h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So what was the deal around the eighteenth century with S's looking like long lower case f's. I'm sure you won't difappoint me Gnomon.

BTW anyone remember that hilarious scene from 'The Vicar of Dibley' where Alice Tinker reads from an antique bible?

If I recall correctly, the f-style s was used for S sounds that occurred anywhere but the end of a word. The end S sound would be represented by the curly s.

The German sharp S symbol (looks a bit like the Greek beta without a tail) is apparently a combination of the f-style s and a normal s.

I don't know if I can post non-ASCII symbols here, but here goes:

ß - scharfes S
ſ - langes S

I found them using the CHARMAP program on my PC.

Damn, that's a bit rubbish. Sort your message posting stuff out, h2g2.

The s that looks like an f dates all the way back to the 10th century. But in those days, they wrote f's quite differently, so there was no room for confusion. If you look at the first page of Beowulf, (http://athena.english.vt.edu/~brinlee/beowulf.gif) which was written down around the year 1000, you can see that the F was a low letter similar to a lower-case p, which dropped below the line, while the s was a tall one. They couldn't be confused.

The tall f was used for s's at the start and in the middle of words, while the other more normal s was used at the ends of words.