7 ms·

Long S

98 points by dcminter 7y ago

galaxyLogic 7y ago
The interesting part: "The long s survives in elongated form, with an italic-styled curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus."
- __coaxialcabal 7y ago
  The notation for the indefinite integral was introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1675 (Burton 1988, p. 359; Leibniz 1899, p. 154). He adapted the integral symbol, ∫, from the letter ſ (long s), standing for summa (written as ſumma; Latin for "sum" or "total"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral
petters 7y ago
This is very interesting:https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/google-ngrams-vs-long-s/ https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/google-ngrams-vs... The word "fuck" was used a lot in the 1600s according to OCR.
- bildung 7y ago
  Well the OCR were humans :) Before Google produced the Waymo (or Maps?) datasets with recaptcha, it was book digitalization. I remember always being frustrated when I had to enter the long as as f to make the captcha go away...
  - qxnqd 7y ago
    That's true. When the recaptcha was two words, one of it was the control word (which would make you fail the captcha if wrong) and the other was the word you were actually OCR'ing. I would always enter the control word correctly and put "fuck" as the other word. I would get it right 90% of the time :)
  - KwanEsq 7y ago
    Heh, I just modified my keyboard layout to add the long s as the alt gr output for s. Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator was pretty handy (There were other keys I customised to justify creating my own layout variant) [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/823010/the-microsoft-keyboard-layout-creator https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/823010/the-microsof... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22339 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=223...
- spirographer 7y ago
  You can actually use the google ngrams data set to determine that the long s was eliminated from print over a 25 year period roughly from 1795 to 1820.
sm4rk0 7y ago
Interesting that the article doesn't mention Greek lowercase sigma which has similar rules: > uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma
danans 7y ago
Faſcinating! (backſ-away-ſlowly)
- redmorphium 7y ago
  Should be "backs" because long-s isn't used if it's the end of the word.
  - CGamesPlay 7y ago
    > Before a hyphen at the end of the line a long ſ must always be used, for example Shaftſ-bury.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      The hyphen is not at the end of the line. Shaftſ- bury is just Shaftſbury with a hyphenated line break.
    - seszett 7y ago
      That's when hyphenating a word, not between different words linked by hyphens.
      - OJFord 7y ago
        That's exactly what a hyphenated word is.
        monadgonad 7y ago
        No. "Hyphenating a word" here means when a whole word is split by a hyphen to continue on the next line of a justified column of text. In that case only, a long s is used before the hyphen.
- maaaats 7y ago
  The example of "Paradise loft" written as "Paradife loft" reminds me of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten's logo looks like Aftenpoften https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftenposten https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftenposten
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
susam 7y ago
On a related note, I have been looking for good references on cursive writing. While there are many references for cursive writing popular in the US such as D'Nealian, Zaner-Bloser, etc. there aren't many as many references for joined-up writing popular in the UK. I was looking for something where the joined-up style resembles printscript as much as possible. Here are a few resources I found during my search for anyone interested in British-style joined-up handwriting: - https://www.cursivewriting.org/joined-cursive-fonts.html https://www.cursivewriting.org/joined-cursive-fonts.html - https://linkpenfonts.co.uk https://linkpenfonts.co.uk Although the second link is the more recent website, I like the fonts presented in the first link.
aasasd 7y ago
These days you usually become familiar with that letter through looking at title pages for old books on Wikipedia.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  The still use it on the street signs hereabouts, writing "-straſze" instead of "-straße".
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    Interesting, where is that? Wikipedia has an example of a street sign with "ſs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waldstra%C3%9FePirna.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waldstra%C3%9FePirna.JPG And of course there are the street signs in Berlin which use a very weird ß, but it's still an ß as opposed to a "ſz" combination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berliner_Stra%C3%9Fe.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berliner_Stra%C3%9Fe.JPG
    - aap_ 7y ago
      The Berlin ſʒ is indeed what parent was referring to....unless he meant Bonn, where a very similar font is used. Would be interesting to know if a font like this is used elsewhere too.
    - wholepointofcc 7y ago
      I absolutely love the typographical choices used for Berlin's street signs. There are multiple variants but I'm talking about the posted one. It also preserves the old tz-ligature[0], the vertical descender on lower-case Y[1], as well as both the ch- and the ck-ligature which (being an antiqua font) are mostly realized in terms of careful kerning [2, 3, 4]. The font is both pleasing, readable, breathable, and has these nods to Germanic typographical heritage. It's really lovely. Among my favorite details pertaining to living in Berlin. [0] https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/fotos/Strassenschild_luederitzstr_berlin_1.jpg https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/fotos/Strassenschil... [1] https://live.staticflickr.com/3730/9668177465_bde765c591_h.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/3730/9668177465_bde765c591_h.j... [2] https://fhxb-museum.de/xmap/media/S16/T1815/image/fhxb_jh_k02_0430_11_1500px.jpg https://fhxb-museum.de/xmap/media/S16/T1815/image/fhxb_jh_k0... [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/M%C3%B6ckernstra%C3%9Fe_Schild.jpg/1024px-M%C3%B6ckernstra%C3%9Fe_Schild.jpg?1575558184352 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/M%... [4] http://www.w-volk.de/museum/encke01.jpg http://www.w-volk.de/museum/encke01.jpg
wodenokoto 7y ago
I had to read the caption of the poster in order to see that it was "Paradise Lost" and not "Paradise Loft" ...
- MayeulC 7y ago
  I first came into contact with the long s while reading (IIRC) Antoine de Lavoisier's memoirs (or papers?) on the nature of diamond. It was very unnerving to read, as I couldn't see the difference with an "f" before enquiring more about it, and reading the wikipedia article. I couldn't find the exact reference, but the book was along the lines of that one (French): https://books.google.fr/books?id=yr3OAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA22 https://books.google.fr/books?id=yr3OAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA22
snalty 7y ago
I was momentarily confused by these when I saw them in some old journal articles on PubMed. There's a load if you search a really generic term and sort oldest to newest.
pavlov 7y ago
In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the phonetic sign for the S sound was a vertical bar bent around at its top end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian#Uniliteral_signs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy... Apparently it's officially called "folded cloth", U+132F4. I wonder if there's an actual lineage here, or if it's just a coincidence that the S sound is represented as a curved vertical bar across millennia.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- koolba 7y ago
  I’ve wondered if it’s shaped after a snake as the sound matches up (“sssssss”).
  - kps 7y ago
    Perhapsss sssurprisssingly, the sssnake letter is “N”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script
throwanem 7y ago
If you'd like to be able to use the long S in Emacs, there's a minor mode for that: https://github.com/aaron-em/long-s-mode.el https://github.com/aaron-em/long-s-mode.el It's an older one and I apparently haven't put it on MELPA yet. I can, if there's interest.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  "Copyright (c) 2013 Aaron Miller. All rights reverſed. ſhare and Enjoy!" Heh! I'm not sure bulking up melpa is worth it for the infinitesimal number of people who would find it useful. Tangentially I really wish letters eth and thorn had not disappeared. They were certainly better than what we've got now, the 'th' digraph for both.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    In English the voiced/unvoiced distinction stopped mattering so merger of eth and thorn was warranted. A digraph is a sad compromise, but given sh/ch digraphs its now just a given standard in the language's orthography. It might be fun to use better letters for all of English's digraphs, but that ship has probably sailed at this point.
minikites 7y ago
The long S is also problematic for OCR: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cafe&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cafe&year_star... (Google ngram viewer is pulling the word "case" with a long S from the many legal documents in its corpus)

