The Long S | Hacker News Reader

The Long S

en.wikipedia.org

127 pointsbryanrasmussen81 comments

Tangentially: this answered a long-standing question I've had, why the long S disappeared, which also incidentally served as a great example of how the wrong learning environment can completely kill a child's curiosity.

I came across the long S in the fifth grade, if I recall, during some line of learning about colonial American history. The conversation between the teacher and me, in the middle of class, went something like this:

> Why is the letter S shaped differently?

> If you'd read the sidebar, it says that's the letter S.

> But why is it different?

> It's just an S. We need to move on.

I've never really been curious enough to go look up the Wikipedia article in the ensuing years, but that discourse really stuck with me. Luckily, now that it's been linked here, I _have_ read the Wikipedia article, and have my answer (typesetting). Even if Wikipedia didn't exist in those days, though, it would've been nice to be pointed at an encyclopedia instead of having my question dismissed.

What your story tells me is that your teacher didn't know and didn't want to admit it.

This was my impression as well. The older I get the more I appreciate someone who can admit they don't know something.

I don't know how old your story is, but one thing that I can see factoring in is that before recently-ish, it would have been hard to say "it's an interesting question, but I don't know. How about we figure it out?" without spending a large amount of time to find the answer.

Two ways my teachers liked to deal with that situation was:

- "That's an interesting question. To find out we could ..."

- "Does anyone have any ideas what the answer could be?"

Both approaches can be easily combined (first ask for ideas, then say how to validate them), but if you're in a hurry to get on just use the first approach.

Intentionally stifling others' curiosity because of your own ignorance and laziness is horrible

Yeah, but also, those people get punished for it - they are perceived less capable.

Admitting ignorance is a luxury that becomes affordable once you have knowledge, seniority, and respect. It can be an expensive hazard for those just starting out.

That's one obvious reason: teachers aren't intellectuals. But teachers can get fed up with questions as well, or know that a certain pupil should keep focus and not be distracted.

This is because teachers are themselves graded on standardized test results. Standardized tests don't give a crap about curiosity.

So classroom instruction in the US ends up being mostly about the teachers making sure that their students won't drastically underperform on the standardized test.

This! I sucked in school, had to leave early because of my performance. I was just bothered by those linear performance assessment strategies. Though I suck in every piece of information, technologies, biology, mathematics, physics, psychology... Whatever.

It makes me sad knowing, that the current system focusses on performance and leaves behind so many briliant people, and I don't even consider myself briliant.

Having taught for several years, I agree that this is part of it. A much bigger reason is the need to avoid or reduce distractions. A class of 30 students all going off on separate tangents unrelated to the lesson plan, or unrelated the subject of the class, is unmanageable.

I think most teachers just don’t care. In highschool, I remember asking my math teacher about ruler’s identity, and she had never heard of it. In middle school our math teacher told us pi was exactly 22/7. In elementary school one of my teachers said there was no gravity on the moon. My highschool chemistry teacher told us that if you put two cheerios in a bowl of milk, they move towards each other because of their mutual gravitational attraction.

As it turns out, there is gravity on the moon: you just need math to prove it (no wonder an elementary teacher thought otherwise). Safer just to wear heavy boots.

*euler's

The long s seems to form ligatures better. When people wrote with ink and quill flow was important —maybe that’s why it was devised. They also had many abbreviations so as to avoid tiring their fingers writing common words and particles over and over.

I always wondered where the integral sign was coming from. This gives a very simple explanation: it's just the letter 's', the shorthand for sum!

It’s also smoother than the sigma, which visually incorporates the fundamental theorem of calculus.

In general I’m glad we use Leibniz’s notation and not Newton’s, because my handwriting is messy. Though I did use dot and dot dot in physics long ago.

And the uppercase sigma (Σ) used for summation is basically the Greek 'S' (i.e. S for "Sum"). So it's just another S.

Also, the capital pi (Π) used for product notation, is basically the Greek 'P' (i.e. P for "Product").

And Greek too has two versions of the lower-case sigma: σ (whose usage corresponds to that of the long s) and ς for use only in the word-final position (corresponding to the terminal s as distinguished from the long s).

Also if anyone knows an alphabet with a nice distinct 'P', please donate it to your local mathematician, there's a great shortage at the moment.

I recommend the Thai alphabet. It has four of them! ป ผ พ ภ

If you want to be really flamboyant you could try Javanese: ꦦ

While we're here about greek trivia: both omicron and omega are a sort of O. Can't figure what kind? Hint: O-micron, O-mega.

‘O’ has an interesting backstory. The shape comes from phonecian ayin and has the meaning of “eye”, from which it takes its form. It probably had a sound close to the Arabic ayin (a kind of guttural growl where you half choke yourself).

However the Greeks were probably just as confused by that sound as non-Arabs are by it today, so they instead gave it a vowel sound.

