Long s

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An italicized long s used in the word Congress in the United States Bill of Rights.
An italicized long s used in the word Congress in the United States Bill of Rights.

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.

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[edit] History

Title page of John Milton's Paradise Lost
Title page of John Milton's Paradise Lost

The long 's' is derived from the old Roman cursive medial s, which was very similar to an elongated check mark. When the distinction between upper case (capital) and lower case (small) letter-forms became established, towards the end of the eighth century, it developed a more vertical form.[1] At this period it was occasionally used at the end of a word, a practice which quickly died out but was occasionally revived in Italian printing between about 1465 and 1480. The short 's' was also normally used in the combination 'sf', for example in 'ſatisfaction'. In German written in fraktur, the rules are more complicated: short 's' also appears at the end of distinct elements within a word.

The long 's' is subject to confusion with the lower case or 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 middle of the 19th century; in French the change occurred from about 1780 onwards, in English in the decades before and after 1800, and in the United States around 1820. This may have been spurred by the fact that long 's' looks somewhat like 'f' (in both its Roman and italic forms), whereas short 's' did not have the disadvantage of looking like another letter, making it easier to read correctly, especially for people with vision problems.

Long 's' survives in German blackletter typefaces. The present-day German 'double s' 'ß' (das Eszett "the ess-zed" or scharfes-ess, the sharp S) 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 was familiar with Greek.

[edit] Modern usage

Long s in Berlin 2002
Long s in Berlin 2002
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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 Swann 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's patriotic musical, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Vol. 1, about the Declaration of Independence: Upon perusing Thomas Jefferson's new document Benjamin Franklin reads "life, liberty and the 'purfoot of happinefs'" and tells Jefferson his s's look like f's. Mad magazine also makes humorous light of the long s's resemblance to lower case f in Poor Alfred'f Almanack, although this is somewhat inaccurate, as the long s never occurred at the end of a word; only either at the beginning or in the middle.

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" because in addition to the long s resembling f, the Fraktur capital A looks like a U and the v is written to resemble a b.

Also, in the English comedy The Vicar of Dibley, there is an episode containing a scene where the character Alice must read a prayer which contains various long "S"s and is unable to determine which, if any, are "F"s, and which are not, leading to such nonsensical humorous reads as "Ye are the falt of the Earth and fainted." (Really: "salt" and "sainted" respectively). The scene ends when Alice is about to pronounce the prayer's final long S word with an "f" but the Vicar interrupts and says it correctly for her. The word is 'succour'.

In Finland there is a sweet pastille called 'Sisu', a Finnish word meaning something like 'stubborn strength'. Finns tend to regard 'sisu' as their national virtue, and the word as untranslatable[citation needed]. 'Sisu' pastilles are sold in a package with the name in a style of fraktur lower-case long 's' and a capital 'S' that looks a little like a 'G'; hence the common joke of referring to the brand as 'Gifu'.

[edit] See also

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[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. ^ www.beachmedia.com/gorbuduc.html.

[edit] External links

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
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