I'll be away for a few months and need to unsubscribe. Does anyone know how to do that?
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of John Delacour Sent: Sun 12/28/2003 4:24 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: German 0364 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER E At 2:52 pm -0500 28/12/03, John Cowan wrote: > > For the same reason, why is the German "ess-tsett" (sharp S) given a >> compatibility decomposition as <s><s> instead of <long-s><s>? > >Because in modern German orthography, the sharp-s is replaced by "ss" if >the sharp-s is not available. Michel de Montaigne displays a nice variety of esses in this letter to the King: <http://bd8.com/temp/mm_lettre.jpg> It looks as if he never wrote long s+s but he seems to be pretty flexible. 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: <http://bd8.com/temp/georg1778.jpg> I have some older Italian manuscripts including a letter from Petrarch but I can't find them at the moment. The Italian first s was tall and overhanging. It's too late to tie these guys down to the rules of our illiterate world. JD
