The letter Sharp S and the English language

The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Georg Bauhaus]

In case you remember a heated discussions of what ß is,
whether it is an S-Z ligature or an S-S, and how to (not)
downcase "ACCESS", more evidence comes from Ireland of 1759,
in the signature of Arthur Guinneß,

http://home.arcor.de/bauhaus/Ada/GUINNESS.jpg

The original is seen here:

http://www.guinness.com/en-row/img/story/1759/1759-t2.jpg


Cheers!

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Adam Beneschan]

On Saturday, March 23, 2013 2:22:26 PM UTC-7, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> In case you remember a heated discussions of what ß is,
> whether it is an S-Z ligature or an S-S, and how to (not)
> downcase "ACCESS", more evidence comes from Ireland of 1759,
> in the signature of Arthur Guinneß,
> 
> http://home.arcor.de/bauhaus/Ada/GUINNESS.jpg

That pretty clearly looks like two separate letters to me, although the two s's are in different styles.  But it isn't a ligature.  I'm not sure what your point is since I don't remember the original thread very well.

                         -- Adam

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Eryndlia Mavourneen]

A friend suggests...

   Perhaps a simple answer?  He was drunk!

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Georg Bauhaus]

On 25.03.13 17:15, Eryndlia Mavourneen wrote:
> A friend suggests...
> 
>    Perhaps a simple answer?  He was drunk!

Half of that bottle had gone when I saw the "ſs" on it, so...
your friend is right. Sorry!

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Georg Bauhaus]

On 25.03.13 16:23, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> On Saturday, March 23, 2013 2:22:26 PM UTC-7, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
>> In case you remember a heated discussions of what � is,
>> whether it is an S-Z ligature or an S-S, and how to (not)
>> downcase "ACCESS", more evidence comes from Ireland of 1759,
>> in the signature of Arthur Guinne�,
>>
>> http://home.arcor.de/bauhaus/Ada/GUINNESS.jpg
> 
> That pretty clearly looks like two separate letters to me, although the two s's are in different styles.  But it isn't a ligature.  I'm not sure what your point is since I don't remember the original thread very well.

I'm investigating how Unicode enabled Ada can help me "export"
street names to Switzerland. Thus,

  To_Upper ("Xyz-Stra�e");  -- String or Wide_String

What interests me is whether or not this might or might not work in the
future, i.e. with Ada 2012, in the light of recent developments of
ISO/IEC 10646:

First, you'd typically not be writing '�' in Switzerland and instead
replace every occurrence with "ss". That's for both lower case and
upper case. (And also when using small caps). So, To_Upper's definition
won't help.

But! Since Ada 2005 there are two new twists. In 2008, ISO/IEC 10646
has published an official upper case character for '�', U+1E9E. And in
2010, official spelling (read: government; "amtlich") requires U+1E9E
in geographical names. These include street names.

http://141.74.33.52/stagn/Portals/0/101125_TopR5.pdf

Currently, GNAT's implementation of
 Ada.Wide_Characters.Handling.To_Upper
gives Wide_Character'Val (223) for To_Upper ('�'), AFAICS.

Unicode's CaseFolding.txt, if applicable, has two lines pertaining
to the matter,

1E9E; F; 0073 0073; # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S
1E9E; S; 00DF; # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S

So I'm wondering if Simple Case Mapping might mean that

  To_Upper (Wide_Character'('�'))

should return Wide_Character'Val (16#1E9E#) in Ada 2012.


('�' will thus continue to cause problems originating in web based form
entry fields and elsewhere, I'm almost sure. Just one out of many
experiences: a major fruit company's customer invoices have consistently
shown what looks like junk HTML right after "Stra" in my address for years.)

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Eryndlia Mavourneen]

On Monday, March 25, 2013 2:42:01 PM UTC-5, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> On 25.03.13 17:15, Eryndlia Mavourneen wrote:
> 
> > A friend suggests...
> 
> > 
> 
> >    Perhaps a simple answer?  He was drunk!
> 
> 
> 
> Half of that bottle had gone when I saw the "ſs" on it, so...
> 
> your friend is right. Sorry!

