German ß + French Œ

[mikelove]

Working on updates to our full-text indexer to support a "don't ignore diacritical marks" option (so that letters containing umlauts are treated differently from non-umlaut letters in German), and while ä / ö / ü are fairly straightforward, we're a bit puzzled about what to do with ß.

Right now, we turn that internally into 'ss', so that when you type an ß you also get matches with 'ss' in its place and vice versa. Our understanding, however, is that ß/ss does serve as a differentiator in some cases, 'buße' versus 'busse' e.g., and that it might be worth adding an option to make that distinction, probably as a separate option from the ä / ö / ü one since as we understand it ß is not used at all in Switzerland and German-speaking Swiss users would likely prefer that we not require them to remember whether a particular word ought to use an ß or an ss.

My question, though, is whether the ß/ss distinction is actually observed consistently enough in our dictionaries that it would be worth having as an option, or whether it's enough of a muddle that you're basically going to always want them merged anyway. Can anyone provide any insight on that (and on whether this option would be a good idea in general)?

 

[mikelove]

Also, a related question for our French-speaking friends: what should we do about Œ? Is it likewise a meaningful differentiator or is it something that we can simply ignore + treat as 'oe' for search purposes?

 

[Shun]

I checked with Google, I think there are only three cases in German where the "ss" / "ß" distinction matters:

Masse (mass) -- Maße (measurements)
Busse (buses) -- Buße (fine)
Russe (Russian person) -- Ruße (carbon blacks, very rare)

In all other cases, like "Gruss" (Swiss) or "Gruß" (German), or "Spass" and "Spaß", the words mean the same thing whether one writes "ss" or "ß", so I would suggest that you just merge "ss" and "ß" and don't offer the option to distinguish between them. In those rare cases of ambiguity, if Pleco shows both in a prominent position, the user should not get confused.

That's very true, most Swiss would certainly prefer just being able to always use "ss".

Edit: Perhaps even better, you could save these three special cases: "Maße", "Buße", and "Ruße" inside Pleco, so that only in these cases, the words with the "ß" are chosen instead of both.

 

[HW60]

The spelling of german words is defined in a book called Duden. It states in rule 160:
If the keyboard of a computer or a typewriter has no ß, you take ss instead. In Switzerland you can generally use ss instead of ß.

 

[sahal]

There is also a certain degree of ambiguity because of the orthography reform of the 90s. I know that I still sometimes type Fluß instead of Fluss, and if the indexed text is old enough, it might contain Kuß instead of Kuss. So I would probably want to have ss and ß always merged, even when I might not want the same for umlauts.

 

[Shun]

Just to add this little fact: As part of the orthography reform of the 90s, the use of "ß" after short, stressed vowels was discouraged. (like Kuß or Fluß, now Kuss and Fluss) So now, "ß" occurs pretty much only after long vowels. But in both cases, no semantic distinction can be made between "ß" and "ss", so they can easily be merged. (except for Maße, Buße, and Ruße, which, when written this way, can only mean one thing, while Masse, Busse, and Russe can mean two things each)

 

[jyh]

Also, a related question for our French-speaking friends: what should we do about Œ? Is it likewise a meaningful differentiator or is it something that we can simply ignore + treat as 'oe' for search purposes?

Πis really just a ligature, so for all purposes (including dictionary search) it is treated as OE rather than as a a special character.
The same goes for Æ vs. AE