Julius Caesar

[Darren Dirt]

Jvlivs C?ſar

^ it woulda/coulda been spelled any number of possible ways hundreds of years ago, including the above example.

I discovered this interesting and painful-to-say-out-loud fact via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English#Orthography -- after I decided to FINALLY have a quick look into WHY so many old historical documents (from the 1700s/1800s, such as Thomas Paine's "The Rights Of Man") seem to have an "f" where an "s" should be found (<-- ſeem to have an "f" where an "s" ſhovld be foundde )

Found wikipedia, AFTER reading this: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37982/use-of-f-instead-of-s-in-historic-printed-english-documents


It's called a "long s" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s -- and it only was just a quirk of the written language (so "congreſs" was pronounced out loud normally, not as "KON-GREFS") ... looks like it was used for EVERY location of the "s" letter, except at the end of a word (hence "congress" being so weirdly spelled, oops maybe I ſhould be ſaying ſpelled?) so "affairs"="affairs" while "saffron"="ſaffron". #quirky


At least we still have the letter "s" -- it didn't suffer the fate of the ?/? = singular letter for "th".


fascinating stuff, this English language of ours. And this is just MODERN English, not nearly as wild (compared to today) as the true OLD English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Text_samples (blame the GVS for the major differences!


so... if ?u art vnmoued by this thread, no ſkin off my noſe, move alongge.

[Thorin]

Yeah, English has gone through a lot of transformations.  Old English is more German than English (well, Low German, anyway), then there was the Battle of Hastings (I learned all about that in grade four at the British private school I attended as a kid back in Europe), then the language quickly changed to sound more like what the conquering Normans spoke.  I find it interesting that 1,200 years ago, most languages in Northern Europe sounded closer to German than they do nowadays.