“Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013) | Hacker News Reader

“Why Does S Look Like F?”: A Guide to Reading Very Old Books (2013)

theappendix.net

88 pointsbane21 comments

The book linked to is a really interesting slice of 1680s culture.

Kathy: "But they can't hide it [having sex] from God, who sees and knows all things"

Frank: "God who sees and knows all things will say nothing; besides, I cannot think leachery a sin, I am sure if Women govern'd the world and the Church as men do, you would soon find they would account fucking so lawful, as it should not be accounted a Misdemeanor."

Kathy: "I wonder men should be so rigorous against a thing they love so well."

Frank: "Only for fear of giving to much liberty to the Women, who else would challenge the same liberty with them, but in fine, we wink at one anothers faults, and do not think swiving a hainous sin, and were it not for fear of great Bellys, if it were possible swiving would be much more used then now it is."

The double s ligature starting with a long s is also where the modern german Scharfes S (ß) comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F

I'm kind of surprised there's no mention of it since it's a perfect example of the long s still in use.

"Last month, I came across a recently digitized book from 1680 with the innocuous-sounding title The School of Venus."

Funny. I read that title and assumed it was erotica.

Venus is the goddess of love. The title is also rather similar to one of the most famous pieces of erotic literature of all time, Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus.

This sort of took me aback in the article; this is a relatively well-known piece of libertine literature for those who study early-modern lit/culture.

As part of my History major I did a subject on Witchcraft in Europe, which involved a lot of primary texts from the early modern period. You certainly get faster the more you read, but I always did a double take when the text discussed the familiars (think black cats) "sucking their mistresses".

To go OT, the "witch's teat" was a superfluous nipple for feeding their satanic familiars, and was even used as evidence to convict some witches.

It gets even more fun if you go back to the medieval grimoires, like the Munich Manual. Medieval Latin is tricky in both orthography and its linguistic departures from classical Latin.

I’ve actually used the long S in a comment here on Hacker News before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7300266

(It was in a quote from 1788.)

I've always read it as F. How can you rule out the possibility that, before certain advances in dental technology [1], most people spoke with a lisp, so what you read is what would have actually been said? It's not like there are recordings or standardized international phonetic alphabets to record the sounds represented by the letters.

[1] I seem to remember George Washington's dentures a technological marvel of his day, or something.

There are lots of ſ's and other slightly hard-to-read typesetting when reading papers from the Royal Society. It's freely-available and has some quaint gems: https://royalsociety.org/news/2011/Royal-Society-journal-arc...

Fun fact, the integral symbol is in fact this long S (as in 'sum' or 'ſum').

You would do well to heed Wikipedia's advice[0].

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_symbol

Ah sweet, those links give a much better explanation than the original article.

The excerpt from "The School of Venus" in the article > Coufin, I confefs my ignorance

"Confefs" ? The old and the new in one word.

I think that was addressed by the author: '... the long S is that it occurs only in the middle of words, never at the beginning or end.'

"I ſleep, ſing and dance, and ſometimes ..."

My only problem with this article. The image contradicts what was written shortly thereafter, without explanation.

That small slip annoyed me too. Long s does not appear at the end of words or in capital letters (at least not that I can currently recall), which is why it would not appear in the title (the capital letter of "School" or the word-end form in "Venus"), but I believe it is the standard form at the start of words.

"Anything is readable"

Has anyone deciphered the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript yet?

Obvious bait, but I'll bite.

You're equivocating. The letters of the Vonyich manuscript are readable, discrete, and consistent. They are not meaningful, however.

How do we know?

I can't even read my own handwriting.

I have been suffering from a bad handwriting my entire life. In school and uni I would always be afraid, that answers could not be decoded by the person grading the test.

I also thought that the resulting text looked ugly.

Recently I have started to consciously improve my handwriting with great results. The simplest most effective step was to treat every letter as a single entity (in contrast of slurring all letters together into one word).

Of course this takes a little more time, but I now can actually read the results, and I also think that it looks good from an aesthetic point of view. Now I am not afraid of writing christmas or birthday cards anymore (I even bought a fountain pen for this purpose).

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