Long s

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The long, medial or descending s (ſ) is a form of the minuscule letter 's' formerly used where 's' occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example ſinfulneſs ("sinfulness"). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s.

Contents 1 History 2 Modern usage 3 See also 4 Notes 5 External links

[edit] History

The long 's' is derived from the old Roman cursive medial s, which was very similar to an elongated check mark. Eventually it got a more vertical form.^[1]

The long 's' is subject to confusion with the minuscule 'f', sometimes even having an 'f'-like nub at its middle, but on the left side only, in various kinds of Roman typeface and in blackletter. There was no nub in its italic typeform, which gave the stroke a descender curling to the left—not possible with the other typeforms mentioned without kerning.

The nub acquired its form in the blackletter style of writing. What looks like one stroke was actually a wedge pointing downward, whose widest part was at that height (x-height), and capped by a second stroke forming an ascender curling to the right. Those styles of writing and their derivatives in type design had a cross-bar at height of the nub for letters 'f' and 't', as well as 'k'. In Roman type, these disappeared except for the one on the medial 's'.

The long 's' was used in ligatures in various languages. Three examples were for 'si', 'ss', and 'st', besides the German 'double s' 'ß'.

Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the end of the 19th century; in English the change occurred in the decades before and after 1800. In most countries ligatures vanished as well. Typographers have presently revived ligatures in seriffed and sans-serif text fonts, as well as many kinds of display types. For example, some text fonts have an 'st' ligature made up of a terminal 's' with a small bulbous curl connecting the two letters at the top, unlike ligatures using a long 's', which joins directly to the 't' by an extension of the long s ascender.

Long 's' survives in German blackletter typefaces. The present-day German 'double s' 'ß' (ess-zett) is an atrophied ligature form representing either 'ſz' or 'ſs' (see ß for more). Greek also features a normal sigma 'σ' and a special terminal form 'ς', which may have supported the idea of specialized 's' forms. In Renaissance Europe a significant fraction of the literate class were familiar with Greek.

[edit] Modern usage

The long 's' survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus; Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz based the character on the Latin word summa (sum), which he wrote ſumma. This use first appeared publicly in his paper De Geometria, published in Acta Eruditorum of June, 1686,^[2] but he had been using it in private manuscripts since at least 1675.^[3]

In linguistics a similar glyph (ʃ) (called "esh") is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which it represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, the first sound in the English word shun.

The long 's' is represented in Unicode by the sign U+017F, and may be represented in HTML as ſ or ſ.

Confusion between the long 'ſ' and 'f' has been the subject of much intentional humour, much of it involving phrases like "sucking pig", but Greenfleaves made an appearance in a Flanders and Swan monologue about coming up with a Shakespearean hit^[4] and the same joke forms the basis of Benny Hill's song "Fad-Eyed Fal" (i.e., Sad-Eyed Sal), as well as some dialogue in a scene from Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Vol.1 about the Declaration of Independence: Upon perusing Jefferson's new document Franklin reads "life, liberty and the 'purfoot of happinefs'" and tells Jefferson his s's look like f's. It has also been proposed as a possible etymology of the hacker jargon term cruft (from cruſt).

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten ("The evening mail"), the logo of which is written using the long 'ſ' (), is often humorously referred to as "Aftenpoften". Similarly for the Adresseavisen (), mocked as "Udresfeabifen".

[edit] See also

• ß (Eszett)

[edit] Notes

1. ^ DAVIES, Lyn. A Is for Ox, London: 2006. Folio Society.
2. ^ Mathematics and its History, John Stillwell, Springer 1989, p. 110
3. ^ Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz, J. M. Child, Open Court Publishing Co., 1920, pp. 73–74, 80.
4. ^ http://www.beachmedia.com/gorbuduc.html

[edit] External links

• The Straight Dope on long s
• The American Declaration of Independence with long s's
• The Rules for Long S
• The Long and the Short of the Letter S

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters