(Sorry for taking up such an old topic; this message replies to http://
groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/259 by Doug Ewell.)
When I stepped on this old discussion, it took me at once, because to
me it seems very obvious that German es-zett originates in a
combination of the letters s and z. I well know my that's not a matter
of personal conviction, and so I decided to follow the advice of doing
some research. Now I communicate it to this group, because without this
group I'd never done this research.
Here's my result: The antiqua letter es-zett/sharp-s, in shape almost
the same as the Greek small letter beta, has two independent and
different origins: in a (mainly or even exclusively German) gothic
script ligature between long s and z (which in Gothic scripts looks
very similar to the number 3) AND in older (for example English or
French) italic script ligature between long s and short s.
In the following comes a number of reasons to prove the former of the
two origins, the one in the (German) gothic scripts.
- there's a sz-digraph in other languages which throughout there
history have had (and suffered) a lot of German influence: Polish and
Hungarian (though they don't use the es-zett/sharp-s)
- similarity of the es-zett/sharp-s to the ligature of t and z
- the conditions of ligatures in Gothic scripts don't allow ligatures
between straight stems (as in the long s) and bows (as in the short s)
- a historical linguistic explanation: Old German had two different s-
sounds, and one of them (the one corresponding to English t) was
written with the letter z. When in the Middle Ages this phonological
distinction got lost, people who writed still wanted to distinguish the
s-sound which had been written with z from the s-sound which always had
been written with s. They did it by writing the former as sz: 's-sound
originating in z-letter'
- there are even some cases where this was written as zs and not sz
(though very seldomly)
reference:
Wolf-Dieter Michel: Die graphische Entwicklung der s-Laute im Deutschen
["the Graphical Development of the s-Sounds in German"], in: Beiträge
zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 81 (1959)