However, I recently began searching for the history of eszett and its use and found no such references, although google did come up with some informal sources that claimed this to be true. If anyone who knows a good bit about this, I'd appreciate a history lesson.
Thanks in advance!
"In der Schweiz wurde das "ß" nie formal abgeschafft, doch wurde es im allgemeinen Gebrauch immer mehr durch "ss" ersetzt, was bis heute so ist. Deshalb betrifft die Schweiz ein Teil der Rechtschreibreform von 1998 auch überhaupt nicht. Hierzu ist aber wiederum zu bemerken, dass im Schweizerischen Bundesblatt bereits seit 1906 eine Schreibweise ohne jegliches "ß" verwendet wird, in einigen Kantonen aber noch in den 60er Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts noch das "ß" regelmäßig verwendet wurde."
subtle difference, but it's there.
In typesetting technical literature, it is a commonly made mistake to use the German letter ß (a s–z or s–s ligature) as a replacement for β. The two letters resemble each other in some fonts, but they are unrelated.
subtle difference, but it's there.
(Obviously, German QWERTZ keyboards have a ß key. Swiss German QWERTZ keyboards don't.)
So my guess is the devide started with the typewriter. The more the Standardised the Swiss keyboard became, the less common to see eszet.
Österreich - Schweiz 1:2
Migranten auf der Balkanroute: Osterreich übernimmt die Führung
Caps Lock + ö = Ö
ÜÖÄ
The Swiss QWERTZ keyboard actually has to accommodate four languages — and of course many use it for English, too. The Swiss keyboard is the same for all, but with different drivers to allow access without shift keys to the accented letters, so for example 'é' requires no shift key if the keyboard is set up for French but does if it's primarily used for German. Conversely, 'ä' is easily accessible on a German Swiss keyboard but not as easily on an Italian-, French- or Rumantsch-configured keyboard.
Note that the Ctrl and Del keys are in English on Swiss keyboards — this was a compromise to try to cater to the four national languages!
There also exists AZERTY keyboards, which are French (for France and most of Belgium), just as there are also QWERTZ keyboards for Germany that lack some of the keys that Swiss keyboards have (but do have an ß key).
That's nonsense about the Swiss dispensing with umlauts on capital letters. Where did you get that idea?
Subtle difference but it's there.
On the other hand, Ae / ae, Oe / oe and Ue / ue actually had been the original way of writing an umlaut since the Middle Ages; around 13th century the "e" was moved on top of the main vowel, where it gradually turned into two vertical slashes and then two dots around the 16th century. Ae etc. kept being widely used in many scripts way into the 19th century, and so did the little "e" diacritic.
Since ä, ö and ü are used much more frequently than the capital variants, it made some sense in the entire 20th century to put them on the cramped Swiss IRTKPC keyboard but replace the Ä etc. with the French and partly Italian and Romansh accent diacritics.
Because Ae etc. were so widely used in typewritten text, most Swiss Germans do not even notice if someone writes Österreich or Oesterreich , and many type " Oel " out of a pure habit.
The eszett is a different matter. It originally is a typographic ligature of a "long s" ("s", also to be found in many old text in other languages including English) and a "z". It underwent several changes of its usage since the early Middle Ages and eventually ended up as a means to mark the different pronunciation of Busse (with a short "u", meaning busses in English) and Buße (with a long "u", meaning fines).
The same applies to Masse (mass in the physical sense) and Maße (measures, dimensions), Schoss (= Schössling , a shoot on a plant) and Schoß (the lap of a person), and, funny enough, Floß (a raft) and Dental Floss (which is English anyway.
Those are pretty much the only examples where the eszett really matters these days that come to my mind right now. But they are not important because the different pronunciations can be easily told from the context.
So, in the first half of the 20th century with the wide spread of typewriters, the Swiss said, "Hey, what the heck? Why should we keep using a special character just to avoid four pretty rare ambiguities of pronunciation? We have enough troubles with our other national languages, so let's remove that typographical appendix. After all, there are many more ambiguities in German orthography and pronunciation to deal with."
And they did. Very painlessly. The Germans, Austrians etc., however, stuck to it even through the latest Orthography Reform of 1996. I still wonder why. Not a single person in Switzerland has ever been hurt because the eszett got dropped, but because of four (FOUR!) ambiguous spellings you still have to use a character that exists only in one language and is a major p.i.t.a. to find on a non-German computer.
And those very same folks in their Ivory Tower force us (including the Swiss!) to write auswendig and aufwenden , but aufwändig ? Come on!
I just tried it out and alt+0223 still produces the ß on a Windows machine.
