Quick Luddite Notes

German Swiss keyboards are retarded

In the last ten years, I grew accustomed to the German keyboard layout, although in a previous life I mostly used UK and US keyboards. With the US layout, I preferred the ISO version with a large ENTER key, although in recent years most keyboards are ANSI, even if they are “international,” with an AltGr on the right-side Alt key.

As I am multilingual of sorts, I am also used to switching the logical keyboard layout to US English International (with dead keys for some French characters) or Romanian, while using a physical German keyboard.

If you have a UK English keyboard (or a CANYON keyboard, because CANYON sells only a unique UK-cum-US layout with all symbols printed for both layouts), you have an even smarter choice: the UK English Extended layout. With this extended layout, Alt enables composing with grave accents, and AltGr allows composing with diaresis (Umlaut), circumflex, acute accent, and tilde. Not only that, but with AltGr you already get some accented characters (maybe this page helps).

Unfortunately, as I said, I prefer the German layout, even though certain programming characters are harder to input than on US/UK layouts: ()[]{}\|. Even if I need to press AltGr or Shift-AltGr, the muscle memory makes this an automatic reflex. 🤷‍♂️

By the way, Linux also supports a so-called “Romanian (Germany)” layout (listed under “German”), which is just your regular German keyboard, with șțăâî added on stäai!

That said, I was considering the Swiss German keyboard layout and tried to weigh its advantages and disadvantages against the standard German layout. Take a look at the layouts.

Also online: German vs. Swiss German. Microsoft has them, too: German vs. Swiss German.

It’s obvious that, while being a German QWERTZ layout, the Swiss variant was designed to include French characters and even the cent and pound characters (oh, those Swiss banks!). But in doing so, it changed the place of a few characters by placing them in the most unexpected places: !+* are only a few of them. And no µ anymore.

Oh, no, the Swiss are retarded! There is no ß whatsoever!

German:

Swiss German:

Funny thing, how they wrote everything in English. But where is my ß?!

Google answered:

The ß (Eszett) character is completely absent from standard Swiss German physical keyboard layouts because Switzerland officially abolished its use in standard spelling, replacing it everywhere with ss. Wikipedia

And:

Swiss Standard German does not use the letter ß (Eszett) primarily due to practical typewriter limitations, educational simplification, and a historical shift away from German printing conventions. Reddit and Quora

AI Overview (a second time I got a different overview):

Key Reasons for Dropping the "ß"

Typewriter Keyboards: Swiss typewriters had to accommodate keys for three national languages (German, French, and Italian). Space was limited, so the ß key was dropped in favor of a double ss.

School Reforms: Switzerland stopped teaching the ß in primary schools starting in the 1930s and 1940s (such as in Zürich in 1938).

Official Abolition: The Swiss federal administration phased out the letter by the late 19th century, and it was officially removed from Swiss spelling standards in the 2006 spelling reform.

Cultural Distance: Anti-German sentiments during the 20th century encouraged Switzerland to create a distinct written standard separate from Germany.

Typographic Shifts: The move away from traditional German Blackletter (Fraktur) fonts to Roman (Antiqua) fonts made the ß ligature less standard in Swiss publishing.

Sources: Reddit, StackExchange, Apostroph Group, TheLocal.ch

Fucking tards.

The Apostroph page has this chapeau (or lede):

The sad fate of the hunchbacked Mr S.

After all we don't want to cause confusion. If a German speaker sees the phrase “Trinken in Massen” (literally drinking masses), he could think you were advocating binge drinking and not explaining that drinks are served in the traditional German litre glasses, written with a ß. In the large canton up north, elongated S sounds are still indicated with an “ß”, affectionately also called an Eszett or a hunchbacked S.

Drinking in moderation would have prevented this shit. But maybe they didn’t like the mustachioed aquarellist:

In Switzerland, the “ß” (a kind of double s still used in Germany) went out of fashion in 1938. From then on, it was officially no longer taught in schools. The NZZ was the only Swiss daily newspaper to resist this decision for many years – but it too gave up the fight in 1974. The letter was officially abolished in Switzerland with the spelling reform of 2006.

Since then, the seemingly antiquated and yet somehow endearing ß has eked out a sad existence on the substitute bench of Swiss German linguistic customs. In Germany, too, it is increasingly being replaced by the double S.

Yes and no. The 1996 German Rechtschreibreform merely introduced a more consistent rule for ß vs. ss:

Before the reform, this rule wasn't consistently applied — ß was also written after short vowels whenever it stood at the end of a word or syllable, or before a consonant (like “t”). The reform got rid of that exception, but words with a long vowel kept their ß unchanged.

Common words that changed from “ß” to “ss”: dass, muss, passt, Fluss, Kuss, Schluss, nass, hässlich, bisschen, Ross (=Pferd), wusste, mistrauen.

But we still have Fuß, groß, Straße, außer, weiß, Gruß.

Switzerland sucks.