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From: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
To: Damian McGuckin <damianm@esi.com.au>
Cc: groff@gnu.org, TUHS main list <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: GNU eqn clarifications and reforms
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:07:05 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20230616050705.3ualzkwc44a7sm4u@illithid> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <37ea7f2b-e8f7-3cfe-a27d-ece47c5dc0f7@esi.com.au>

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At 2023-06-16T14:22:22+1000, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jun 2023, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > But I may suffer from an excessive familiarity with this material.
> 
> Yes. Me too. Maybe that is a sad comment on the both of us.

That is the price of trying to leave things better than one found them.

> Why do Greeks have an alternate way of writing sigma!

We English-speakers used to have an alternative way of writing it, if
you regard the Latin alphabet's "S" as cognate (so to speak) with the
Greek sigma (and I think doing so is defensible).  It's even in Unicode
with a low code point, U+017F.

For inſtance, the United States uſed to employ a non-final lowercaſe S
in the founding documents of its preſent government, where you can see
exhibits of the "Congreſs of the United States".

It can take the modern reader a "long S" time to not read that "s" as an
"f".

And if you think that's difficult enough, check out, IIRC, the Arabic
and Devanagari scripts where you can have different initial, medial, and
final forms for letters.

Follow-ups ſhould probably be confined to groff@;  I'll ſtop now leſt we
get ſent to the COFF liſt for groſs tranſgreſſions of topicality.

(Although if anyone wants to tell me whether non-final s was applied to
the trailing ends of non-final morphemes _within_ words, I'm all ears.)

Regards,
Branden

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2023-06-16  5:07 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-06-16  2:18 Douglas McIlroy
2023-06-16  3:20 ` G. Branden Robinson
     [not found]   ` <37ea7f2b-e8f7-3cfe-a27d-ece47c5dc0f7@esi.com.au>
2023-06-16  5:07     ` G. Branden Robinson [this message]
2023-06-16  7:43       ` [TUHS] Re: end-S/long-S (was: Re: GNU eqn clarifications and reforms) markus schnalke
2023-06-16  9:39         ` Wesley Parish
2023-06-16 16:18         ` Paul Winalski
2023-06-16 17:46           ` John Cowan
2023-06-16 17:51             ` Steve Nickolas
2023-06-16 18:19               ` Angelo Papenhoff
     [not found]           ` <1da83cf3-7fac-b5fd-dec-e4b4313d3a@esi.com.au>
2023-06-16 19:38             ` [TUHS] Re: GNU eqn clarifications and reforms G. Branden Robinson

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