To me it just feels out of place, like a calligraphy ligature got accidentally mixed with a standard serif font. From what I've seen this kind of ligature is usually applied to many other letter combinations as well, in which case it at least looks consistent.
The same goes for the ampersand – “et” slowly morphed into “&”.
> It's how English was written in the "olden times".
Exactly.
(skipping some minor details)
When we started printing instead of writing, we dumbed the letterset down into fewer mechanical pieces. Thus earlier printers in English had to use the letter 'f' for the discarded "long 's'" letter, back when the long 's' was still expected by readers.
And that dumbed-down letterset was the one that then made it to typewriters and then our keyboard today.
According to the Wikipedia page for eszett [0] it evolved from "sz", as the name "eszett" suggests. (I only realized the link with "z" when I saw "tz" ligatures on street signs in Berlin.) Given that its typographic origin is sz, and given that its name literally says sz, I wish the spelling reformists had gone for sz rather than ss!
Re:WebP is so great except it's not
by vintermann on Friday December 15, 2023 @09:47AM
(#38654684)
It's one way it was written, I bet. If my experience from old Norwegian church books is any indication, there were a lot of ligature fads. Some liked to replace all double consonants with a single consonant with a line over, for instance. It had a good couple of decades.
Do we really need to continue this stuff on computer screens.
Fun fact: The German "eszsett" (ß; U+00DF) is a ligature for "ss" (specifically the "long s"[0] and a normal "s") that evolved over time to be one "letter".[1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sz_modern.svg