On German letter for "sz" & shift vowels (2012-01-29)

For I have recently experienced such search entries with wrongly spelled German, I would like to contribute an ABC post.

There are tons of fraud OCRs falsely recognise German letter solely stands for "sz" (i.e. "ß") and apparently there are millions of people who occasionally run into some German title (books, address, etc.) and it is thereby "misspelled" as B or even disseminated as "b" such as in *einbahnstraBe and *einbahnstrabe by someone else. Don't be fooled! An alternative, officially and pedagogically approved, for this situation in non-German-speaking countries and written typefaces, in this case, it will be transscribed as "ss" and it appeared "sz" in old times as in some classical poems, as some variant to modern orthography. For example:

Wilhelmsstraße → Wilhelmsstrasse, can also be (but outfashioned and non-standard today): Wilhelmstrasze

accordingly, the well-known book by Walter Benjamin

Einbahnstraße[1] → Einbahnstrasse, Einbahnstrasze; never valid for *einbahnstraBe or *einbahnstrabe

Yes, this trick requires a minimum knowledge in German, but anyone who would mess up a little with German would be criticized for a mistake like this forever on the web.

There is a German layout on QWER keyboard

Source description Here

By the way, many of the nomina in non-German situations are de-capitalized and this is not very seriously wrong. There is another problem, namely, the Umlaut[e] (umlauts), the -a-, -o- and -u- shift as -ä-, -ö- and -ü- respectively. There are also alternatives to muste the umlauts to write ä as ae as in Maedchen, ö as oe as in Oeler and ü as ue as in Mueller. Don't just miss them. That can cause misunderstandings and difficulties in bibliographical issues. Now you learned how to play it smart.

P.s. Greek letter for "beta" (β) is not an alternative for "ß". Things like this happened, and are still happening somewhere. Don't mistake, my readers.

An example from Grimm-Wörterbuch (DWB) online [at Woerterbuchnetz.de], there you see the ancient spelling for ß as "sz":

From YOSEF

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[1] Also, a Verkehrsschild/ Verkehrszeichen, a traffic sign for "one-way-street".