German (human language) \j*r'mn\ A human language written (in latin alphabet) and spoken in Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland.
German writing normally uses four non-ASCII characters: "ä", "ö" and "ü" have "umlauts" (two dots over the top) and "ß" is a double-S ("scharfes S") which looks like the Greek letter beta (except in capitalised words where it should be written "SS"). These can be written in ASCII in several ways, the most common are ae, oe ue AE OE UE ss or sz and the TeX versions "a "o "u "A "O "U "s. See also ABEND, blinkenlights, DAU, DIN, gedanken, GMD, kluge. Usenet newsgroup: news:soc.culture.german. ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/usenet/news-info/soc.answers/german-faq, ftp://alice.fmi.uni-passau.de/pub/dictionaries/german.dat.Z. Last updated: 1995-03-31