It has been many, many years since I looked at Old or Middle English; however, it would make sense that during the time of the Norman invasion, which created Middle English (French influence), there would be a mix of writing styles, just as there was a mix of spellings and pronunciations.  As a couple of for instances, final "e" was pronounced as in Brook-e, and a combination of French (the court) and English (the commoners) was frequently used to help ensure clarity of intent as in "Cease and desist!"

-- Eryndlia

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Georg Bauhaus]

On 25.03.13 16:23, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> On Saturday, March 23, 2013 2:22:26 PM UTC-7, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
>> In case you remember a heated discussions of what ß is,
>> whether it is an S-Z ligature or an S-S, and how to (not)
>> downcase "ACCESS", more evidence comes from Ireland of 1759,
>> in the signature of Arthur Guinneß,
>>
>> http://home.arcor.de/bauhaus/Ada/GUINNESS.jpg
>
> That pretty clearly looks like two separate letters to me, although the two s's are in different styles.  But it isn't a ligature.  I'm not sure what your point is since I don't remember the original thread very well.

I forgot to mention the issue with 'ß' and Ada. Ada-auth.org produces
AI-05-0227 which mentions acceß and the 'Image of enumeration literal
Diyarbakır. Seeing that reminds me that I should search at least two
memories before posting (mine and the net's 8-°).

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Adam Beneschan]

On Monday, March 25, 2013 1:12:22 PM UTC-7, Eryndlia Mavourneen wrote:

 
> It has been many, many years since I looked at Old or Middle English; however, it would make sense that during the time of the Norman invasion, which created Middle English (French influence), there would be a mix of writing styles, just as there was a mix of spellings and pronunciations.  As a couple of for instances, final "e" was pronounced as in Brook-e, and a combination of French (the court) and English (the commoners) was frequently used to help ensure clarity of intent as in "Cease and desist!"

I think it's also the Normans' fault that we don't have wonderful letters like thorn and yogh and edh in English any more.  Too bad.  Wouldn't it be better if we could write something like

wiþ Ada.Text_IO;
procedure Display_Value (B : Boolean) is
begin
   if B ðen
       Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line ("true");
   else
       Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line ("false");
   end if;
end;

Clearly our world would be improved if we could write that.  Or maybe that's just the Guinneſs in me talking ...

                        -- Adam

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Randy Brukardt]

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"Georg Bauhaus" <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote in message 
news:5150a9f2$0$6567$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net...
...
> Unicode's CaseFolding.txt, if applicable, has two lines pertaining
> to the matter,
>
> 1E9E; F; 0073 0073; # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S
> 1E9E; S; 00DF; # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S
>
> So I'm wondering if Simple Case Mapping might mean that
>
>  To_Upper (Wide_Character'('ß'))
>
> should return Wide_Character'Val (16#1E9E#) in Ada 2012.

No. You are looking at the wrong Unicode table (case folding is used for 
case-insensitive comparisons, you want case mapping -- these get different 
results. Besides, case folding is a mapping to *lower* case.) If you were 
looking at the right table, the 'S' line would be the important one, and in 
this case, the mapping is to "00DF", which definitely is not "1E9E". ;-)

It's possible that the upper case mapping does use that character, but case 
mapping is implementation-defined in the respect that we don't require the 
use of any particular character set standard so long as it is at least as 
new as 10646:2003. So if a compiler used the 2003 definition, then it would 
be impossible to have the result you want.

Moral: if you care about anything that's changed in character set mappings 
since 10646:2003, then you have to write your own conversions in order to be 
sure that they happen.

                                   Randy.

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Randy Brukardt]

"Georg Bauhaus" <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote in message 
news:5150a88a$0$6556$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net...
> On 25.03.13 17:15, Eryndlia Mavourneen wrote:
>> A friend suggests...
>>
>>    Perhaps a simple answer?  He was drunk!
>
> Half of that bottle had gone when I saw the "?s" on it, so...
> your friend is right. Sorry!

