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The ß — Eszett or scharfes Es (sharp es) if spelled out — is a letter used only in the German alphabet. It represents the ligature "ss" under certain conditions (cf. the letter W, which represents a ligature, too: "double u"). "ß" is unique among the letters of western alphabets in that it has no majuscule (upper-case form); "SS" must be used when everything is being written in capitals. Nowadays many people simply use the lower-case glyph with all-caps too, but this is considered typographically wrong.
[es'tset] is a phonetic transcription of how the two letters "s" and "z" are pronounced in German. This is meant to reflect that ß is derived from a ligature of the long or medial "s" ("?") and "z". However, the increasingly more common way of referring to the letter is scharfes S (sharp S), in reference to the way it is pronounced.
There is some controversy on whether this is correct. In the past, some influential scholars, most notably Jan Tschichold in 1940Events January-February January 5 FM radio is demonstrated to the FCC for the first time. January 6 World War II: Mass execution of Poles, committed by Germans in the Poznan, Warthegau. January 12 World War II: Russia bombs cities in Finland. February 2 F ("Herkunft und Form des ß in der Fraktur und der Antiqua"), have argued that the letter actually comes from the long "s" and the short or terminal " sS is the nineteenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Semitic Šin (bow) was pronounced as /S/ as the modern English digraph SH. In Greek, there was only one phoneme /s/ and no /S/, so Greek σιγμα ( sigma) came to repres" (now the conventional minusculeMinuscule or lower case is the smaller form ( case) of letters (in the Roman alphabet: a b c . Originally alphabets were written entirely in majuscule (capital) letters which were spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. When written quickly wi letterform). Such a ligature certainly existed for example in Old FrenchOld French is a term sometimes used to refer to the langue d'oil, the continuum of varieties of Romance language spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland during the period rough handwriting, and in EnglishThe English language is a West Germanic language, originating from England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the mil, perhaps most famously in the original typography of the United States Declaration of IndependenceThe Declaration of Independence is a document in which the Thirteen Colonies declared themselves independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain and explained their justifications for doing so. It was ratified by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776; this, in the spelling of such words as "nece?sary", "di?solve", and "Congre?s". Tschichold also presents a speculation for the evolution of ß in Fraktur type. He concludes that the naming "sz" is entirely incorrect.
Though many have accepted this view, others have since argued that it is too simplistic and, specifically, that the Fraktur forms hypothesized by Tschichold do not exist: for example, Max Bollwage in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1999. As, in any case, "ß" derives from a ligature, the discussion has to focus on historical orthography, and in fact, in old texts both the "?z" and the "?s" writing can be found. Typically, in Blackletter typefaces like Gothic or Fraktur, the ligature "long s + z" is used (see illustration). On the other hand, in Antiqua types as used in modern scripture, the composition of "ß" as "long s + terminal s" seems graphically more plausible, depending on the particular font used.