🚀 go-pugleaf

   In article <TMB.91May20125338@volterra.ai.mit.edu> tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
   >degenerated into two little dots. The German sharp-s, a character
   >that looks sort of like a beta, similarly, is simply a ligature
   >between an 's' and a 'z'.

   Really?  The old fraktur script (cf. Greek) provides two ways of
   writing an s: one long like an f that starts syllables, the other more
   like the regular s to end syllables.  The sharp-s ligature is formed
   from the long f-like s followed by the short one.

   There is no z anywhere in the picture.

No, it is a ligature of the "f"-like "s" and a "z" (that's why it's
called an "ess-zett").

The "s" that ends a word in Fraktur looks more like the Roman "s", and
I have never seen it word internal in German.