Long before the spelling reform of the last decade, it’s been more and more common to spell them

Flusse - Strasse

If the ß were a ligature of ‘s’ and ‘z’, then the spellings would have been

Flusze - Strasze

with the accompanying change in pronunciation to ‘Flus-tse’ and ‘Schtras-tse’.

You may be correct, Olentzero, but I’m wondering if you have any historical evidence that it derives from an ‘s’ and an ‘s’. If that’s true, I have two questions :

Why, then, is it called an ess-tset and not an ess-ess? (no silly Nazi war jokes, please.)

Why does it look exactly like medial s and z without the thick lines or complete loop? (this is in Fraktur, the way it was formerly written.)

To me, it seems easier to believe that what at one time might actually have been ‘sz’ was softened to ‘ss’ in pronounciation.

panama yak

A quick search for ‘ess-tset’ on Google didn’t net me any sort of history of the liagture, but plenty of assertions that it stood for ‘ss’. If the Germans already had a symbol for ‘s’ in the final position, I don’t believe they would use the ‘z’ in its place. I couldn’t tell you why it’s called an ‘ess-tset’, although it appears to me that it comes after Z in German alphabetical order. It doesn’t look like a medial s ligatured with a ‘z’ to me; I can’t see a ‘z’ in the right-hand element at all.

Here is an interesting example of the elements that make up an ß from the U.S. Bill of Rights.

I’m still trying to find early examples of the use of ß; nothing seems to be coming up in Old or Middle High German. The combination ‘sz’ doesn’t make an appearance either. It may be easier to believe ‘ss’ evolved from ‘sz’ but there is no evidence, at least as far as 15 minutes of research got me, to say it is correct to do so.

Did they do anyting about irregular verbs, or did they decide to just stay out of that particular minefield?

LP - as far as I know, it only concerns spelling. I don’t think they went after irregular conjugations, though perhaps there’s some rules for stem changes.
I did some searching of my own on the ess-zet, and did find at least some things. For one, I found out that it’s often called ‘scharfes s’ in German.

So here’s this, from an instructor’s page :

http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Hall/1238/intro.html#ortho

I always did in fact assume that the ligature meant ‘ss’, and was always to be replaced by two esses. The ‘sz’ seems to be just the origin. I found out to my surprise that it might sometimes equal ‘SZ’; from this page, Sec 1.2.2:

http://www.ifag.de/Kartographie/Stagn/tr_dt/sprachen.htm

And I don’t have an example similar to the Bill of Right’s opening ‘Congress’ – there simply aren’t words that actually have sz separate. But I really think it looks far more like sz than medial-final s. Look at one of Adobe’s fonts :

(it’s down the page a bit from the rest of the alphabet)

but by far the most convincing story (and one of the first I found) was the charming (and rather funny) fairy tale of the little s here :

http://www.franken.de/users/ssilkyway/ssilk/nkleines_s.html

An excerpt; the S-Mutter is speaking to the little s :
Eines Tages meinte die Mutter: “Du mußt unsere GroßS-mutter besuchen und ihr etwas zu S-en mitbringen.”

I’m convinced that that is the true story of how it happened.

panamajack

“S war einmal …”

First: I have in fact seen old (non-Fraktur) texts with a kind of sz ligature that looks like and s and a z together. There was a time in which this was the trend, so much so that it seems to have affected Hungarian which to this day writes the /s/ sound as “sz”.

Second: the letter can also be called “scharfes s”, but is in fact most often referred to as ess-tset which is in fact “s-z” in German.

Last and probably least, Fluss is the usual word for river, not Flusse (although it could be a old-fashioned dative), and is in fact now spelled with two esses according to the new rules.

Here’s a recent CNN item on the reform. Apparently it also included some rules like the use of commas. At any rate, it’s meeting some opposition: German paper readers want spelling reform ditched