What is the history of what looks like a letter "f" iin place of the modern "s" in 18th C manuscripts?

Question

Reading an 1788 maritime logbook I read words that contain a letter that looks like an "f" instead of the modern letter "s"; for example, succeff, fpecial. From where did the "f" character originate and when did the change to using the "s" take place?

Answer 1

It's called a 'long S' and it occurs as a lower case letter at the beginning and in the middle of words and as the first element only of 'ss'. At the ends of words and as the second element of a double letter it is the curled form with no ascender or descender. This is still seen in the German letter ß, which looks like a B but is a ligature of a long S and a short s.

The long s does not have the cross bar that l.c. f has.

It is a writing convention that goes back to the invention of miniscule (lower case) letters as quickly written forms of what we now call capital letters. Really, the long s was the standard form and the s we know today was just a terminal form that looked neater when written.

The change to 's' came about sometime towards the middle of the 18th Century when some printers began to dispense with it, mostly because it was a letter which was very often damaged and also took a little extra time to set in type.

Answer 2

First of all, it's not an "f" it's a long s.

The medial s is subject to confusion with the minuscule f, sometimes even having an f-like nub at its middle in various kinds of Roman typeface and in blackletter. There was no nub in its italic typeform, which gave the stroke a descender curling to the left—not possible with the other typeforms mentioned without kerning.

The nub acquired its form in the blackletter style of writing. What looks like one stroke was actually a wedge pointing downward, whose widest part was at that height (x-height), and capped by a second stroke forming an ascender curling to the right. Those styles of writing and their derivatives in type design had a cross-bar at height of the nub for letters f and t, as well as k. In Roman type, these disappeared except for the one on the medial s.

The medial s was used in ligatures in various languages. Three examples were for si, ss, and st, besides the German double s ß.

Long s fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the end of the 19th century; in English the change occurred in the decade before and after 1800. In most countries ligatures vanished as well. Typographers have presently revived ligatures in seriffed and sans-serif text fonts, as well as many kinds of display types. For example, some text fonts have an st ligature made up of a terminal s with a small bulbous curl connecting the two letters at the top, unlike ligatures using a long s, which joins directly to the t by an extension of the long s ascender. The prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade uses a long s ligature.

Long s survives in German blackletter typefaces. The present-day German double s ß (ess-tsett) is an atrophied ligature form representing either ſz or ſs (see ß for more). Greek also features a normal sigma σ and a special terminal form ς, which may have supported the idea of specialized s forms. In renaissance Europe a significant percentage of the literate class were familiar with Greek.

Answer 3

Another way to look at this is to realize that 's' is the most common letter in English. If you are setting type from a wooden or metal type case you are going to run out of the letter 's' long before you run out of other letters. Some really old printers I talked to years ago said they would use 'f' in place of 's' if they ran out of 's'.??? I don't think they were joking.

I have some 200 year old books printed in this country and 'f' is used throughout the books in place of 's'. Just like your log book. If you go back further you will find not 'f' but 'ph'. Considering Chaucer, he probably didn't have enough of 'f' or 's' to go around?!!!

I have seen no example of what I am telling you and other answers here are probably correct. Still the switch probably did take place from time to time in the newspaper business before the advent of linotype. Or could it be lynotype cause I ran out of 'i'.

Answer 4

It was called a "long s," technically; there's a short history of it at the wikipedia link. The long s was inherited from the standard script of Carolingian Minuscule, one of the forebears of Times New Roman. In English, the long s was abandoned at the beginning of the 19th century.

Answer 5

Good question, it may have been the print or it was easier to carve or something it's the same with U it looks like a V like CHVRCH

Answer 6

some one told the head abbott to suck off and realised it did'nt sound right