Isn't this the issue of the two forms of 's' that John Barnes wrote about in 
the Ada 2005 Rationale??
http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/05rat/html/Rat-7-5.html

"The Greek situation used to apply in English where the long s was used in 
the middle of words (where it looked like an f but without a cross stroke) 
and the familiar short s only at the end. To modern eyes this makes poetic 
lines such as "Where the bee sucks, there suck I" somewhat dubious. (This is 
sung by Ariel in Act V Scene I of The Tempest by William Shakespeare.)"

It would appear that the spelling of "Guiness" would also use one long and 
one short 's'.

                                                 Randy.

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Eryndlia Mavourneen]

> 
> Isn't this the issue of the two forms of 's' that John Barnes wrote about in 
> the Ada 2005 Rationale??
> 
> http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/05rat/html/Rat-7-5.html
> 
>                                                  Randy

John Barnes says,

  In some systems, such as the ideographic system used by Chinese, Japanese and 
  Korean, there is only one case, so things are easy. But in other systems, like     
  the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, upper and lower case characters have 
  to be considered.

But, of course, in languages using the Persian-Arabic script (such as Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu) we have to contend with 3 letter forms -- beginning-of-word, middle-of-word, and end-of-word.

-- Eryndlia

Re: The letter Sharp S and the English language

[Paul Sture]

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In article <5150a9f2$0$6567$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net>,
 Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote:

> On 25.03.13 16:23, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> > On Saturday, March 23, 2013 2:22:26 PM UTC-7, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> >> In case you remember a heated discussions of what � is,
> >> whether it is an S-Z ligature or an S-S, and how to (not)
> >> downcase "ACCESS", more evidence comes from Ireland of 1759,
> >> in the signature of Arthur Guinne�,
> >>
> >> http://home.arcor.de/bauhaus/Ada/GUINNESS.jpg
> > 
> > That pretty clearly looks like two separate letters to me, although the two 
> > s's are in different styles.  But it isn't a ligature.  I'm not sure what 
> > your point is since I don't remember the original thread very well.
> 
> I'm investigating how Unicode enabled Ada can help me "export"
> street names to Switzerland. Thus,
> 
>   To_Upper ("Xyz-Stra�e");  -- String or Wide_String
> 
> What interests me is whether or not this might or might not work in the
> future, i.e. with Ada 2012, in the light of recent developments of
> ISO/IEC 10646:
> 
> First, you'd typically not be writing '�' in Switzerland and instead
> replace every occurrence with "ss". That's for both lower case and
> upper case. (And also when using small caps). So, To_Upper's definition
> won't help.

Indeed, Swiss German keyboards do not have '�' (which was a real pain 
when doing a German language course on Windows which insisted I used it).

> 
> But! Since Ada 2005 there are two new twists. In 2008, ISO/IEC 10646
> has published an official upper case character for '�', U+1E9E. And in
> 2010, official spelling (read: government; "amtlich") requires U+1E9E
> in geographical names. These include street names.
> 
> http://141.74.33.52/stagn/Portals/0/101125_TopR5.pdf

That's a useful document.  The last paragraph on Page 10 might mean you 
need to clean up existing data:

"NEW: Due to the new regulation of German spelling the letter � is after 
a short (stressed) vowel now replaced by ss. The letter � remains after 
a long vowel or a diphthong."

<snip>

> ('�' will thus continue to cause problems originating in web based form
> entry fields and elsewhere, I'm almost sure.

Yes I would expect problems with web based forms. On OS X I can get � 
via option-s, but on Windows that is alt-0223, not something I expect a 
typical end user to remember.

> Just one out of many
> experiences: a major fruit company's customer invoices have consistently
> shown what looks like junk HTML right after "Stra" in my address for years.)

I had an example the other day in a Captcha which decided from my IP 
address that I needed German when viewing a UK based website.  I wish 
that if they are going to do that they would get it right...

http://www.sture.ch/images/scrambled-umlauts.png

-- 
Paul Sture