[TUHS] end-S/long-S (was: Re: GNU eqn clarifications and reforms)
Steve Nickolas
usotsuki at buric.co
Sat Jun 17 03:51:18 AEST 2023
On Fri, 16 Jun 2023, John Cowan wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 12:18 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>> German also has a ligature letter called eszet that is a fusion of a
>> long s (the one that resembles the English letter f) and a short s.
>>
>
> Not a short s, but a z, as the name indicates: es-zett, S-Z. This
> reflects the use of z in Old and Middle High German to represent a sibilant
> sound distinct from s, derived from /t/ by the High German sound shift but
> distinct from original /s/. When the distinction was lost in the 13C, z
> came to be used for its modern sound /ts/, but the ligature came to
> represent the merged /s/.
I've seen ß used in some copies of the Geneva Bible with exactly the
modern German sense, as a ligature of long s and normal s.
-uso.
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