You might notice the long s in Arth Guinness' signature.
http://www.irishfair.org/assets/images/GUINNESS_NAME.gif
Long S
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Long S
#22Re: Long S
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, my `we' meant the Germans. And not so much only the long-s, but also Fraktur. The Nazis banned Fraktur, probably because Hitler didn't like it, and we never re-introduced it. As an irony of history, for some people Fraktur now carries connotations of the Third Reich. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua-Fraktur_dispute ) I have a few old books in Fraktur. Faust and translations of Shakespeare's plays.…
I have a large number of old books in Fraktur (mostly Lutheran theology). I read so much more German in Fraktur that I find it easier to follow than the Latin script. It always amazes me that there are a good number of Germans who cannot read it at all. My wife (who also is well-versed in Fraktur, as well as the old German "saw-tooth" cursive) has had a number of German-speakers ask her to transcribe Fraktur to moder…
Similar story here: I have a lot of c.18 and older antiquarian theology texts that feature the long s. Most of mine are in English, though.
Re: Long S
#24I think the most amazing part of this is just how quickly it disappeared. That graph showing it almost entirely disappearing — after being used for hundreds of years beforehand — in just 15 years is pretty amazing. The explanations in this article, sadly, aren't that in-depth about why we see such a big switch so quickly...
It's almost a perfect logistic curve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
An S-curve, you might say. (See the first paragraph of that WP article.)
Re: Long S
#25Fell out of usage with the advent of industrial printing presses, it looks like?
Yeah, that would be my guess.
Survived from through to late 1700s whilst only against the hand-powered press, then as soon as industrial presses (steam powered) appear circa 1800 and mass printing was now possible (double-output with far lower human effort being input) it dropped off.
Still doesn't wholly explain it though. If it was seen as a valid character you would expect that the symbol would've been in the charset and have been used in print too.
Re: Long S
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, my `we' meant the Germans. And not so much only the long-s, but also Fraktur. The Nazis banned Fraktur, probably because Hitler didn't like it, and we never re-introduced it. As an irony of history, for some people Fraktur now carries connotations of the Third Reich. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua-Fraktur_dispute ) I have a few old books in Fraktur. Faust and translations of Shakespeare's plays.…
I have a large number of old books in Fraktur (mostly Lutheran theology). I read so much more German in Fraktur that I find it easier to follow than the Latin script. It always amazes me that there are a good number of Germans who cannot read it at all. My wife (who also is well-versed in Fraktur, as well as the old German "saw-tooth" cursive) has had a number of German-speakers ask her to transcribe Fraktur to moder…
I agree it's not that hard - I don't even speak German and I had no trouble reading the Fraktur samples I found on wikipedia.
Re: Long S
#27Fell out of usage with the advent of industrial printing presses, it looks like?
Now that we have Unicode fonts, we can bring it back!
“Dear Mr. Jones: I am pleaſed to reply to your meßage of Tueſsday laſt, requeſting my ſervices as a ſoft-ware engineer...”
Re: Long S
#28Re: Long S
#29Too bad we gave up on that.
I have compoſe-f-s as the key combination for long s in my .xcompoſe file: https://github.com/kragen/xcompose . You, too, can compoſe miſsives uſing our dear antiquated friend, ſhould you ſo deſire.
Thanks! (Though I'd ideally want my computer to take that decision for me.)