Re: German Letter in the English Language!?

Peter Willer wrote:

Hi,

a friend told me that in earlier times, the English Language had the Letter "ß", in Germany called "sz". I've googled around but haven't found further information. Is here someone, who knows more about this?

I hope I've chosen the subject well, I only guess that the German Language is the only one, which contain the letter "sz".


Earlier in English (and in other languages too) there were two forms of the letter "s". One looked a bit like "f" without the crossbar and the otehr looked like the modern "s". When you had double "s" it was often written like "fs" (without the crossbar on the "f" , of course). For frequently occurring letter combinations such as "ss", "ti", "fi" etc.printers often used combined letters called ligatures because it saved time (and space) while typesetting with loose type. This meant that a "ss" often looked like the German letter "ß". This ligature was retained in German, becoming a semi-independent letter itself, while it disappeared in other languages - this was probably aided by the fact that in the old gothic script (Fraktur) many letter pairs were represented by such ligatures.

It might help if you gathered information about ligatures. Incidentally the German umlauted letters originated from such ligatures too.

Hope that helps a bit.

Regards, Einde O'Callaghan
.

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