spelling of »several«

[JanSeifert]

Hi, in my current text the word »several« is constantly written with a capital »S« (see picture). Was several written with a »long s« previously? I am just puzzled as it is so consistent.

Jan

[goldie61]

You don't say what date this is, or what sort of document.

You could post a slightly larger clip of the handwriting so more of the way this scribe writes can be seen. It's impossible really to make any sort of comment with only seeing one word out of context.

[martin hooper]

The letter s was elongated way back so that it looked more like an f. But as goldie61 says - without a date it's hard to help.

Martin

[JanSeifert]

Sorry it took me a while to reply. The text is a 1831 scribe copy of a 1830 personal diary. The scribe was a local working in an office for the East India Company.

here is a slightly larger snippet:

[arthurk]

Obviously I wasn't connected with the East India Company in 1831, so I don't know if they had any strange conventions, but it looks to me a bit like a quirk of the scribe - if it's the same one, I think you said before that he wasn't a native English speaker.

One possible explanation might be that he was once told that a particular instance of 'several' should be written like that, and assumed that this applied always and everywhere. Other similar quirks in this larger extract appear to be upper-case 'M' in 'Minutes', and possibly upper-case 'K' in 'Killed'. He also seems to have omitted the 's' at the start of 'streams'.

[Wexflyer]

It is not a capital S, it is simply a long s.

[shanreagh]

I wonder if the long  s was used before a vowel and the short s was used before a consonant.

[KGarrad]

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

[JanSeifert]

It is not a capital S, it is simply a long s.

Quite possible. But the question remains: Why a long s/capital s only with »several«?

I have filed it under quirks now.

J.