ß
The letter ß (uppercase: ẞ) (not to be confused with the Latin letter B or the Greek letter beta: β) is a specific letter of the German alphabet. It is called Eszett [ɛsˈtsɛt] ('ese-zeta') or scharfes S [ ˈʃaʁfɛsˈɛs] ('that rough one'). It originated from the ligature of two consecutive s's, one of high spelling (ſ) and the other normal (s), or of a long s and a z in Gothic form (ʒ), in the way that the ñ represents the ligature of two n's
Since it never appears at the beginning of a word, ß existed only in a lowercase version; in texts written exclusively in capital letters, it used to be replaced by two s's, the same as in all those cases in which this character was not available in a typeface. In April 2008, an uppercase variant was introduced in Unicode version 5.1, whose grapheme is ẞ. On June 29, 2017, the German Orthography Council (Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, RDR, in German) officially introduced the uppercase version of the letter into the German alphabet.
Both ß and ss are pronounced similar to the Spanish phoneme s, without vibration of the vocal cords, distinguishing both from the letter s, used for the sonorous consonant heard in the Madrid pronunciation of mismo or in the English pronunciation of rose. The only difference between ß and ss is that the former is used to indicate that the vowel before it is long or a diphthong (as in Edelweiß), while the latter only follows vowels. short (as in delicatessen); are also found in derivatives of these words, respectively.
Before the 1996 German spelling reform, ß was also used at the end of a word, even if it was preceded by a short vowel. On the other hand, neither in Liechtenstein nor in German-speaking Switzerland is this letter used, but instead it is replaced by ss.
Keyboards
In Germany and Austria, the letter ß is present on computer and typewriter keyboards, usually to the right of the topmost row. In other countries, this letter does not appear on keyboards, but in many operating systems and programs there is a combination of other keys to produce it.
- Microsoft Windows: Alt+225 (or +0223), Ctrl+Alt+S; on some keyboards, such as the US-International also AltGr+S and Ctrl+Shift+S.
- Macintosh: Option+s, or Alt+b.
- X Window System: AltGr+S or Compose key, s, s.
- Emacs: C-x 8 "s.
- GNOME: Ctrl-Mayusculas-DF or, in the version of GNOME 2.15 and later, Ctrl-Mayusculas-U, df.
- Debian GNU/Linux: AltGr+S.
- SUSE Linux: AltGr+S.
- Ubuntu: AltGr+S.
- Friends (using Amiga's own keyboard): Alt+S.
In the Vim text editor and in GNU Screen, the digraph of ß is ss.