Long S | Hacker News Reader

Long S

en.wikipedia.org

81 pointsshawndumas26 comments

I think the most amazing part of this is just how quickly it disappeared. That graph showing it almost entirely disappearing — after being used for hundreds of years beforehand — in just 15 years is pretty amazing. The explanations in this article, sadly, aren't that in-depth about why we see such a big switch so quickly...

It's almost a perfect logistic curve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

An S-curve, you might say. (See the first paragraph of that WP article.)

Interestingly, google's book indexing project shows that the word 'fuck' used to be a much more popular word back in the day than it is now - http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fuck&year_s...

I read some place it's because google's character recognition automation interprets the long S as an 'f' instead of an 's'

One of my favorite uses of the long S in an Achewood comic: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=10192004

Fell out of usage with the advent of industrial printing presses, it looks like?

Yeah, that would be my guess.

Survived from through to late 1700s whilst only against the hand-powered press, then as soon as industrial presses (steam powered) appear circa 1800 and mass printing was now possible (double-output with far lower human effort being input) it dropped off.

Still doesn't wholly explain it though. If it was seen as a valid character you would expect that the symbol would've been in the charset and have been used in print too.

Now that we have Unicode fonts, we can bring it back!

“Dear Mr. Jones: I am pleaſed to reply to your meßage of Tueſsday laſt, requeſting my ſervices as a ſoft-ware engineer...”

"The long s survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus."

Did not know that.

Always remind myself that the (Reimann) integral is generally a sum: sum of the areas of all the rectangles under the curve. It becomes more accurate as their bases shrink (as x becomes smaller, and the rectangles become thinner. They eventually become almost lines, completely saturating area under the curve.)

The limit of their diminishing IS the Reimann integral. So it makes sense to use 'S' for sum.

Big-Sigma (∑) is used for summation in general, and Big-pie (∏) for products.

A good article was submitted a while ago, discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059173 and article at http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html

You might notice the long s in Arth Guinness' signature. http://www.irishfair.org/assets/images/GUINNESS_NAME.gif

Too bad we gave up on that.

English is a living language, you can always try and revive it. It might give your resume a certain je ne sais qua ;)

s/qua/quoi/

ſ/sais/ſais

Actually, my `we' meant the Germans. And not so much only the long-s, but also Fraktur.

The Nazis banned Fraktur, probably because Hitler didn't like it, and we never re-introduced it. As an irony of history, for some people Fraktur now carries connotations of the Third Reich. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua-Fraktur_dispute)

I have a few old books in Fraktur. Faust and translations of Shakespeare's plays.

P.S. For my resume, my name only has the wrong kind of s.

I have a large number of old books in Fraktur (mostly Lutheran theology). I read so much more German in Fraktur that I find it easier to follow than the Latin script. It always amazes me that there are a good number of Germans who cannot read it at all. My wife (who also is well-versed in Fraktur, as well as the old German "saw-tooth" cursive) has had a number of German-speakers ask her to transcribe Fraktur to modern script. I mean, sure, it's different. Some of the capitals are especially strange, and there are a few more ligatures, but it's not that hard.

Ever watched both parts of "Die Nibelungen Saga" silent movie version from 1924 by Fritz Lang? After 4.5 hours reading these old letters you will hate them ..

Hey, we number theorists still use fraktur all the time! Prime ideals in Dedekind domains are usually denoted with fraktur letters.

Similar story here: I have a lot of c.18 and older antiquarian theology texts that feature the long s. Most of mine are in English, though.

I agree it's not that hard - I don't even speak German and I had no trouble reading the Fraktur samples I found on wikipedia.

When I chat, occasionally, I'll þrow in a þorn, or, depending if it's voiced, ðen I'll use ðe eð [eth]. Most people just pretend it was an artifact in ðe session.

Please. It's je ne sais quoi ("I don't know what"). εὐ πραττειν...

I have compoſe-f-s as the key combination for long s in my .xcompoſe file: https://github.com/kragen/xcompose. You, too, can compoſe miſsives uſing our dear antiquated friend, ſhould you ſo deſire.

Thanks! (Though I'd ideally want my computer to take that decision for me.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com