posted on February 28, 2004 07:10:49 PM new
well the vote is all for EdelweiB (Edelweis). Too bad I can't Google anything up on the maker.
The outfit is for a young boy, the wool jacket, the suspenders, the suede shorts and the matching socks. I can't decide if I want to go ahead and list it or wait until it gets closer to Oktoberfest in October. It looks like they bring pretty good prices anytime though.
posted on February 28, 2004 07:49:32 PM new
Edelweiss for sure! that thing that looks like a B is the way they do the double S.
If you're lucky, someone won't come in here and start doing the jokes about German words and spellings.
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posted on February 28, 2004 07:57:45 PM new
I think I do got it trai
Thought I was right, or should I say my son was right. He lived in Germany for 3 & 1/2 years.
He said the spelling for street is Strasse, but you often see it spelled Strabe, using the B with the tail instead of the double S
Now does anyone know the name for the B with a tail. Could it be beta B or epsilon?
posted on February 28, 2004 09:46:04 PM new
The name is "es-zet":
"The name of the symbol comes from how it is written (as a single symbol). The scripted "z" looks a bit like a "3". The "s" is similar to a capital "S". If you look at how a double-s was written 200 years ago in English, a word like Congress was written like "CongreSs" (use your imagination or look at a copy of the US Constitution).
At any rate, the large "S" in combination with a scripted "z" is the es-zet. A better substitution would be Sz when considering it's origin."
That's partially inaccurate. It's called sz for phonetic reasons; it has no relation to the actual letter z. Its origin is the ss it represents; it's a ligature (a merging of two letters), one which was used in languages other than German (even English) in the past. Notably, though, it was more of a flourish than anything in languages other than German; German changed it from a matter of aesthetics to a matter of spelling, using both ss and ß, and not interchangeably.
It may seem odd to call it a ligature because it doesn't look much like two small s's, but at the time of its origin, an s which fell inside a word was written very much like the lowercase f, but without a full horizontal stroke. A lowercase s at the end of a word was drawn as we do today. When they fell next to each other, artistic calligraphers (and clever typesetters; using ligatures in type conserved space and made text flow more naturally) merged the top of the tall s to the short s.
And no matter the orthography, a capital ß is always SS.