98 points by dcminter 7y ago

The interesting part: "The long s survives in elongated form, with an italic-styled curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus."

__coaxialcabal 7y ago
The notation for the indefinite integral was introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1675 (Burton 1988, p. 359; Leibniz 1899, p. 154). He adapted the integral symbol, ∫, from the letter ſ (long s), standing for summa (written as ſumma; Latin for "sum" or "total"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral

petters 7y ago

This is very interesting:https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/google-ngrams-vs-long-s/ https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/google-ngrams-vs... The word "fuck" was used a lot in the 1600s according to OCR.

bildung 7y ago
Well the OCR were humans :) Before Google produced the Waymo (or Maps?) datasets with recaptcha, it was book digitalization. I remember always being frustrated when I had to enter the long as as f to make the captcha go away...
- qxnqd 7y ago
  That's true. When the recaptcha was two words, one of it was the control word (which would make you fail the captcha if wrong) and the other was the word you were actually OCR'ing. I would always enter the control word correctly and put "fuck" as the other word. I would get it right 90% of the time :)
- KwanEsq 7y ago
  Heh, I just modified my keyboard layout to add the long s as the alt gr output for s. Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator was pretty handy (There were other keys I customised to justify creating my own layout variant) [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/823010/the-microsoft-keyboard-layout-creator https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/823010/the-microsof... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22339 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=223...
spirographer 7y ago
You can actually use the google ngrams data set to determine that the long s was eliminated from print over a 25 year period roughly from 1795 to 1820.

sm4rk0 7y ago

Interesting that the article doesn't mention Greek lowercase sigma which has similar rules: > uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma

danans 7y ago

Faſcinating! (backſ-away-ſlowly)

redmorphium 7y ago
Should be "backs" because long-s isn't used if it's the end of the word.
- CGamesPlay 7y ago
  > Before a hyphen at the end of the line a long ſ must always be used, for example Shaftſ-bury.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    The hyphen is not at the end of the line. Shaftſ- bury is just Shaftſbury with a hyphenated line break.
  - seszett 7y ago
    That's when hyphenating a word, not between different words linked by hyphens.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      That's exactly what a hyphenated word is.
      - monadgonad 7y ago
        No. "Hyphenating a word" here means when a whole word is split by a hyphen to continue on the next line of a justified column of text. In that case only, a long s is used before the hyphen.
maaaats 7y ago
The example of "Paradise loft" written as "Paradife loft" reminds me of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten's logo looks like Aftenpoften https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftenposten https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftenposten

