On Fri, 16 Jun 2023, John Cowan wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 12:18 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>> German also has a ligature letter called eszet that is a fusion of a
>> long s (the one that resembles the English letter f) and a short s.
>>
>
> Not a short s, but a z, as the name indicates:  es-zett, S-Z.  This
> reflects the use of z in Old and Middle High German to represent a sibilant
> sound distinct from s, derived from /t/ by the High German sound shift but
> distinct from original /s/.  When the distinction was lost in the 13C, z
> came to be used for its modern sound /ts/, but the ligature came to
> represent the merged /s/.

I've seen ß used in some copies of the Geneva Bible with exactly the 
modern German sense, as a ligature of long s and normal s.

-uso.