The original artwork for this strip is available for purchase. See the original artwork information page for more information.
The original artwork for this strip is available for purchase. See the original artwork information page for more information.
I never understood the meaning or the purpose of that strange looking character that apparently makes an “s” sound. Does anyone know what that thing is and why it exists (existed)??
It actually is an ‘s,’ just vertically stretched. It’s a calligraphic style thing more than a linguistic thing.
There are (were) some orthographic rules for some languages, at least German – the left part of the (in)famous ß is such a ‘long s’.
Leß harmful than the Capitalization rules 🙂
The short ‘s’ character was first used in the fifteenth century, in mixed use with the then-prevalent long ‘ſ’. It was popularised in the 1700s by mechanical printing, where it became necessary to distinguish the long S ‘ſ’ from lowercase F ‘f’ in some fonts, and soon became the accepted convention.
The long S also survives as the integral sign in calculus, IIRC.
smaug. very subtle in your names.
The lonely dragon can only take from you what you don’t already have, but he must return it to you.
So by giving him something, you can get free stuff in the long term?
Shades of Trogdor