At the weekend, I was lucky enough to visit the picturesque city of Bath in western England.
While in Bath Abbey (the current structure built in the 1600s, I believe) I noticed some differences in how some words were written on some of the earlier grave stones.
Basically, there seemed to be an almost “f” like character replacing some of the “s” characters. For example, on one grave, “husband” was spelt “hufband”. It should be noted that the character was not a perfect “f” shape, the horizontal line through the middle of the vertical line was only marked on the left hand side (hard to explain, I know), but there was a perfectly good “s” used later on the same grave so it can’t have just been a poor or olden day representation of that.
Can anyone enlighten me on what this was about? IIRC the grave was from the 1700s.
This was the traditional way of writing S until around the year 1800. Basically, from the medieval period the “f”-like character was used within a work, with the “s” we know being used only at the end of a word.
This was true of not just English, but other European languages. The German character ß is actually just the “f”-like “s” and the letter “z” written together, so “sz.” Medieval writers also did the same with Greek, with lowercase sigma being written in a different way if it was within a word or at the end.
This is not only a British affair, but was common in America during the colonial period. The writings of America’s founding fathers were printed this way.
Unu, actually, the German character you mention stands for double-S (as in Straße = street), not the combination “sz” (which is used in Polish and some other Slavic languages, but not German, AFAIK).
The confusion probably arises over the fact that that character is called the “ess-tset,” which combines the German word for the letter s with the German word for the letter z.
By the way, German no longer uses this character, as I understand the recent changes in German orthography.
No confusion here, look at the character! It’s the old way of writing medial S joined to the old way of writing Z! I regretably can’t type the two symbols here, but just draw a line right down the middle of ß and you’ll see. Yes, “ss” is used for “ß” now in Germany (although AFAIK Austria has not accepted the spelling reforms, and a lot of Germans wanted to go back to the old spellings), but it was derived from “sz”.
Reminds me of the episode of “Cheers” in which Woody has been reading the U.S. Constitution, and declares that we all have an inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff.”
As far as my German prof has told our class, the rules for using the ß have changed, but it is still present (some words that used to have ß in them do not anymore, i believe “mussen” used to be “mußen”, but I don’t have my book handy). In Germany, the ß is still used in places, but isn’t quite as common. I believe that Switzerland completely eliminated the use of it and replaced it totally with ‘ss’. I’m not sure about Austria, though. (If I get anything wrong in this post, forgive me, Dopers!)
