From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 19:38:06 EST
John Delacour <JD at BD8 dot COM> wrote:
> English practice was generally, I think, to write the long s first
> but _printed_ double s is always two tall longs, certainly in the
> 18th century:
I thought English practice was to write all s's long except at the end
of a word, as opposed to the German practice of writing all s's long
except at the end of a syllable (and composing ſ + s = ß as necessary).
Compare these to the Greek distinction between σ and "word-final" ς. I
would have assumed that current Greek usage of σ and ς is parallel to
18th-century English usage of ſ and s, but TUS says (p. 176) that "use
of the final sigma is a matter of spelling convention," so that
assumption is probably overly simplistic.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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