Talk:S/Archive 1

Comments
Anything on what to do with the link to S2 in the letter-number combinations?? It is a dis-ambiguation page and it is impossible to dis-ambiguate. 66.245.73.39 00:57, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * It seems like it is perfectly appropriate to link to a disambuation page here. After all, it gives the list of all the S2 entries. --Elijah 19:17, 2004 Dec 31 (UTC)

- what's the source of semitic 'Šîn's /S/ relating to "bow"? doesn't it relate directly to 'tooth' (hebrew Šen) or 'breast' (Šad)? both of which represented in early glyphs, and of course, in the sound,

Template:Polytonic
Those characters should have Template:Unicode added, not Template:Polytonic, which is meant for Polytonic Greek. I'm not going to make the change myself, since I'm not using MSIE/Windows, and wouldn't be able to tell if that browser's Unicode breakage was showing up. &mdash;Michael Z. 2005-03-9 15:58 Z 

I agreed that ideally one should use Template:Unicode; but in practice it's rather defective, and several of these characters do not show up at all using it, whereas they display correctly with Template:Polytonic. I've mentioned this on Template Talk:Unicode, suggesting that someone should update the template, at which point we can start using it more widely, and reserve Polytonic for its intended purpose. rossb 16:09, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Okay, I was afraid of something like that. I would rather see Wikipedians spending their time making the template work right, than misapplying a template dozens of times across Wikipedia.  These templates were created to work around MSIE/Windows bugs, but they also have other uses.


 * You've probably heard this from me before, but I would suggest using Mozilla Firefox, which fully supports Unicode (unlike MSIE/Windows). &mdash;Michael Z. 2005-03-9 17:46 Z 

I'm afraid I have little time for suggestions that people should start installing other software in order to use Wikipedia. You or I as editors might do so, but we're creating this encyclopedia for the readers not the writers. Whatever we think of MSIE, the fact is that the majority of people buying a PC these days will have it already installed, and will not take kindly to suggestions that they should be using a different browser because Wikipedia has failed to take into account the deficiencies of the de facto standard. And don't forget that many users will be accessing Wikipedia from their office machines, and would be neither able nor permitted to put new software onto them. As and when someone with the appropriate skills has upgraded the Unicode template (it seems pretty useless at present) I'll be happy to replace Polytonic with it in my various edits. But at present for instance the Hebrew language article is fairly unusable because of font problems (not the hebrew fonts, but the Roman alphabet transcriptions!) and I intend to continue adding the Polytonic template to it in appropriate places when I get the time. Unfortunately there are some characters that the Polytonic template won't touch either, the Romanian s with a comma underneath beting one of them. rossb 19:09, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, I've also heard that before. I do recognize that we have to try to help users with broken browsers to an extent, and I wasn't suggesting otherwise.  But we also have to make available the information they need to ameliorate the problems (e.g., advice on configuring personal style sheets, sources of Unicode fonts and unbroken browsers).


 * There will always be some users who will find it impossible to read some text. Although I've put in a lot of work developing template:IPA and other kludges for a browser I don't even use, there's a point where we have to stop, and let them fend for themselves or just lump it.  &mdash;Michael Z. 2005-03-9 19:46 Z 


 * See also discussion and list of articles at Template talk:Polytonic rossb 06:39, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

ISBN 81-7052-022-3

Egyptian hieroglyph?
I feel sort of stupid for writing this, but why is there no Egyptian hieroglyph for S?--Montaced (talk) 16:56, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Location of S in the alphabet
In the Latin, Greek, and Phoenician alphabets, the ancestors of the letter S were all in the same location, but according to one Internet site, an even older alphabet had the letter S (properly the ancestor of English S) between K and L. Anyone know the reason it moved?? Georgia guy 22:56, 18 November 2005 (UTC)


 * No idea.Cameron Nedland 01:47, 16 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Which alphabet is that? Which site is that? 惑乱 分からん 18:41, 24 November 2006 (UTC)


 * OK, I begin to see what you mean now, anyway, it appears that alphabet had two s-like letters, one for s and one for š, and in the process of alphabetic evolution and adaption to new languages, it seems one letter got lost... 惑乱 分からん 18:47, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Siemens Advert?
In the article, it says the following:

Care must be taken for incompletely anglicized words from German and proper names from that language. The trigraph "sch" is pronounced like the English digraph "sh." When S is followed either by a p or t, it is pronounced with the same "sh" sound, but when starting a word followed by a vowel, it is pronounced like the English "z," (not the German one). Firms started in German-speaking countries, like Siemens, would prefer to have their customers world-wide pronounce the name of the company in this manner.

I don't understand the importance of an example here. Is this a subtle advertisment for Siemens, or is it simply an excercise in crude humor? (Siemens sounds like... I'll let you fill in the blank.)

the character ſ
the character ſ is unreferenced as cited here [] "Dieselweasel 14:53, 18 March 2007 (UTC)"

S & E
I thought E was the most common and S was the most common for words to begin with, no?

Unclear
"S is the nineteenth as well as the largest letter of the modern Latin alphabet." What exactly is meant by the term largest here, or is this a mistake? Can anybody clarify? Tezp 15:50, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

I've deleted this part of the sentence as nobody appears to know why it was there in the first place! Tezp 13:33, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

"Spelling in English"...
Why do all of the articles on letters include a comment in the first paragraph about how the letter's name is "spelled in English"? (e.g., this article says that "S" is spelled "ess"; similarly, we are told that "B" is spelled "be", "Q" is spelled "cue", etc.) These all seem completely arbitrary to me, and it's very rare in my experience to see someone attempt to spell out the name of a letter in English. Why is this here?

Scrutchfield 17:52, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Delete them all if you feel like, I don't quite see the point either. It's spelt 'S' in any case. 124.177.9.77 (talk) 02:50, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Deleted long s graph
I deleted the long s to s graph for English, for the same reasons discussed on Talk:Long s. It's original research, and it's extrapolating from bad data. You'll note that there's peaks in the early 18th century that don't exist in reality, since sometimes Google gets it right and OCRs "laſt" as "last".--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:05, 13 May 2012 (UTC)