For anyone who may have been interested in my post of some time ago concerning the romanization character below (I can't find the original post), the "mystery" has been solved.



Dr. Lauren Pfister of Hong Kong brought my attention to the following details:

The character was used in Thomas Wades' (of Wade-Giles fame) first Chinese romanization models, but was replaced simply by "ts" or "tz" in later (and current) Wade-Giles protocols.

Dr. Pfister also said the character "was found in traditional forms of German text ... and revived in Hitlerian years". So, to me its origin was obvious--Fraktur. (Though, other than the sound it makes [ts], I'm not really sure why Wade chose a Fraktur character over the simple English combination of 'ts'.)

Another fun little detail...

I've been trying to find out what this thing is called and where it comes from for a few years now, the whole time it's been right under my nose--the German eszet is a ligature comprised of two Fraktur characters, first an 's' (es) and then a 'z' (zet). Can't believe I didn't see it, but then, I'm not familiar with Fraktur forms.

Brings up some interesting questions though...

1) What's the word, is Fraktur/blackletter a redeemable object given its prior Nazi affiliations? (Doesn't Steven Heller talk about this in 'Texts on Type'?)

2) Since zet's use as a romanization character, is it warranted its own Unicode codepoint assignment? Does Fraktur already possess its own codepage (or is it simply a non-specific variation of Latin-1)?