Eszet
Speaking of "s" and "z", I was talking to a new EFF volunteer about the German character eszet (which is also spelled other ways) -- if your browser can render it, it's ß. We were wondering where this character comes from and what it might have in common with the Greek beta. Often a glyph for beta is used as a glyph for eszet.
A little bit of research reveals that it's purely a coincidence that eszet looks so much like Greek beta. As the name suggests, eszet means "sz", and the HTML character entity name for the character is "ß", because, historically, it's a ligature of the long s (the form which produces things like "Congrefs" in English, and from which we also get the integral sign in calculus) with z. The z is a curly z and the s is a long s, and they are joined together in a ligature, and that's probably also why eszet is usually open on the bottom where the classical beta is closed. Also, in a beta, the bar on the left descends slightly below the curve, where an eszet will have the bar approximately level with the curve if it's printed with a separate glyph.
(The above is partly cribbed from my note to Riana.)
