Long S

dcminter | 98 points

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

sm4rk0 | 4 years ago

The interesting part: "The long s survives in elongated form, with an italic-styled curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus."

galaxyLogic | 4 years ago

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.

petters | 4 years ago

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.

throwanem | 4 years ago

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)

minikites | 4 years ago

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

- https://linkpenfonts.co.uk

Although the second link is the more recent website, I like the fonts presented in the first link.

susam | 4 years ago

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.

pavlov | 4 years ago

Faſcinating!

(backſ-away-ſlowly)

danans | 4 years ago

These days you usually become familiar with that letter through looking at title pages for old books on Wikipedia.

aasasd | 4 years ago
[deleted]
| 4 years ago

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.

snalty | 4 years ago

I had to read the caption of the poster in order to see that it was "Paradise Lost" and not "Paradise Loft" ...

wodenokoto | 4 years ago