the 'f' as an 's' thing in old manuscripts

[Allen Johnson]

I read alot of documents from the 18th century (Mostly Scottish and English). Frequently you will see a sort of "f" letter that is meant to be pronounced as our "s". However, the "s" as we know it still occurs in the documents. Sometimes within the same word. The "f" as we know it also occurs as such in words as well. A sentence from a document Im reading appears as ..."it is therefore more fafe to rely on common fenfe, the conftant practice of both Picts and Scots,"... We see "f" pronounced as "s" and both "f" and "s" pronounced as we know it. Does anyone know the linguistic rules reguarding this matter of writing?

[Dan Sellars]

I believe (read I saw a tv program about it once) that the 'f' is actually like more a 'ss' as opposed to 's'. It's written differently to an 'f' (F) it is more itaicised and slightly elongated.

Apparently it dropped from common usage around 1780 due to printing. For some reason (no-one seems to know why) typesetters just stopped using it around this date.

As I said this is just from what I saw in tv once <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" /> If anyone else has any better information then I would be glad to know about it.

Regards,
Dan.

[Allen Johnson]

yeah it is not the exact same letter as the "f" but its the closest reperesentation. I have seen earlier versions of it that do look more like a stretched out s and less like an f but its still a curious thing.

[Jon Pellett]

It's called a long s. It's used at the beginning and in the middle of a word, but not at the end; always round s at the end.

If you look closely, you can tell the difference between long s and f; sometimes it doesn't have a crossbar at all, and if it does, it will usually only stick out on one side, whereas an f will have the crossbar jutting out on both sides. Sometimes it curves differently too. However, in some modern transcriptions and scans the transcriber or text-recognition software will replace the long s with an f, which is a pain.

Cheers

[Allen Johnson]

ok interesting... however, in the quote I have above it used the word "Scots" as opposed to "Fcots". is it different cause its a propper name or something? Also, is this something you just learned from some one or do you have a book or something that talks about this kinda stuff?

[Ben Strickling]

For printed text from about the 17th century until they stopped using the long 's', Jon's description is pretty much how it went. In earlier printing and in handwritten manuscripts, though, the rules changed a lot depending on which script was being used.

Also, the long 's' is almost always used as a lower-case letter. This goes back to 8th/9th century Caroline Scripts where the long 's' was used for most all lower-case letters and the round 's' was used for capitals (with occasional exceptions, of course).

However, also keep in mind that much of the printing done during the later 16th and 17th centuries was often pretty sloppily type-set, sometimes making the "rules" for printing pretty irregular. Often in a pinch printers would use the long 's' in place of a 'f' and vice versa, sometimes to save money and sometimes just out of sloppiness.

As for a nice introductory book on manuscripts and printed text I'd recommend Textual Scholarship by D.C. Greetham (ISBN 0-8153-1791-3). It's a bit expensive for a paperback but it has good info nonetheless.

[Allen Johnson]

Thanks- well if theres one thing Ive got used to in this hobby, it is expensive books! <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

[Jake_Norwood]

Yeah, Roger. It's a long "S" and is equivalent to that German letter that looks like a capital 'B' but is actually an S.

The best example in American English is the Constitution which reads "In Congrefs"

Jake

[Richard Strey]

Close, but not quite (I hope I remember this correctly, my girlfriend is the one studying history and German). The f-looking s (as noted, the crossbar only exists on one side) is called the "Binnen-s." Meaning roughly "internal-s," because it occurs on the inside of a syllable, while the round s occurs at the end of a syllable and thus also at the end of a word.
The B-looking letter is called a "scharfes s" or "eszett" meaning "sharp s" or "s-z." Try writing one of those "f" looking s and a z right next to each other and you'll see where it comes from. In modern German, it is equivalent to "ss."

[Jake_Norwood]

Richard,

Correct me if I'm off, but isn't the "B" looking letter in German also transliterated as SS, which is itself rendered in Swabian and other bohemian dialects (and in the alphabets of both nearby Poland and Hungary) as variants on SZ?

As for the "inside" of a syllable as opposed to the outside...the only thing "inside" a syllable is a vowel. Perhaps you mean between syllables? If that's so then it is a "long S" due to phonotactic constraints (a fancy way of saying "because that's the way that people naturally talk in a given language).

Good call on the s-z flowing into one letter in writing, though.

Jake

[Richard Strey]

Yes, it is. It is translated and transcribed in modern German (if, for example, your keyboard doesn't feature an ß) as "ss." It is called "s-z" or "scharfes s," though. Reading von Danzig, I've seen words spelled with "sz" where I'd write "ss." So I guess you're on the right track, even though I have no familiarity with those dialects outside of fechtbücher.

A correction concerning the "long-s" and the "round-s." I read up on this in the German Wikipedia (not very scientific, I know). According to this, the long-s occurs only on the beginning and inside *words.* The round-s is used at the end of syllables and words. There may be no two round-s following each other, those have to be written "fs."
An example:
There is no way in written modern German to differentiate between "Wachstube - Wach-stube (guard room)" and "Wachstube - Wachs-tube /tube of wax)". With the old writing you get "Wachftube" and "Wachstube," respectively.
I hope that clears it up.
<img src="/forum/images/icons/smirk.gif" alt="" />

[Filip Pobran]

i have to say that it isn't "f" we are talking about. it looks like f, but has no line (sometimes, when it does, the line is different than that on "f")


croatian literature had something similar, because of sounds that german and latin don't have, and because of ortographic ideal: one letter - one phoneme

[Richard Strey]

That much should be obvious from reading the previous posts. I don't want to offend you, but have you actually read the thread? Jon Pellet's post from 02/28/06 04:00 PM and my discourse with Jake should have made clear that we are not talking about inventive uses for the actual letter "f." I tried to use the long-s in my last post by copying it from the Wikipedia site (for the link, se above), but it just gave me this: "&amp;#383;" so I left it out.