Long-sin Late Modern English manuscripts

Abstract

It is a generally accepted fact that the use of long-s, or <ſ>, was discontinued in English printing at the close of the eighteenth century and that by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century this allograph had all but disappeared. This demise of <ſ> in printing has been fairly well documented, but there is virtually no literature on what happened to it in handwritten documents. The disappearance of <ſ> and <ſs> (as in ʃeems and buʃineʃs) in favour of <s> and <ss> is generally ascribed to the printers' wishes to simplify their type-settings. But at what point and to what extent did this simplifying process influence private writing of the period? In this article we have documented the rules, as observed by printers, for the use of long-s in the Late Modern English period, and we illustrate how printing practice during this period compared to the usage of this particular grapheme in letters written by two well-known codifiers of the English language, the grammarians

The year’s work in stylistics 2012

“…The stylistic tendencies of Late Modern English are revealed in a series of articles in a special issue of English Language and Linguistics (Beal et al, 2012). Those likely to be of particular interest to readers of Language and Literature include Nevala’s (2012) analysis of social identification in Early and Late Modern English letters, Percy’s (2012) discussion of metalanguage in anecdotes about George III, Fens-de-Zeeuw and Straaijer’s (2012) exploration of long- s in Later Modern English manuscripts and Hundt et al’s (2012) analysis of complexity in scientific discourse. Anecdotally at least, it would appear that historians are beginning to notice the advances being made in other disciplines and seeing the value in such different approaches.…”