John Delacour <JD at BD8 dot COM> wrote: > English practice was generally, I think, to write the long s first > but _printed_ double s is always two tall longs, certainly in the > 18th century:
I thought English practice was to write all s's long except at the end of a word, as opposed to the German practice of writing all s's long except at the end of a syllable (and composing Å + s = Ã as necessary). Compare these to the Greek distinction between Ï and "word-final" Ï. I would have assumed that current Greek usage of Ï and Ï is parallel to 18th-century English usage of Å and s, but TUS says (p. 176) that "use of the final sigma is a matter of spelling convention," so that assumption is probably overly simplistic. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
