From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 18:05:53 EST
"John Delacour" <JD@BD8.COM> wrote:
> 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>
This letter shows consistant use of long form of s for all non-final
occurences of s, and consistant use of the small form for all final s...
Where is the problem here ?
> 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>
Note that this is not English, but Latin language. This consistently uses
the long s form for all non-final s, and the small s for all final s
(including words extended by the Latin conjonction "-que", which means "too"
or "and", and can be appended onto most words, without changing its
orthograph and its declinations, conjugaisons or plural and genre marks).
This use of long-s was almost mandatory and consistant within almost all
Latin-scripted languages during medieval periods, up to the Renaissance
where some inconsistance started to spread, as suffixes added to words
ending by s were creating too many exceptions for the correct form of s in
the middle of compound words).
I don't know when the long form of s was effectively abandonned in French
and English, by simply choosing the uniform form that is used for uppercase;
but this usage has survived in German for long, notably in the final
ess-tsett which was effectively a non-final s and a final s, with only the
first one consistently represented by a long form, often creating ligatures
with the last s in handwritten script. Even in the German Sütterlin, the
long s was the only prefered form as most letters where to be written in
actual texts as lowercase, and German words are often composed by ignoring
the preservation of the special final small form occuring at end of a
non-final radical.
> 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.
The long s has traditionally always been overhanging in handwritten script,
with the same reason it was also overhanging for the lowercase f. I do think
that long s with a short leg is an error for the handwritten script, but the
short leg form of long s is also occuring in printed book script exactly
with the same cases as f.
We have the same final/non-final differences in Greek with final and
non-final sigma; or in Hebrew with some letters; or even more in Arabic on
almost all letters. I don't see why you think that your examples would be
showing inconsistant use.
Still, none of the examples you show use a sharp-s ligature, which is only
typical of German. So I don't see why this would exclude the correct
interpretation of sharp-s as being effectively a German ligature of a "long"
(initial/medial) s followed by the modern "normal" (final) s.
Do you still think I'm one of those illiterate that did not know this
consistant use of long-s as the principal form of s in medieval French,
English, German, Italian, Spanish, etc... ???
Thanks.
Philippe.
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