Why was the letter "s" sometimes written as "f" in 18th-century english? (See picture of handwriting in my answer)
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Anti-Semantic - Quaerens Intellectum
ANSWERS: 4
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Here's an image of the handwriting of Richard Price, 18th Century philosopher: [Notice how sometimes the leter "s" is written as "f" - like in "suspect"...but written as a normal "s" in the words "as" and "is"] ...
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Hey i might be wrong in this but could it be a typo? I only say that because it looks like in the second line of your example, the first word looks like "is" and the S appears to be written in the normal way? Could you clarify this?
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Suck is I know.
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It is called a long s or medial s. I have U.S. English art books from the early 20th century that still used it--so I'm not in complete agreement about when it died out. From Wikipedia: An alternative form of s, Å¿, called the long s or medial s, was used at the beginning or in the middle of the word; the modern form, the short or terminal s, was used at the end of the word. For example, "sinfulness" is rendered as "Å¿infulneÅ¿s" using the long s. The use of the long s died out by the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion with the minuscule f. The ligature of Å¿s (or Å¿z) became the German ess-tsett ( ß ). See this wiki article on the letter S for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S
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