16 Jun
2023
16 Jun
'23
11:07 a.m.
At 2023-06-16T14:22:22+1000, Damian McGuckin wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jun 2023, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
That is the price of trying to leave things better than one found them.
But I may suffer from an excessive familiarity
with this material.
Yes. Me too. Maybe that is a sad comment on the both of us. Why do Greeks have an alternate way of writing sigma!
We English-speakers used to have an alternative way of writing it, if
you regard the Latin alphabet's "S" as cognate (so to speak) with the
Greek sigma (and I think doing so is defensible). It's even in Unicode
with a low code point, U+017F.
For inſtance, the United States uſed to employ a non-final lowercaſe S
in the founding documents of its preſent government, where you can see
exhibits of the "Congreſs of the United States".
It can take the modern reader a "long S" time to not read that "s" as
an
"f".
And if you think that's difficult enough, check out, IIRC, the Arabic
and Devanagari scripts where you can have different initial, medial, and
final forms for letters.
Follow-ups ſhould probably be confined to groff@; I'll ſtop now leſt we
get ſent to the COFF liſt for groſs tranſgreſſions of topicality.
(Although if anyone wants to tell me whether non-final s was applied to
the trailing ends of non-final morphemes _within_ words, I'm all ears.)
Regards,
Branden