In Cecil’s first book, he discusses the reason for the use of “f” as “s” in colonial times, for example. His historical coverage is good, but Uncle Cecil left some questions dying to be asked:
A1) Where was the “f” in the alphabet then?
A2) Were there 27 letters, perhaps???
B1) Was there are actual /f/ sound?
B2) If so, what letter made the /f/ sound?
C) How would one know if it were Thomaf Jesserfon? Jepherson?
How confusing! Even Cecil wrote that the rules became skewed with time.
Is that column on line? My linguistics professor told us (I seem to remember) that this symbol meant “ss” and was distinct from f. They just look similar and the old symbol is not in use anymore. I don’t have any proof on hand, though.
In German they use a funky little symbol not to different to mean “ss”
The column in question is Why did 18th-cent. writers use F inftead of S?.
As Cecil notes,The two versions were phonetically equivalent and derived from the same Roman letterform., i.e. the long-s wasn’t a different letter from the regular-s, or pronounced differently, it was just an alternate way to write it.
Originally the long-s was only supposed to only be used in the middle of a word, but eventually that rule broke down, and people started to use it with abandon, merely to make their writing fancier, much like people today who dot their i’s with smilely faces.
So to answer the actual questions:
A1) Yes.
A2) No.
B1) Yes.
B2) f.
I’ll leave C) as homework :).
It is too clear, and so it is hard to see.
The “long s” is one of the upper ascii characters in some fonts, but not consistantly. I currently see it if I type Alt-159 ƒ, but that could show as anything depending on what font you’re using to read this.
The question here assumes that the f and the long-s looked identical, but they weren’t. The f has a definite crossbar in the middle, and the long-s is just a fancified version of a regular s, with no crossbar, pretty much like the modern integral sign in calculus.
It’s hard to read to us today because we see a long letter like that, and our brains have been trained to interpret it as an f. But if you regularly read documents that used the long-s, your brain would learn to regard the crossbar as important, and those documents would be easy to read.
Curt:
I do regularly read old documents in a parttime job I have and I can definitely confirm what you say. After a while one doesn’t even notice if it is a long or short S while reading.
English long “s” is not found in ordinary fonts, since it is both obsolete and unnecessary. (After all, if you want to do a facsimile of an old document, you can just do a facsimile.) Alt-159 is the “Francs” sign.
When I had need of long “s” recently, I used “f”. (Since I was creating a fake “typed and mimeographed” handout for a Halloween show at a fake “National Park”, I figured the imaginary typist would have used an “f” anyway.)
Interestingly, Fraktur (the Gothic font used on and off in Germany until quite recently) and Greek also have separate “not-final” and “final” forms for “s”. Hebrew has “not-final” and “final” forms of several letters, including “s”, but Arabic is the champ, with “initial”, “final”, “medial”, and “alone” forms of each and every letter.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles William
Woodja –
German has a “double-s” character that looks somewhat like a a lower-case “f.” I no longer remember how it is pronouonced.
It looks a good deal more like a lower-case beta, assuming that you mean “ß”. It is historically an “sz” ligature – a long “s” joined to a “z” (which in gothic type is also a long letter, as it is in English handwriting), but it is pronounced “ss”, and “ss”, not “sz” is used to replace it if it is not available.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles William
Regarding initial, intermediate, and final forms, think cursive. Even just using lower case letters, there is often a difference in how you write it as a starting letter vs. an intermediate letter.
It’s the kind of thing that what you learn is expected to be standard and natural, and everybody simply must do it that way or they are weird. The first way you learn things creates unstated (and unrecognized) assumptions in how you look at the way others do the same things.