‘A’ had a similar story. In Phonecian it represents a glottal stop and has the name ‘alep. However a glottal stop at the start of a word is quite hard to hear if you aren’t used to it, so the Greeks seemingly assumed that the letter represented the second phoneme of ‘alep, an /a/ sound. Hence the alphabet was invented, a mixture of vowels and consonants with equal status.

It's really a lucky happenstance that Semitic languages have enough gutterals that could be repurposed as vowels; if these had been lacking, or if Greek had needed them as consonants, then it's easy to imagine a sort of incomplete consonant-only orthography coming into use, perhaps even persisting to Latin alphabets in the modern day. Greece's first introduction to writing (linear b) didn't stick and doesn't seem to have been used for anything other than palace records, arguably because of deficiencies in that script, might literacy in the West have similarly been stunted by scripts that could not show vowels?

We could get by without most vowels anyway, that's basically SMS text speak.

We cld gt by wtht mst vwls aynw, tht's bscly SMS txt spk.

Losing the vowels works in languages like Arabic because of the structure of the language, with consonantal clusters (e.g. ktb, tlb) being semantic “roots”. So you usually know from context, and if you don’t know the absolutely precise word, you know the meaning, which can sometimes be more informative.

Indo-European languages don’t work that way.

It’s not a hypothetical actually. Many non-Semitic languages have adopted Semitic writing systems. e.g. Persian, Urdu, Yiddish.

Sometimes they always write the short vowels in, e.g. Urdu and Yiddish, but other times they don’t e.g. Persian.

So it’s at least possible to write an Indo European language without vowels. Desirable? Probably not.

If anything, it would be shorthand for "Summe", I suppose.

The oldest book in my personal library is from the eighteenth century and frequently talks about the Catholic church ſucking money out of England.

ſuck it and ſee?

Read the preface to the 1st edition of this thing, and prepare for your mind to be blown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douay%E2%80%93Rheims_Bible

Keep clicking "next" on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1609_Doway_Old_Testament....

In summary, they (the authors of Douay-Rheims) based their bible translation on Jerome's 4th century Latin translation because they believed that the extant Greek and Hebrew versions had been corrupted by "Iewes and Heretikes".

Not sure what am I looking for, but damn, the typography and typesetting of this 400 year old book is mind blowing.

On page 3 the mix of double 'V's for 'W', 'u' for 'v', and 'V' for 'U' ('IESVS' at the top) is quite intriguing.

Interesting to note also the use of ã as shorthand for an, i.e. "the reſidue is in hãd" -> "the residue is in hand"

Any relation to Spanish ñ ?

W, v and j were still pretty novel letters at that point. j was typically used as a final form for i/j so you will see things like the roman numeral for 3 represented as iij. V tended to be used for U/V in capitals and u for u/v in lowercase. W was often not a letter that was part of a typefont and writing VV or vv was the only way to represent it in print. The sixteenth century was the point where u and i became the vowel forms and V and j became the consonant forms. Later Latin is inconsistent in its use of u/v and i/j, right down to dictionaries. I remember having difficulty with my pocket Latin dictionary in college because I would often forget that iam was listed as jam in it (and similar instances of an initial consonantal i).

Yes, but there are 'w's in the text. Mixed in the same sentence in one case with a 'vv'.

> ...we ſend you here...you receiued the New...therof shal not now...

> ...impediments, which hitherto haue long hindered this vvorke...

I would guess it's to justify the text. People would also add/remove unnecessary vowels to fit a line better.

That seems likely. Some early typefaces included wider and narrower versions of some letters to enable justification. Arabic typography does this by allowing, e.g., ﻧـﺪ in place of ﻧﺪ (not a real word, in case you’re puzzling over it, I know more about the letters than the language), where there is an extension to the connecting line between letters.

I think, that Gutenberg’s type had multiple versions of letters for this purpose, but I’m going by vague decades-old memories now.

The printer likely had a limited set of types[1] from which to construct the page. If a page was unusually W-heavy, they probably ran out of W blocks, and substituted VV.

Also, V was considered "just another shape for U" for a long time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_(typesetting)

Why do pages end on a line with a single word set flush right?

That's a preview of the first word of the next page. I guess it helps to switch between pages more smoothly.

That's the catchword, the first word of the next page. It helps with keeping the pages in the correct order when binding the book. It could also be an aid when reading aloud, to give the reader one word of "buffer" when turning the page.

I would guess it is to aid a speaker reading aloud so as not to have an awkward pause between pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclamans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catchword

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kustode_(Buchherstellung)

Reading the wiki page, I still don't get why this long S entered usage at all. The article mostly talks about the rules for usage and how it gradually phased out.

What was the purpose or reason for it appearing to begin with? Were words with double-ss needing some typographic distinguishing? What warranted a new character that broke through the normal height of lower case letters, when regular s was doing just fine? And why only one of the S's in a pair? Puzzling.

