On the right way to transcribe long-s

Yale Law School has a wonderful web resource called the ‘Avalon’ project, which collects important historical documents from throughout the ages in an easy hypertext format. Recently, your correspondent had a need to check a quotation Blackstone’s Commentaries and went to the Avalon project’s free web edition. To my disappointment, the passage was transcribed as follows (footnotes omitted):¹

The conftituent parts of a parliament are the next objects of our enquiry. And thefe are, the king’s majefty, fitting there in his royal political capacity, and the three eftates of the realm ; the lords fpiritual, the lords temporal, (who fit, together with the king, in one houfe) and the commons, who fit by themfelves in another. And the king and thefe three eftates, together, form the great corporation or body politic of the kingdom, of which the king is faid to be caput, principium, et finis. For upon their coming together the king meets them, either in perfon or by reprefentation ; without which there can be no beginning of a parliament; and he alfo has alone the power of diffolving them. It is highly neceffary for preferving the balance of the conftitution, that the executive power fhould be a branch, though not be whole, of the legiflature. The total union of them, we have feen, would be productive of tyranny ; the total disjunction of them for the prefent, would in the end produce the fame effects, by caufing that union, againft which it feems to provide. The legiflature would foon become tyrannical, by making continual encroachments, and gradually affuming to itfelf the rights of the executive power.

It is a lovely passage, but the problem with the Yale version is obvious: the long-s glyph (‘ſ’)has been transcribed, quite wrongly, as ‘f’. This is incorrect for several reasons, the most obvious being that a long-s is not the same as the letter ‘f’! It causes special problems in digitisation because Internet searches for particular quotations may fail to yield results because the text sought is mis-transcribed (an exact search for “spiritual” won’t match “fpiritual”) and screen readers will constantly mispronounce words. It also causes difficulty for those (such as your correspondent) looking to copy and paste a passage to quote inline (where one would use short-s), since the passage then needs to be manually cleaned up. (An automated replacement of ‘f’ for ‘s’ will fail because it will turn ‘of’ into ‘os’)

The correct approach is simple, and certainly the boffins at Yale are capable of carrying it out. It might be tempting to transcribe the long-s as the Unicode glyph ‘ſ’ (U+017F), but this is mistaken. First, because long-s is a typographic convention rather than a semantic one, it should be easy for the user to change the passage to short-s when pasted to other formats. Second, for Internet searches, it is desirable that ‘s’ be used as the base glyph so that automated systems will understand that ‘repreſentation’ means the same thing as ‘representation’. Third, it would be good to include two options to allow users to switch long-s on and off, given that it is a fairly arbitrary feature of transcription. (For example, Yale has not preserved the italics in the original printings of the Commentaries which appeared alongside the long-s). Therefore, the proper method is to use Open Type features, which in the typeface of this web-log (Cardo), is provided by the ‘Historical Forms’ option. Here is the same quotation, properly typeset:

The constituent parts of a parliament are the next objects of our enquiry. And these are, the king's majesty, sitting there in his royal political capacity, and the three estates of the realm ; the lords spiritual, the lords temporal, (who sit, together with the king, in one house) and the commons, who sit by themselves in another. And the king and these three estates, together, form the great corporation or body politic of the kingdom, of which the king is said to be caput, principium, et finis. For upon their coming together the king meets them, either in person or by representation ; without which there can be no beginning of a parliament; and he also has alone the power of dissolving them. It is highly necessary for preserving the balance of the constitution, that the executive power should be a branch, though not be whole, of the legislature. The total union of them, we have seen, would be productive of tyranny ; the total disjunction of them for the present, would in the end produce the same effects, by causing that union, against which it seems to provide. The legislature would soon become tyrannical, by making continual encroachments, and gradually assuming to itself the rights of the executive power.

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1. 1 Bl Comm 149↩︎