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

susam 7y ago

On a related note, I have been looking for good references on cursive writing. While there are many references for cursive writing popular in the US such as D'Nealian, Zaner-Bloser, etc. there aren't many as many references for joined-up writing popular in the UK. I was looking for something where the joined-up style resembles printscript as much as possible. Here are a few resources I found during my search for anyone interested in British-style joined-up handwriting: - https://www.cursivewriting.org/joined-cursive-fonts.html https://www.cursivewriting.org/joined-cursive-fonts.html - https://linkpenfonts.co.uk https://linkpenfonts.co.uk Although the second link is the more recent website, I like the fonts presented in the first link.

aasasd 7y ago

These days you usually become familiar with that letter through looking at title pages for old books on Wikipedia.

squiggleblaz 7y ago
The still use it on the street signs hereabouts, writing "-straſze" instead of "-straße".
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  Interesting, where is that? Wikipedia has an example of a street sign with "ſs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waldstra%C3%9FePirna.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waldstra%C3%9FePirna.JPG And of course there are the street signs in Berlin which use a very weird ß, but it's still an ß as opposed to a "ſz" combination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berliner_Stra%C3%9Fe.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berliner_Stra%C3%9Fe.JPG
  - aap_ 7y ago
    The Berlin ſʒ is indeed what parent was referring to....unless he meant Bonn, where a very similar font is used. Would be interesting to know if a font like this is used elsewhere too.
  - wholepointofcc 7y ago
    I absolutely love the typographical choices used for Berlin's street signs. There are multiple variants but I'm talking about the posted one. It also preserves the old tz-ligature[0], the vertical descender on lower-case Y[1], as well as both the ch- and the ck-ligature which (being an antiqua font) are mostly realized in terms of careful kerning [2, 3, 4]. The font is both pleasing, readable, breathable, and has these nods to Germanic typographical heritage. It's really lovely. Among my favorite details pertaining to living in Berlin. [0] https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/fotos/Strassenschild_luederitzstr_berlin_1.jpg https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/fotos/Strassenschil... [1] https://live.staticflickr.com/3730/9668177465_bde765c591_h.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/3730/9668177465_bde765c591_h.j... [2] https://fhxb-museum.de/xmap/media/S16/T1815/image/fhxb_jh_k02_0430_11_1500px.jpg https://fhxb-museum.de/xmap/media/S16/T1815/image/fhxb_jh_k0... [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/M%C3%B6ckernstra%C3%9Fe_Schild.jpg/1024px-M%C3%B6ckernstra%C3%9Fe_Schild.jpg?1575558184352 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/M%... [4] http://www.w-volk.de/museum/encke01.jpg http://www.w-volk.de/museum/encke01.jpg

wodenokoto 7y ago

I had to read the caption of the poster in order to see that it was "Paradise Lost" and not "Paradise Loft" ...

MayeulC 7y ago
I first came into contact with the long s while reading (IIRC) Antoine de Lavoisier's memoirs (or papers?) on the nature of diamond. It was very unnerving to read, as I couldn't see the difference with an "f" before enquiring more about it, and reading the wikipedia article. I couldn't find the exact reference, but the book was along the lines of that one (French): https://books.google.fr/books?id=yr3OAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA22 https://books.google.fr/books?id=yr3OAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA22

snalty 7y ago

I was momentarily confused by these when I saw them in some old journal articles on PubMed. There's a load if you search a really generic term and sort oldest to newest.

pavlov 7y ago

In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the phonetic sign for the S sound was a vertical bar bent around at its top end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian#Uniliteral_signs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy... Apparently it's officially called "folded cloth", U+132F4. I wonder if there's an actual lineage here, or if it's just a coincidence that the S sound is represented as a curved vertical bar across millennia.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
koolba 7y ago
I’ve wondered if it’s shaped after a snake as the sound matches up (“sssssss”).
- kps 7y ago
  Perhapsss sssurprisssingly, the sssnake letter is “N”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script

throwanem 7y ago

If you'd like to be able to use the long S in Emacs, there's a minor mode for that: https://github.com/aaron-em/long-s-mode.el https://github.com/aaron-em/long-s-mode.el It's an older one and I apparently haven't put it on MELPA yet. I can, if there's interest.

tempguy9999 7y ago
"Copyright (c) 2013 Aaron Miller. All rights reverſed. ſhare and Enjoy!" Heh! I'm not sure bulking up melpa is worth it for the infinitesimal number of people who would find it useful. Tangentially I really wish letters eth and thorn had not disappeared. They were certainly better than what we've got now, the 'th' digraph for both.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  In English the voiced/unvoiced distinction stopped mattering so merger of eth and thorn was warranted. A digraph is a sad compromise, but given sh/ch digraphs its now just a given standard in the language's orthography. It might be fun to use better letters for all of English's digraphs, but that ship has probably sailed at this point.

minikites 7y ago

The long S is also problematic for OCR: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cafe&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cafe&year_star... (Google ngram viewer is pulling the word "case" with a long S from the many legal documents in its corpus)