61–70 of 83 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What your story tells me is that your teacher didn't know and didn't want to admit it.
This was my impression as well. The older I get the more I appreciate someone who can admit they don't know something.
Tangentially: 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…
What your story tells me is that your teacher didn't know and didn't want to admit it.
The confusion of ſ looking like f is the basis of one of my favourite bits from The Vicar of Dibley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UySOpb64yc
What was the purpose or reason for it appearing to begin with? Were words with double-ss needing some typographic distinguishing? What warranted a new character that broke through the normal height of lower case letters, when regular s was doing just fine? And why only one of the S's in a pair? Puzzling.
Tangentially: 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…
This is because teachers are themselves graded on standardized test results. Standardized tests don't give a crap about curiosity. So classroom instruction in the US ends up being mostly about the teachers making sure that their students won't drastically underperform on the standardized test.
It makes me sad knowing, that the current system focusses on performance and leaves behind so many briliant people, and I don't even consider myself briliant.
Reading the wiki page, I still don't get why this long S entered usage at all. The article mostly talks about the rules for usage and how it gradually phased out. What was the purpose or reason for it appearing to begin with? Were words with double-ss needing some typographic distinguishing? What warranted a new character that broke through the normal height of lower case letters, when regular s was doing just fine?…
The German language allows you to compose several words into one long word, which is no longer structured by spaces. This can lead to ambiguities, especially where a sub-word ends with an S. Due to the rule that words always end with a round S, these ambiguities were resolved.
Examples from German wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langes_s
Kreiſchen (Krei·schen, shouting) vs Kreischen (Kreis·chen, a small circle)
Verſendung (Ver·sen·dung, posting) und Versendung (Vers·en·dung, end of a verse)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
‘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…
We cld gt by wtht mst vwls aynw, tht's bscly SMS txt spk.
Reading the wiki page, I still don't get why this long S entered usage at all. The article mostly talks about the rules for usage and how it gradually phased out. What was the purpose or reason for it appearing to begin with? Were words with double-ss needing some typographic distinguishing? What warranted a new character that broke through the normal height of lower case letters, when regular s was doing just fine?…
It entered usage because we needed a lower case S when Carolingian monks first developed cased letters in the eighth century, and the Romans already had a similar shape (the "medial S"). For a long time "S" was only used in the capital form; small "s" came later.
Here's what Carolingian miniscule looked like, note the r-like s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carolineminuscel.jpg
And here's Old Roman cursive for comparison: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Cu...
Small-s starts taking off around the 12th century or so, coexists with long-s for a while, before eventually replacing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was my impression as well. The older I get the more I appreciate someone who can admit they don't know something.
I don't know how old your story is, but one thing that I can see factoring in is that before recently-ish, it would have been hard to say "it's an interesting question, but I don't know. How about we figure it out?" without spending a large amount of time to find the answer.
- "That's an interesting question. To find out we could ..."
- "Does anyone have any ideas what the answer could be?"
Both approaches can be easily combined (first ask for ideas, then say how to validate them), but if you're in a hurry to get on just use the first approach.
