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In the 20th century, the ß-character was replaced with ss in the spelling of Swiss Standard German (Switzerland and Liechtenstein), while remaining Standard German spelling in other varieties of the German language. [3] The letter originates as the sz digraph as used in late medieval and early modern German orthography, represented as a ...
The letter q in German only ever appears in the sequence qu (/kv/), with the exception of loanwords, e.g., Coq au vin or Qigong (which is also written Chigong). The letter x (Ix, /ɪks/) occurs almost exclusively in loanwords. Native German words that are now pronounced with a /ks/ sound are usually written using chs or cks, as with Fuchs (fox).
Umlaut (/ ˈ ʊ m l aʊ t /) is a name for the two dots diacritical mark ( ̈) as used to indicate in writing (as part of the letters ä , ö , and ü ) the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels (for example , , and as , , and ).
German has four special letters; three are vowels accented with an umlaut sign ( ä, ö, ü ) and one is derived from a ligature of ſ and z ( ß ; called Eszett "ess-zed/zee" or scharfes S "sharp s"). They have their own names separate from the letters they are based on.
"umlaut In German placenames, ae, oe and ue should almost always be rendered ä, ö, ü. Family names, however, for the most part became petrified many years ago and there is no way of working out whether the e form or the umlaut should be used; you just have to find out for each individual" (ISBN 1843549913, 2004-07-14)
Besides the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, [b] Fraktur usually includes the Eszett ß in the ſʒ form, vowels with umlauts, and the long s ſ . Some Fraktur typefaces also include a variant form of the letter r known as the r rotunda , and many include a variety of ligatures which are left over from cursive handwriting and have ...
The present-day German letter ß (German: Eszett or scharfes s; also used in Low German and historical Upper Sorbian orthographies) is generally considered to have originated in a ligature of ſz (which is supported by the fact that the second part of the ß grapheme usually resembles a Fraktur z: , hence ſ ; see ß for details), although in ...
Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...