Re: German 0364 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER E

From: John Delacour (JD@BD8.COM)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 16:24:50 EST

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    At 2:52 pm -0500 28/12/03, John Cowan wrote:

    > > For the same reason, why is the German "ess-tsett" (sharp S) given a
    >> compatibility decomposition as <s><s> instead of <long-s><s>?
    >
    >Because in modern German orthography, the sharp-s is replaced by "ss" if
    >the sharp-s is not available.

    Michel de Montaigne displays a nice variety of esses in this letter
    to the King:

    <http://bd8.com/temp/mm_lettre.jpg>

    It looks as if he never wrote long s+s but he seems to be pretty flexible.

    English practice was generally, I think, to write the long s first
    but _printed_ double s is always two tall longs, certainly in the
    18th century:

    <http://bd8.com/temp/georg1778.jpg>

    I have some older Italian manuscripts including a letter from
    Petrarch but I can't find them at the moment. The Italian first s
    was tall and overhanging.

    It's too late to tie these guys down to the rules of our illiterate world.

    JD

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