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The Long S

en.wikipedia.org

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Re: The Long S

#71

Post by biofox »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #49
don-code wrote: post #40

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.

Having taught for several years, I agree that this is part of it. A much bigger reason is the need to avoid or reduce distractions. A class of 30 students all going off on separate tangents unrelated to the lesson plan, or unrelated the subject of the class, is unmanageable.

Re: The Long S

#72

Post by jl6 »

aliqot wrote: post #46
glandium wrote: post #41

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.

Admitting ignorance is a luxury that becomes affordable once you have knowledge, seniority, and respect. It can be an expensive hazard for those just starting out.

Re: The Long S

#73

Post by ChadNauseam »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #49
don-code wrote: post #40

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.

I think most teachers just don’t care. In highschool, I remember asking my math teacher about ruler’s identity, and she had never heard of it. In middle school our math teacher told us pi was exactly 22/7. In elementary school one of my teachers said there was no gravity on the moon. My highschool chemistry teacher told us that if you put two cheerios in a bowl of milk, they move towards each other because of their mutual gravitational attraction.

Re: The Long S

#74

Post by gumby »

HPsquared wrote: post #68
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 could get by without most vowels anyway, that's basically SMS text speak. We cld gt by wtht mst vwls aynw, tht's bscly SMS txt spk.

Losing the vowels works in languages like Arabic because of the structure of the language, with consonantal clusters (e.g. ktb, tlb) being semantic “roots”. So you usually know from context, and if you don’t know the absolutely precise word, you know the meaning, which can sometimes be more informative.

Indo-European languages don’t work that way.

Re: The Long S

#75

Post by BeFlatXIII »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #73
quadrifoliate wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think most teachers just don’t care. In highschool, I remember asking my math teacher about ruler’s identity, and she had never heard of it. In middle school our math teacher told us pi was exactly 22/7. In elementary school one of my teachers said there was no gravity on the moon. My highschool chemistry teacher told us that if you put two cheerios in a bowl of milk, they move towards each other because of their m…

As it turns out, there is gravity on the moon: you just need math to prove it (no wonder an elementary teacher thought otherwise). Safer just to wear heavy boots.

Re: The Long S

#76

Post by euroderf »

kwk1 wrote: post #11
b3morales wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On page 3 the mix of double 'V's for 'W', 'u' for 'v', and 'V' for 'U' ('IESVS' at the top) is quite intriguing.

Interesting to note also the use of ã as shorthand for an, i.e. "the reſidue is in hãd" -> "the residue is in hand"

Any relation to Spanish ñ ?

Re: The Long S

#77

Post by donatj »

int_19h wrote: post #57
donatj wrote: post #52

Reading 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

Why on earth did that get a codepoint… Someone in the 1400's made a single crazy looking O and now it's forever embedded in unicode?!

Re: The Long S

#78

Post by int_19h »

donatj wrote: post #77
int_19h wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why on earth did that get a codepoint… Someone in the 1400's made a single crazy looking O and now it's forever embedded in unicode?!

The most obvious explanation is that it is simply the mark of Tzeentch on one of its creations. ~

Re: The Long S

#79

Post by supernova87a »

zero_shift wrote: post #69
supernova87a wrote: post #64

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?…

Long-s predates short-s. 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 her…

Thanks, interesting!

That Carolingian script really has a lot of characters that can be easily confused, or relies on very subtle differences. b vs. h, i vs. j, i vs. l, r/s/t.

Re: The Long S

#80

Post by zarzavat »

gumby wrote: post #74
HPsquared wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could get by without most vowels anyway, that's basically SMS text speak. We cld gt by wtht mst vwls aynw, tht's bscly SMS txt spk.

Losing the vowels works in languages like Arabic because of the structure of the language, with consonantal clusters (e.g. ktb, tlb) being semantic “roots”. So you usually know from context, and if you don’t know the absolutely precise word, you know the meaning, which can sometimes be more informative. Indo-European languages don’t work that way.

It’s not a hypothetical actually. Many non-Semitic languages have adopted Semitic writing systems. e.g. Persian, Urdu, Yiddish.

Sometimes they always write the short vowels in, e.g. Urdu and Yiddish, but other times they don’t e.g. Persian.

So it’s at least possible to write an Indo European language without vowels. Desirable? Probably not.

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