3 ms·

My theory #1: It's not protection against forgery, it's protection against accidental misreads. It's less likely a random smear looks like an "x" of "v" than an

My theory #1: It's not protection against forgery, it's protection against accidental misreads. It's less likely a random smear looks like an "x" of "v" than an "i", so they don't really benefit from the terminal marker. And "i" can never start a large roman numeral, so just a terminal marker is fine. Theory #2: It didn't start as such protection. It started as a typographical convention -- remember, there was a time when "i" and "j" weren't separate letters, "u" and "v" were not separate letters, and so on -- which then people started using as a reading guide.

jacobolus 2y ago
I've been skimming a bunch of 16th–17th century English books with blackletter type recently, and the relation of ꝛ to r, ſ to s, v to u, j to i, ʒ vs z, etc. seem generally similar, just typographic variants of a letter to be used interchangeably or with one form in the middle of a word and another at the end or beginning depending on the letter. (Disclaimer: I am not an expert on this topic.)
garciansmith 2y ago
It's weird nothing in the Stackexchange answer makes the point about the letters not being separate. In Latin (at least during the Middle Ages) J and I were used interchangeably. It was simply a matter of style or, at times, the random whim of the scribe. A person's name might start with a J and then in the same document be an I. As for numerals, tacking a J (or really what often just looked like an I with a longer straight descender) was common in late medieval Gothic scripts. Forgery doesn't make sense, yeah. You gave some reasons, but also western medieval and early modern conceptions of forgery, for instance, were very different than our modern one. Ease of reading and clarity makes sense. Nothing in the answer (or anywhere in this thread) distinguishes "when". It don't doubt that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the "j" was used in this way, but that might not have always been the case.

jacobolus 2y ago

I've been skimming a bunch of 16th–17th century English books with blackletter type recently, and the relation of ꝛ to r, ſ to s, v to u, j to i, ʒ vs z, etc. seem generally similar, just typographic variants of a letter to be used interchangeably or with one form in the middle of a word and another at the end or beginning depending on the letter. (Disclaimer: I am not an expert on this topic.)

garciansmith 2y ago

It's weird nothing in the Stackexchange answer makes the point about the letters not being separate. In Latin (at least during the Middle Ages) J and I were used interchangeably. It was simply a matter of style or, at times, the random whim of the scribe. A person's name might start with a J and then in the same document be an I. As for numerals, tacking a J (or really what often just looked like an I with a longer straight descender) was common in late medieval Gothic scripts. Forgery doesn't make sense, yeah. You gave some reasons, but also western medieval and early modern conceptions of forgery, for instance, were very different than our modern one. Ease of reading and clarity makes sense. Nothing in the answer (or anywhere in this thread) distinguishes "when". It don't doubt that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the "j" was used in this way, but that might not have always been the case.