The recent discussion of transcriptions and gravetones has tempted me to
mount a favorite hobby horse.
 
What in old script and printing resembles a lower-case f is an antique
character for the letter s. If you examine them carefully you will see
that they are not the same. We do not write that way now, and our
typewriters (remember them?) and computers do not even have those
characters.
 
There are some other antique characters that we no longer use, such as
placing a tilde over a letter to indicate that it is doubled or to use a
tilde rather than an apostrophe to indicate an abbreviation; or the
letter p with a cross bar on the descender (called a tailed p) that
indicates that it is to stand for "per" or "pro" or any other short
prefix beginning with the letter p.
 
Best known and most often misunderstood is the antique character called
a thorn. It is a disused compression of the letters t and h but it looks
very much like a letter y. It isn't, even though many people read and
transcribe the thorn as a letter y. Our computers don't have that
character, either, so we should not have our transcriptions read "in ye
good olde summer time."
 
The ampersand, &, is antique character that we still have and use, and
it is a compression of the letters e and t into one ligature, and it
means "and" in English because "et" means "and" in Latin.
 
Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at
http://www.lva.virginia.gov
 
 
 

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