Not to be confused with Cyrillic letterDze (Ѕ), the Armenian letterTyun (Տ), or the Georgian Asomtavruli letter Ch'ari (Ⴝ).This article is about the nineteenth letter of the alphabet. For other uses, seeS (disambiguation)."Ess" redirects here. For other uses, seeEss (disambiguation).
Ancient Greek did not have a/ʃ/ "sh" phoneme, so the derived Greek letterSigma (Σ) came to represent thevoiceless alveolar sibilant/s/. While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenicianšîn, its namesigma is taken from the letterSamekh, while the shape and position ofsamekh but name ofšîn is continued in thexi.[citation needed] Within Greek, the name ofsigma was influenced by its association with the Greek wordσίζω (earlier*sigj-), "to hiss". The original name of the letter "Sigma" may have beensan, but due to the early history of the Greekepichoric alphabets, "san" came to be identified as a separate letter,Ϻ.[3]Herodotus reported that "san" was the name given by theDorians to the same letter called "Sigma" by theIonians.[4]
TheWestern Greek alphabet used inCumae was adopted by theEtruscans andLatins in the 7th century BC, and over the following centuries, it developed into a range ofOld Italic alphabets, including theEtruscan alphabet and the earlyLatin alphabet. InEtruscan, the value/s/ of Greek sigma (𐌔) was maintained, while san (𐌑) represented a separate phoneme, most likely/ʃ/ "sh" (transliterated asś). The early Latin alphabet adopted sigma, but not san, as Old Latin did not have a/ʃ/ "sh" phoneme.
The shape of Latin S arises from Greek Σ by dropping one out of the four strokes of that letter. The (angular) S-shape composed of three strokes existed as a variant of the four-stroke letter Σ already in the epigraphy ofWestern Greek alphabets, and the three and four strokes variants existed alongside one another in the classical Etruscan alphabet. In otherItalic alphabets (Venetic,Lepontic), the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes. The Italic letter was also adopted intoElder Futhark, asSowilō (ᛊ), and appears with four to eight strokes in the earliest runic inscriptions, but is occasionally reduced to three strokes (ᛋ) from the later 5th century, and appears regularly with three strokes inYounger Futhark.
The⟨sh⟩ digraph for English/ʃ/ arose in Middle English (alongside⟨sch⟩), replacing the Old English⟨sc⟩ digraph. Similarly, Old High German⟨sc⟩ was replaced by⟨sch⟩ in Early Modern High German orthography.
Long s
Late medieval German script (Swabianbastarda, dated 1496) illustrating the use of long and rounds:prieſters tochter ("priest's daughter").
Theminuscule form ſ, called thelongs, developed in the early medieval period, within theVisigothic andCarolingian hands, with predecessors in thehalf-uncial andcursive scripts ofLate Antiquity. It remained standard in western writing throughout the medieval period and was adopted in early printing with movable types. It existed alongside minuscule "round" or "short"s, which were at the time only used at the end of words.
In most Western orthographies, the ſ gradually fell out of use during the second half of the 18th century, although it remained in occasional use into the 19th century. In Spain, the change was mainly accomplished between 1760 and 1766. In France, the change occurred between 1782 and 1793. Printers in the United States stopped using the longs between 1795 and 1810. In English orthography, the London printerJohn Bell (1745–1831) pioneered the change. His edition of Shakespeare, in 1785, was advertised with the claim that he "ventured to depart from the common mode by rejecting the long 'ſ' in favor of the round one, as being less liable to error....."[5]The Times of London made the switch from the long to the shorts with its issue of 10 September 1803.Encyclopædia Britannica's 5th edition, completed in 1817, was the last edition to use the longs.
InGerman orthography, longs was retained inFraktur (Schwabacher) type as well as in standard cursive (Sütterlin) well into the 20th century, until official use of that typeface was abolished in 1941.[6] Theligature ofſs (orſz) was retained; however, it gave rise to theEszett⟨ß⟩ in contemporary German orthography.
In some words of French origin,⟨s⟩ is silent, as in 'isle' or 'debris'.
The letter⟨s⟩ is the seventh most common letter inEnglish and the third-most common consonant after⟨t⟩ and⟨n⟩.[7] It is the most common letter for the first letter of a word in the English language.[8][9]
Used in thepreferred IUPAC name for a chemical to indicate a specificenantiomer. For example, "(S)-2-(4-Chloro-2-methylphenoxy)propanoic acid" is one of the enantiomers ofmecoprop.
Related characters
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
𐤔 :Semitic letterShin, from which the following symbols originally derive:
archaic GreekSigma could be written with different numbers of angles and strokes. Besides the classical form with four strokes (), a three-stroke form resembling an angular Latin S () was commonly found, and was particularly characteristic of some mainland Greek varieties, including the Attic and several "red" alphabets.
^Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
References
^"S",Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989);Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "ess," op. cit.
^"corresponds etymologically (in part, at least) to original Semiticṯ (th), which was pronounceds in South Canaanite" Albright, W. F., "The Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from Sinai and their Decipherment," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 110 (1948), p. 15. The interpretation as "tooth" is now prevalent, but not entirely certain. TheEncyclopaedia Judaica of 1972 reported that the letter represented a "composite bow".
^Woodard, Roger D. (2006). "Alphabet". In Wilson, Nigel Guy. Encyclopedia of ancient Greece. London: Routldedge. p. 38.
^"...τὠυτὸ γράμμα, τὸ Δωριέες μὲν σὰν καλέουσι ,Ἴωνες δὲ σίγμα" ('...the same letter, which the Dorians call "San", but the Ionians "Sigma"...'; Herodotus,Histories 1.139); cf. Nick Nicholas,Non-Attic lettersArchived 2012-06-28 atarchive.today.
^Stanley Morison,A Memoir of John Bell, 1745–1831 (1930, Cambridge Univ. Press) page 105; Daniel Berkeley Updike,Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use – a study in survivals (2nd. ed, 1951,Harvard University Press) page 293.
^Order of 3 January 1941 to all public offices, signed byMartin Bormann.Kapr, Albert (1993).Fraktur: Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften. Mainz: H. Schmidt. p. 81.ISBN3-87439-260-0.
^abEverson, Michael; Baker, Peter; Emiliano, António; Grammel, Florian; Haugen, Odd Einar; Luft, Diana; Pedro, Susana; Schumacher, Gerd; Stötzner, Andreas (30 January 2006)."L2/06-027: Proposal to add Medievalist characters to the UCS"(PDF).Archived(PDF) from the original on 19 September 2018. Retrieved24 March 2018.
