"John Delacour" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At 2:52 pm -0500 28/12/03, John Cowan wrote:> <http://bd8.com/temp/mm_lettre.jpg>
> > 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:
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 S�tterlin, 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
