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Capital sharp s (ẞ; German Versal-Eszett) is the majuscule (uppercase) form of the eszett (also called sharp s) ligature in German orthography (ß). German eszett is, in origin, a ligature of two minuscule (lowercase) letters, long s and tailed z, and as such has no traditional majuscule form. Nevertheless, typefaces used for printing German language texts during the early 20th century have often included capital eszett glyphs. There have also been repeated calls to include capital eszett into official German orthography, particularly in the early 20th century, and again during the 1950s and 1960s in East Germany, but the character has never entered widespread use, and has never been part of official orthography.
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Capital ß (ẞ) was introduced as part of the Latin Extended Additional block in Unicode version 5.1 in 2008 (U+1E9E ẞ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S). This has led to renewed debate regarding the graphical design of this character for the purposes of Unicode typefaces, and its possible future incorporation in official orthography.
History
Historical typefaces offering a capitalized eszett mostly date to the time between 1905 and 1930. The first known typesets to include capital eszett were produced by the Schelter & Giesecke foundry in Leipzig, in 1905/6. Schelter & Giesecke at the time widely advocated the use of this type, but its use remained very limited.
At the height of the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute, in 1909, Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke designed an Antiqua font intended to preserve the advantages of Fraktur for the purposes of typesetting German without resorting to a bastardization of the two traditions. The resulting "Ehmcke-Antiqua" was unique in not only offering a capital variant of ß, but also a capital variant of long s (ſ) as well as capital ligatures of the ch and ck digraphs. Ehmcke-Antiqua was adopted by Stephenson Blake under the name Carlton, which was adapted (without the specialised ligatures offered by Ehmcke's original font) in digital form by Linotype in 1994. Most typeset designers attempted to fit the shape of the ß ligature into their majuscules. An alternative approach was a type design which derived the majuscule equivalent of ß from a ligature of the majuscule digraph SZ. An example of this is the Cicero specimen published by Bauer Type Foundry c. 1912, which included both majuscule SS and SZ ligatures.
The preface to the 1925 edition of the Duden dictionary expressed the desirability of a separate glyph for capital ß:
"Die Verwendung zweier Buchstaben für einen Laut ist nur ein Notbehelf, der aufhören muss, sobald ein geeigneter Druckbuchstabe für das große ß geschaffen ist." "The use of two letters for a single phoneme is makeshift, to be abandoned as soon as a suitable type for the capital ß has been developed."The Duden was edited separately in East and West Germany during the 1950s to 1980s. The East German Duden of 1957 (15th ed.) introduced a capital ß in its typesetting without revising the rule for capitalisation. The 16th edition of 1969 still announced that an uppercase ß was in development and would be introduced in the future. The 1984 edition again removed this announcement and simply stated that there is no capital version of ß.
In the 2000s, there were renewed efforts on the part of certain typographers to introduce capital ẞ. A proposal to include a corresponding character in the Unicode set submitted in 2004 was rejected. A second proposal submitted in 2007 was successful, and the character was included in Unicode version 5.1.0 in April 2008 ("ẞ" U+1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S). The international standard associated with Unicode (UCS), ISO/IEC 10646, was updated to reflect the addition on 24 June 2008. In August of the same year, Duden (Bibliographisches Institut, duden.de) published a comment regarding capital eszett (Das große Eszett) in its Newsletter. In the statement, the introduction of capital ẞ by ISO 10646 is welcomed as an "important innovation, especially for publishing houses, albeit not part of official orthography".
The 5th edition of the German "Toponymic Guidelines for map and other editors for international use" (2010) makes explicit mention of the recognition of capital ẞ by DIN and ISO and its adoption in the Unicode character set.
In 2016, the Council for German Orthography proposed the introduction of optional use of ẞ in its ruleset (i.e. variants STRASSE vs. STRAẞE would be accepted as equally valid).
Current situation
As of 2017, capital ẞ does not form part of official German orthography, but its 2008 introduction to ISO 10646 has revived the century-old debate among font designers as to how such a character should be represented.
There are two basic approaches, on one hand, the character may be designed as a capital version of lowercase ß, on the other, it may be derived from a ligature of uppercase letters SS or SZ. Designs for an SZ ligature has been part of typesets from the 1910s until the 1950s, but in the opinion of Herrmann (2011), the long-standing alphabetic equivalence of ß with ss and the abolition of the optional capitalization of ß as SZ (abandoned in 1996) means that this is no longer a valid option that "Germans would want to use on a regular basis". At the same time, Hermann also rejects the realization of capital ß as an SS ligature, because "The whole point of having ß in the German alphabet today, is that it represents a different pronunciation [viz., of the length of the preceding vowel] than ss", concluding that the "capitalized ß" approach is "the most promising one", and indeed the one followed by most font designers since 2008.
The main difference in the shapes of ẞ in contemporary fonts is the depiction with a diagonal straight line vs. a curved line in its upper right part, reminiscent of the ligature of tailed z or of round s, respectively. The code chart published by the Unicode Consortium favours the former possibility, which has been adopted by Unicode capable fonts including Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Courier New, Dejavu Serif, Liberation Sans, Liberation Mono, Linux Libertine and Times New Roman; the second possibility is more rare, adopted by Dejavu Sans. Some fonts adopt a third possibility in representing ẞ following the Sulzbacher Form of ß, reminiscent of the "Greek beta" shape (β); such a shape has been adopted by FreeSans and FreeSerif, Liberation Serif and Verdana.