Re: German uppercasing rules (was: supporting obscure languages)

[John Cowan]

Albert Cahalan scripsit:

> > Unicode 5.0 has introduced the character U+1E9E "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP 
> > S",
> > but the habits in Germany have not changed. The upper-case variant of "Ruß"
> > is still "RUSS". German people don't care about whether this round-trips
> > or not. "ß" uppercases to "SS". It has been like this for centuries.
> 
> Germans with "ß" in their last name are people too, and they care.

I don't see why those people would expect to see their names in upper case.

> U+1E9E exists solely because there is real evidence that people care.

True, but the people in question are mostly the designers of
advertisements who want to put headlines in all caps.

As a certified alter kocker, I personally think that German looks horrible
in all caps, but that battle was lost a generation ago.

> It is pretty common to uppercase "ß" as itself; clearly people care.

Especially if they have blindly applied simple Unicode uppercasing rather
than proper German uppercasing.

Turkic, though, is a more complex problem.  Knowing how to properly recase
German or Greek just requires applying the algorithm: you don't have to
know that the text actually is German or Greek.  To correctly change the
case of a Turkic language, you have to know for sure that you are dealing
with Turkic text.  I can well understand if people fail to get that right,

-- 
John Cowan      address@hidden        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Is it not written, "That which is written, is written"?