On 6/16/23, markus schnalke <mei...@marmaro.de> wrote: > > [2023-06-16 07:07] "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> >> >> 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". > > In old German, up to WWII, namely in Fraktur (the printed letters) > and Sütterlin (the handwritten letters) both kinds of S are > present. > > Today, the long-S has only survived in some old company and > restaurant names, many of them changing by and by to the end-S, > because younger Germans can't read long-S and don't understand it > anymore.
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. It is used when a 's' sound is immediately preceded by a long vowel or a diphthong and not followed by a consonant. When the glyph for eszet isn't available 'ss' is substituted, as in the word 'strasse' (street). -Paul W.
