I can't even read my own handwriting.
“Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
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Re: “Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
#12I can't even read my own handwriting.
I have been suffering from a bad handwriting my entire life.
In school and uni I would always be afraid, that answers could not be decoded by the person grading the test.
I also thought that the resulting text looked ugly.
Recently I have started to consciously improve my handwriting with great results. The simplest most effective step was to treat every letter as a single entity (in contrast of slurring all letters together into one word).
Of course this takes a little more time, but I now can actually read the results, and I also think that it looks good from an aesthetic point of view. Now I am not afraid of writing christmas or birthday cards anymore (I even bought a fountain pen for this purpose).
Re: “Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
#13There are lots of ſ's and other slightly hard-to-read typesetting when reading papers from the Royal Society. It's freely-available and has some quaint gems:
https://royalsociety.org/news/2011/Royal-Society-journal-arc...
Re: “Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
#14The excerpt from "The School of Venus" in the article > Coufin, I confefs my ignorance
"Confefs" ? The old and the new in one word.
Re: “Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
#15The excerpt from "The School of Venus" in the article > Coufin, I confefs my ignorance "Confefs" ? The old and the new in one word.
I think that was addressed by the author: '... the long S is that it occurs only in the middle of words, never at the beginning or end.'
Re: “Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
#16"Last month, I came across a recently digitized book from 1680 with the innocuous-sounding title The School of Venus ." Funny. I read that title and assumed it was erotica. Venus is the goddess of love. The title is also rather similar to one of the most famous pieces of erotic literature of all time, Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus .
This sort of took me aback in the article; this is a relatively well-known piece of libertine literature for those who study early-modern lit/culture.
Re: “Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
#17The double s ligature starting with a long s is also where the modern german Scharfes S (ß) comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F
I'm kind of surprised there's no mention of it since it's a perfect example of the long s still in use.
Re: “Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
#18"Anything is readable" Has anyone deciphered the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript yet?
Obvious bait, but I'll bite.
You're equivocating. The letters of the Vonyich manuscript are readable, discrete, and consistent. They are not meaningful, however.
Re: “Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)
#19The excerpt from "The School of Venus" in the article > Coufin, I confefs my ignorance "Confefs" ? The old and the new in one word.
I think that was addressed by the author: '... the long S is that it occurs only in the middle of words, never at the beginning or end.'
"I ſleep, ſing and dance, and ſometimes ..."
My only problem with this article. The image contradicts what was written shortly thereafter, without explanation.