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The 'long', 'medial' or 'descending' 's' ('ſ') is a form of the minuscule letter 's' formerly used where 's' occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example ſinfulneſs ("sinfulness"). The modern letterform was called the 'terminal' or 'short s'.

Contents

History

Modern usage

See also

Notes

External links

History

The long 's' is derived from the old Roman cursive medial s, which was very similar to an elongated check mark. Eventually it got a more vertical form.DAVIES, Lyn. A Is for Ox, London: 2006. Folio Society.
The long 's' is subject to confusion with the minuscule 'f', sometimes even having an 'f'-like nub at its middle, but on the left side only, in various kinds of Roman typeface and in blackletter. There was no nub in its italic typeform, which gave the stroke a descender curling to the left—not possible with the other typeforms mentioned without kerning.
The nub acquired its form in the blackletter style of writing. What looks like one stroke was actually a wedge pointing downward, whose widest part was at that height (x-height), and capped by a second stroke forming an ascender curling to the right. Those styles of writing and their derivatives in type design had a cross-bar at height of the nub for letters 'f' and 't', as well as 'k'. In Roman type, these disappeared except for the one on the medial 's'.
The long 's' was used in ligatures in various languages. Three examples were for 'si', 'ss', and 'st', besides the German 'double s' 'ß'.
Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the end of the 19th century; in English the change occurred in the decades before and after 1800, and in the United States around 1820. This may have been spurred by the fact that long 's' looks somewhat like 'f' (in both its Roman and italic forms), whereas short 's' did not have the disadvantage of looking like another letter, making it easier to read correctly, especially for people with vision problems.
Long 's' survives in German blackletter typefaces. The present-day German 'double s' 'ß' (das Eszett "''the ess-zed''" or scharfes-ess, the sharp S) is an atrophied ligature form representing either 'ſz' or 'ſs' (see ß for more). Greek also features a normal sigma 'σ' and a special terminal form 'ς', which may have supported the idea of specialized 's' forms. In Renaissance Europe a significant fraction of the literate class were familiar with Greek.

Modern usage

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The long 's' survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral symbol used in calculus; Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz based the character on the Latin word ''summa'' (sum), which he wrote ''ſumma''. This use first appeared publicly in his paper ''De Geometria'', published in ''Acta Eruditorum'' of June, 1686,^[1] but he had been using it in private manuscripts since at least 1675.^[2]
In linguistics a similar glyph () (called "esh") is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which it represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, the first sound in the English word ''shun''.
The long 's' is represented in Unicode by the sign U+017F, and may be represented in HTML as ſ or ſ.
Confusion between the long 'ſ' and 'f' has been the subject of much intentional humour, much of it involving phrases like "sucking pig", but Greenfleaves made an appearance in a Flanders and Swan monologue about coming up with a Shakespearean hit^[3] and the same joke forms the basis of Benny Hill's song "Fad-Eyed Fal" (i.e., ''Sad-Eyed Sal''), as well as some dialogue in a scene from Stan Freberg's patriotic musical, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Vol.1 about the Declaration of Independence: Upon perusing Thomas Jefferson's new document Benjamin Franklin reads "life, liberty and the 'purfoot of happinefs'" and tells Jefferson his s's look like f's. Mad magazine also makes humorous light of the long s's resemblance to lower case f in ''Poor Alfred'f Almanack''.
The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten ("The evening mail"), the logo of which is written using the long 'ſ' (), is often humorously referred to as "Aftenpoften". Similarly for the Adresseavisen (), mocked as "Udresfeabifen".
Also, in the English Comedy The Vicar of Dibley, there is an episode containing a scene where the character Alice must read a (reportedly fictional) prayer which contains various long "S"s and is unable to determine which are "Fs" (If any) and which are not, leading to such nonsensical humorous reads as "Ye are the 'falt' of the Earth and 'fainted'." (Really: "salt" and "sainted" respectively). The scene ends when Alice is about to pronounce the prayer's final Long S word with an "F" but the Vicar interrupts and says it correctly for her. The word is "Succor".

See also

★ ß (Eszett)

★ Esh (letter)

Notes

1. ''Mathematics and its History'', John Stillwell, Springer 1989, p. 110
2. ''Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz'', J. M. Child, Open Court Publishing Co., 1920, pp. 73–74, 80.
3. http://www.beachmedia.com/gorbuduc.html

External links

★ The Straight Dope on long ''s''

★ The American Declaration of Independence with long s's

★ The Rules for Long S

★ The Long and the Short of the Letter S