This week I looked up a word in my collection of dictionaries and was surprised to find sharp S at the begin of words. It's not German, but transcription of Yiddish by Duden into German phonetics. Of course this not an established standard and maybe dates back to the times before World War II, where the JIVO Institute in Berlin was an important center for this language.
4
Comments
"ẞ" yet and it is used so rarely that most people wouldn't even know that this letter exists. Its design is usually so close to the lower case that most people would rather wonder why someone used a lower case letter instead of "SZ" in an all captitals headline, which has been the common solution until recently.
how? by learning about those typefaces.
For those of you who are not familiar with it, Yiddish is a West Germanic language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews and written in Hebrew script. It contains a significant number of Hebrew and Aramaic words, as well as words from Slavic languages, reflecting the culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Yiddish was my family’s secondary household language and I grew up speaking and reading it. In later life, I became involved with it professionally.
The Yiddish word sofek ספק ( the English noun “doubt”) is a direct borrowing from the Hebrew safeik. In Western Yiddish, it was more common to see “doubt” expressed as “Zweifel,” taken from German. Be that as it may, there is no phonological reason to express the initial consonant with an eszett. I don’t have a copy of the Duden Jiddisches Wörterbuch (just ordered one), so I can’t access their reasoning. Did they transliterate all other words beginning with the letter samekh with an eszett? To do so seems absurd to me; to single out this word for such treatment is, on its face, ridiculous.
@John Savard, can you send a picture of the entry? I’m thinking it might be an IPA symbol (International Phonetic Alphabet, not India Pale Ale) rather than an eszett, perhaps one of the sibilant fricative symbols.
I doubt kerning would ever be necessary between ẞ and preceding punctuation or a following minuscule/small capital glyph.
For original (means 'book') in YIVO orthography:
ספֿר
ßejfer -> ßojferLooked in my two other German-Jiddisch dictionaries.
[2] Rosten, Jiddisch - Eine kleine Enzyklopädie, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv), 2013, also uses ß for samekh.
ßejfer (EN-US: Seyfer, Sefer)
[3] Sigmund A. Wolf, Jiddisches Wörterbuch, Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg 1986, uses ss.
ssefer
He explaines the transcription in the preface as samekh -> ss, ß and refers to Bernstein, Ignaz, Jiddisch in ..., Warschau 1908 and Landau, Alfred 1911.
[4] Solon Beinfeld, Harry Bocher, Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary, Indiana University Press, 2013, uses the YIVO orthography and YIVO transcription
[SEYFER]
[5] Peter T. Daniels (Editor), The World's Writing Systems, gives
samekh: IPA [s], YIVO s
Searching older books:
[7] Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch, 1918, https://archive.org/details/siebensprachenw00prusuoft/
Without diacritics ("unpointed" quadratic Hebrew), no transcription:
[8] Ave-Lallemant, Friedrich - Das Deutsche Gaunertum - 3. Band (1914), p. 246 https://archive.org/details/AveLallemantFriedrichDasDeutscheGaunertum3.Band1914543S.ScanFraktur/ has ss
and uses Ashkenasi Cursive (could not find a digital font for this writing style). Maybe I will reconstruct it if I find better specimen.
Many early books (15th to 17th century) printed in Germany used Rashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaybertaytsh, a semi-cursive Hebrew. There is a font Noto Rashi Hebrew on fonts.google.com which claims to support Yiddish but IMHO lacks some codepoints like the precomposed U+FB2B HEBREW LETTER SHIN WITH SIN DOT (Other_Letter) = sin, and U+FB4A HEBREW LETTER TAV WITH DAGESH (Other_Letter) = tof.
In Austria, the voiced S tends to be less voiced than in most Germany*. I think it’s also the case in Switzerland. But in central and northern Germany, S is very clearly either »z« or (in front of some consonants) »sh«. And this is exactly the reason why the double-S was introduced, from which ß evolved.
* Salzburg in most German-speaking regions sounds like »zalts-burg«, but in Austria it often sounds like »ssalts-burg«.
Incidentally, I want to thank you for your post, as it inspired me first to update a page on my site about keyboard arrangements which discussed a news item from 2016, where France was seeking to modify its standard for the AZERTY keyboard to support upper-case accented letters... and then to do a Google search, from which I found that in 2019, they actually completed the process, and issued the new standard, NF Z71-300.