This article uses the FetteFraD font to illustrate the old German lettering. This type of font is most commonly found on hand-lettered regimental steins, but is also occasionally found in verses or banners on other types of steins.

• Three of the extra letters are variants of the three vowels a, o and u with an umlaut added to guide pronunciation (Ä and ä, Ö and ö, and Ü and ü). When transcribed, these characters are usually represented as ae, oe, and ue.
• The fourth additional character (ß)is shown last in the alphabet and known as "ess-zet", meaning "sz". It is actually a special character used for the occurrence of a double s – but only when the double s occurs at the end of a word! (Well, actually its not quite that simple, because many German words are compound words made up of two or more other words, and the ess-zet is used if one of those shorter elements ends in a double s. But this is really digging into the fine points, and if this is the only part of the transcription you have trouble with, you are in good shape.)

Ooops, something else you may notice. There are two flavors of small s (bringing the total number of lower case letters to 31). What’s this about?

• We will refer to the small s which is shown in the middle of our chart as "middle s". It is used only at the beginning or in the middle of a word.
• The second small s, which is called "schloos s" or closing s, is used only to end a word.
• Of course, these rules of usage are also subject to the effects of compound words as discussed above.

A very common example of the usage of both double s ("ess-zet") and the closing s ("schloos s") is given in figure 2 in the familiar "Greetings from Munich".

By now you must recognize that transcription must be done with a sensitivity to the surrounding letters and the position of the letters within the word.

Ooops, upon taking a closer look we discover that the capital letters I and J are the same! I’ll leave it to the philosophers to figure out if this means we have 29 or 30 upper case letters, but how do we distinguish them?

• When it precedes a consonant, this character is transcribed as I, when it precedes a vowel it is transcribed as J.

We’re finally done with the inventory of old German letters which is shown to the left. Unfortunately, there is still one very common and important convention in German writing that has the effect of adding even more letters to the old German alphabet.

• An overlined consonant means the letter should be doubled in transcription to the Roman alphabet.

That’s all there is to explaining the inventory and usage of the old German print alphabet, but let’s take a closer look at some problem areas.

Careful examination of these letters, an understanding of when the special characters were used, and a sensitivity to the context of the words or phrase you are trying to transcribe will normally do the trick. Also keep in mind that the letter set shown in this article is only one of many that were used, so expect to find variations.

One "true life" example is taken from a 4F stein (right). Context plus the chart at the left allows us to transcribe this as "X. Deutsches Turnfest, Nuernberg 1903".