I’ve seen in a lot of old Revolution-era documents the use of a strange, elongated S. I don’t recall seeing a pattern to how it’s used, as the s in today’s form was also used. I think I may have thought it was used when two s’s were next to each other, but that was debunked through closer examination. So, what happened to this old, unusual s, and how was it used?
It was pretty well used in all lower-case, initial medial positions in a word. The capital variety was the same as present-day, and the final variety (used at the end of words, plurals, possessives, etc.) was the familiar lower-case S we still use today. Only the lower-case initial and medial form used the long- or script-s. It is similar to a lower-case f, but close examination reveals that most printers used an f-like letter where the cross-bar did not cross the entire stem of the letter, but only touched the left side of the stem.
canadiana.org has a lot of great 18th and 19th century stuff on line; here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
http://www.canadiana.org/cgi-bin/ECO/mtq?id=938e1fa154&display=35434+0117
Note the initial s in “sledges” (fourth line) uses an f; the final s in the word is the familiar s; “so” (first word in the body of this page) uses an “f”, but twenty-seventh (second line) uses the proper long-s with the short bar. Christmas has a long-s and t ligature; some later reader of the copy used to make the CIHM microfiche has courteously hand-corrected “no” to “on”, showing that the printer (Strahan and Cadell, 1795) was a tad sloppy.
Some works even at this early date (and earlier) already have rejected the long-s, but other printers used it until the early 19th century, and some scribes used it even longer. (My GGF’s Hudson’s Bay Company contract had him residing in the Scottish county of “Rofs”.
The writing to which you refer was merely a style of writing in vogue at the time and reflects a step between the ‘old english’ and the still evolving alphabetic characters we use today.
As far as the actual process of the evolution of our alphabet, :
The long S is still popular in Germany, where the “ß” is equal to Ben Franklin’s “ƒs”.
If you don’t have ß on your typewriter or printer, it is rendered ss.
(They call it “scharfes-s” or “s-tset” meaning “sz”. )
(Hijack)You still have some explaining to do, Skwerl. I even started up a MPSIMS thread so you could introduce yourself. Hmmm. Us rodents have to stick together. (/hijack)
Sqrl