The confusion of ſ looking like f is the basis of one of my favourite bits from The Vicar of Dibley:
The Long S
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: The Long S
#52Reading this, as it's just a stylized lowercase 's' - it seems to me like it would have been more appropriate as a font ligature than a dedicated codepoint?
Re: The Long S
#53Tangentially: this answered a long-standing question I've had, why the long S disappeared, which also incidentally served as a great example of how the wrong learning environment can completely kill a child's curiosity. I came across the long S in the fifth grade, if I recall, during some line of learning about colonial American history. The conversation between the teacher and me, in the middle of class, went someth…
The long s seems to form ligatures better. When people wrote with ink and quill flow was important —maybe that’s why it was devised. They also had many abbreviations so as to avoid tiring their fingers writing common words and particles over and over.
Re: The Long S
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the uppercase sigma (Σ) used for summation is basically the Greek 'S' (i.e. S for "Sum"). So it's just another S. Also, the capital pi (Π) used for product notation, is basically the Greek 'P' (i.e. P for "Product").
While we're here about greek trivia: both omicron and omega are a sort of O. Can't figure what kind? Hint: O-micron, O-mega.
‘O’ has an interesting backstory. The shape comes from phonecian ayin and has the meaning of “eye”, from which it takes its form. It probably had a sound close to the Arabic ayin (a kind of guttural growl where you half choke yourself).
However the Greeks were probably just as confused by that sound as non-Arabs are by it today, so they instead gave it a vowel sound.
‘A’ had a similar story. In Phonecian it represents a glottal stop and has the name ‘alep. However a glottal stop at the start of a word is quite hard to hear if you aren’t used to it, so the Greeks seemingly assumed that the letter represented the second phoneme of ‘alep, an /a/ sound. Hence the alphabet was invented, a mixture of vowels and consonants with equal status.
Re: The Long S
#55Read the preface to the 1st edition of this thing, and prepare for your mind to be blown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douay%E2%80%93Rheims_Bible Keep clicking "next" on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1609_Doway_Old_Testament.... In summary, they (the authors of Douay-Rheims) based their bible translation on Jerome's 4th century Latin translation because they believed that the extant Greek and Hebrew versi…
Why do pages end on a line with a single word set flush right?
Re: The Long S
#56I always wondered where the integral sign was coming from. This gives a very simple explanation: it's just the letter 's', the shorthand for sum!
If anything, it would be shorthand for "Summe", I suppose.
Re: The Long S
#57Reading this, as it's just a stylized lowercase 's' - it seems to me like it would have been more appropriate as a font ligature than a dedicated codepoint?
In many cases, glyphs have distinct codepoints because they had one in some legacy encoding, and Unicode was intended to be able to roundtrip any text in those encodings.
Then again, sometimes a glyph variant that has literally one known occurrence ever gets a codepoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O
Re: The Long S
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
While we're here about greek trivia: both omicron and omega are a sort of O. Can't figure what kind? Hint: O-micron, O-mega.
‘O’ has an interesting backstory. The shape comes from phonecian ayin and has the meaning of “eye”, from which it takes its form. It probably had a sound close to the Arabic ayin (a kind of guttural growl where you half choke yourself). However the Greeks were probably just as confused by that sound as non-Arabs are by it today, so they instead gave it a vowel sound. ‘A’ had a similar story. In Phonecian it represent…
It's really a lucky happenstance that Semitic languages have enough gutterals that could be repurposed as vowels; if these had been lacking, or if Greek had needed them as consonants, then it's easy to imagine a sort of incomplete consonant-only orthography coming into use, perhaps even persisting to Latin alphabets in the modern day. Greece's first introduction to writing (linear b) didn't stick and doesn't seem to have been used for anything other than palace records, arguably because of deficiencies in that script, might literacy in the West have similarly been stunted by scripts that could not show vowels?
Re: The Long S
#59The origin of the German ß is very intuitive once you know that S can look like ſ and Z can look like Ʒ.
Guess what: x.toUpperCase().length === x.length is false when x = 'ß' I guess another falsehood programmers believe about strings is that length is not changed by toUpperCase()!
Rust's char::to_uppercase returns an iterator to cover these sorts of shenanigans :
https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/primitive.char.html#met...
Re: The Long S
#60TIL that the slash in pre-decimal shillings and pence notation is another form of this S - had just assumed naturally enough that it was just a bog-standard slash separator.