Royal Society opens free online archive

[YankeyMCC]

Thought many here would be interested in this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/14/royalsoc_archive_open/

[Poll_Blind]

1. Awesome stuff! Thank you! I just read the account of Mozart as a boy....

...and the dissection of the deformed horse. Great stuff. I only wish I could get the lisp out of my mind while reading old English.

As an aside, does anyone know if, in practice, the words were pronounced with such a lisp or is it entirely an artifact of spelling?

Most apprecaited,

PB

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Not sure. You might want to check this site...

http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/oe/oe-chars.html

After that, try to figure out why divers were so prominent in old England.

on edit: It's just a typographical variant of s. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

[Poll_Blind]

3. Thank you! Thank you! I have wondered about that a very long...

...time. There was a great link at the Wiki entry which led me straight to Cecil and, as always, da truth!

PB

[Bear down under]

4. You mean the "f" for "s"?

It's not actually an "f" it's a "long s" -- old (dating from the late Middle Ages) convention was that you wrote the long S in the middle of the word, the modern 'short s' at the end, and where you had a double s the first was long and the second short, which survives in the German letter for double-s which looks to English speakers a bit like a capital B...

Anyway, people didn't lisp; it was pronounced "s". As you suggest, purely an artifact of spelling -- although there is a very slight difference between the sound of "s" in the middle of a word and at the end, where it is a trifle softer, and that may have been more pronounced in the Middle Ages than it is now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

Good on the Royal Society for putting their archives on-line!