I can only speak for the use in the German language:

The German language allows you to compose several words into one long word, which is no longer structured by spaces. This can lead to ambiguities, especially where a sub-word ends with an S. Due to the rule that words always end with a round S, these ambiguities were resolved.

Examples from German wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langes_s

Kreiſchen (Krei·schen, shouting) vs Kreischen (Kreis·chen, a small circle)

Verſendung (Ver·sen·dung, posting) und Versendung (Vers·en·dung, end of a verse)

Long-s predates short-s.

It entered usage because we needed a lower case S when Carolingian monks first developed cased letters in the eighth century, and the Romans already had a similar shape (the "medial S"). For a long time "S" was only used in the capital form; small "s" came later.

Here's what Carolingian miniscule looked like, note the r-like s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carolineminuscel.jpg

And here's Old Roman cursive for comparison: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Cu...

Small-s starts taking off around the 12th century or so, coexists with long-s for a while, before eventually replacing it.

Thanks, interesting!

That Carolingian script really has a lot of characters that can be easily confused, or relies on very subtle differences. b vs. h, i vs. j, i vs. l, r/s/t.

The confusion of ſ looking like f is the basis of one of my favourite bits from The Vicar of Dibley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UySOpb64yc

Come to think of it, no misreading needed, succor has an inappropriate homophone in English already!

Also, English used to have the letter thorn (þ) for "th", which typesetters would often just replace with a "y". So all of those signs you see in "medieval" settings using "ye olde whatever" are really just "the olde whatever."

My theory is typography killed the long s. It was much more visually distinct in handwriting, in type it just looks like an f without a line.

Makes sense. Especially the way it looks in handwritten “congreſs”.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence was my first exposure to the long S. (Or should I say my firſt?)

I read through that, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights from souvenir reproductions in middle school. I was curious about this letter and kept digging until I found out what it was, and what it was for. Later that helped me understand the proper use of the eszett (ß) in German.

The origin of the German ß is very intuitive once you know that S can look like ſ and Z can look like Ʒ.

All hail the beloved Esszett-Schnitten!

For more on the letter though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F

Guess what:

    x.toUpperCase().length === x.length

is false

when

    x = 'ß'

I guess another falsehood programmers believe about strings is that length is not changed by toUpperCase()!

There is a capitol ẞ now so it will depend on normalization rules.

Rust's char::to_uppercase returns an iterator to cover these sorts of shenanigans :

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/primitive.char.html#met...

So.... it's a ligature!

not to be confused with the Cool S

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S

Came here to read the story of Esselunga ("esse lunga" means "long s" in italian) the first italian supermarket chain, but I'm not disappointed :P

The rules governing long ſ differ between languages, ſee German Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langes_s#Regeln_in_anderen_Spr...

The German rules are thus quite eaſy (contrary to the article):

- never long ſ at the end of a ſyllable (mid-word or end-word)

- everywhere elſe, uſe long ſ

On a German Linux ſystem it is conveniently mapped to Right-Alt+s

Fun fact from the German Wikipedia:

> The „ſ“ [...] is no violation of (modern German) orthography, since the new [...] spelling rules do not prescribe how they should be implemented allographically.

Groſsartig, but please don't, at least if you don't use 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔰! :D

Germans have largely forgotten the rules governing the use of the long s. So when they use 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔰 (𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔨𝔱𝔲𝔯), for example in advertising contexts, they often make miſtakeſ.

> Groſsartig

The ß is aligature of ſ and z, so maybe Groſzartig, or a little bit different script: Groſʒartig

TIL that the slash in pre-decimal shillings and pence notation is another form of this S - had just assumed naturally enough that it was just a bog-standard slash separator.

I bought a 1st edition KJV (1611 reproduction) that had these all throughout. I couldn't make it past the introduction by the 'tranflators'

“tranſlators”

It always reads as if they were liſping.

How much was it? Just curious.

So many people confuse it with an ‘f’. E.g. search for the word “Jagermeifter” for a good laugh :-)

Even knowing what it is, I can't help but pronounce it as an "f" just for laughs and to make the spoken form sound as silly as the written form looks to me.

https://debeste.de/upload/fbe0e08ce37286b7ab60ebdeaf43c33029... :)

The most preftigious letter.

Reading this, as it's just a stylized lowercase 's' - it seems to me like it would have been more appropriate as a font ligature than a dedicated codepoint?

In many cases, glyphs have distinct codepoints because they had one in some legacy encoding, and Unicode was intended to be able to roundtrip any text in those encodings.

Then again, sometimes a glyph variant that has literally one known occurrence ever gets a codepoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O

Why on earth did that get a codepoint… Someone in the 1400's made a single crazy looking O and now it's forever embedded in unicode?!

The most obvious explanation is that it is simply the mark of Tzeentch on one of its creations. ~

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