From: John Delacour (JD@BD8.COM)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 19:46:15 EST
At 12:05 am +0100 29/12/03, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>"John Delacour" <JD@BD8.COM> wrote:
>
>> At 2:52 pm -0500 28/12/03, John Cowan wrote:
>>
>> > > For the same reason, why is the German "ess-tsett" (sharp S) given a
>> >> compatibility decomposition as <s><s> instead of <long-s><s>?
>> >
>> >Because in modern German orthography, the sharp-s is replaced by "ss" if
>> >the sharp-s is not available.
>>
>>
>> Michel de Montaigne displays a nice variety of esses in this letter
>> to the King:
>>
> > <http://bd8.com/temp/mm_lettre.jpg>
>
>This letter shows consistant use of long form of s for all non-final
>occurences of s, and consistant use of the small form for all final s...
>Where is the problem here ?
He writes 'vous estes' and not 'vous e/tes';
'ie les embrasse' and not 'ie les embras/e';
'as/urer vostre maie/te' and not 'vo/tre maieste' but elsewhere
'ce que vostre maieste'
etc. Smetimes he writes st as it were a ligature
and sometimes not and sometimes he writes /t.
That's not consistent to me.
> > <http://bd8.com/temp/georg1778.jpg>
>
>Note that this is not English, but Latin language.
Oh :-)
>I don't know when the long form of s was effectively abandonned in French
>and English, by simply choosing the uniform form that is used for uppercase;
>but this usage has survived in German for long, notably in the final
>ess-tsett which was effectively a non-final s and a final s, with only the
>first one consistently represented by a long form, often creating ligatures
>with the last s in handwritten script. Even in the German Sütterlin, the
>long s was the only prefered form as most letters where to be written in
>actual texts as lowercase, and German words are often composed by ignoring
>the preservation of the special final small form occuring at end of a
>non-final radical.
>
>> I have some older Italian manuscripts including a letter from
>> Petrarch but I can't find them at the moment. The Italian first s
>> was tall and overhanging.
>
>The long s has traditionally always been overhanging in handwritten script,
>with the same reason it was also overhanging for the lowercase f.
I meant that the Italian handwritten long s is
not like the French and English,; it does not go
below the line and is like an upturned L
> I do think that long s with a short leg is an
>error for the handwritten script, but the short
>leg form of long s is also occuring in printed
>book script exactly with the same cases as f.
If it's an error then a lot of Italians fell into
it from 1300 to 1600. At the moment I can only
find Petrarch's formal handwriting
<http://bd8.com/temp/petr_1.jpg>
and his letter style is quite different. The
1601 docs I have use tall and very tree-like
esses. I'll find them some time this week.
>We have the same final/non-final differences in Greek with final and
>non-final sigma; or in Hebrew with some letters; or even more in Arabic on
>almost all letters. I don't see why you think that your examples would be
>showing inconsistant use.
All I'm saying is that styles vary very much from
place to place, as indeed they do now and did
very much 70 years ago.
>Still, none of the examples you show use a sharp-s ligature, which is only
>typical of German. So I don't see why this would exclude the correct
>interpretation of sharp-s as being effectively a German ligature of a "long"
>(initial/medial) s followed by the modern "normal" (final) s.
>
>Do you still think I'm one of those illiterate that did not know this
>consistant use of long-s as the principal form of s in medieval French,
>English, German, Italian, Spanish, etc... ???
Perish the thought :-)
JD
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