The interesting part: "The long s survives in elongated form, with an italic-styled curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus."
This is very interesting:https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/google-ngrams-vs...
The word "fuck" was used a lot in the 1600s according to OCR.
If you'd like to be able to use the long S in Emacs, there's a minor mode for that: https://github.com/aaron-em/long-s-mode.el
It's an older one and I apparently haven't put it on MELPA yet. I can, if there's interest.
The long S is also problematic for OCR: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cafe&year_star...
(Google ngram viewer is pulling the word "case" with a long S from the many legal documents in its corpus)
On a related note, I have been looking for good references on cursive writing. While there are many references for cursive writing popular in the US such as D'Nealian, Zaner-Bloser, etc. there aren't many as many references for joined-up writing popular in the UK. I was looking for something where the joined-up style resembles printscript as much as possible. Here are a few resources I found during my search for anyone interested in British-style joined-up handwriting:
- https://www.cursivewriting.org/joined-cursive-fonts.html
Although the second link is the more recent website, I like the fonts presented in the first link.
In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the phonetic sign for the S sound was a vertical bar bent around at its top end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy...
Apparently it's officially called "folded cloth", U+132F4.
I wonder if there's an actual lineage here, or if it's just a coincidence that the S sound is represented as a curved vertical bar across millennia.
Faſcinating!
(backſ-away-ſlowly)
These days you usually become familiar with that letter through looking at title pages for old books on Wikipedia.
I was momentarily confused by these when I saw them in some old journal articles on PubMed. There's a load if you search a really generic term and sort oldest to newest.
I had to read the caption of the poster in order to see that it was "Paradise Lost" and not "Paradise Loft" ...
Interesting that the article doesn't mention Greek lowercase sigma which has similar rules:
> uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma