• EARLY STAGES OF ‘S’ written by the ancient Semites of some 3,600 years ago appear to be a horizontal, curvy ‘W’ shape, perhaps signifying an archer’s bow. The Phoenicians of 800 BCE made it angular, looking identical to our ‘W’. At this stage it was the letter known as ‘shin’ meaning ‘tooth’ with the value of ‘sh’. The early ancient Greeks rotated it to the vertical and called it ‘sigma’ and it indicated the ‘s’ sound. The Etruscans and early Romans took this and flipped it over so that it resembled an angular ‘S’. The Imperial Roman inscriptions turned it into the thin-thick serif letter we know today.

s

Following the pattern of many other letters, the lower-case ‘s’ starts off in the Latin manuscripts of the AD 500s, is taken up by Charlemagne’s scribes for their ‘minuscule’ and is adopted by the Italian printers of the late fifteenth century as their lower-case ‘s’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

‘S’ is part of the family of ‘F’, ‘L’, ‘M’, ‘N’, ‘R’ and ‘X’ whose names are vowel plus continuous consonant (or, in X’s case, continuous in part of its sound). This means that in late Roman and early medieval times it was called ‘essay’ and this became contracted to ‘ess’, perhaps to distinguish it from ‘zed’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

At the beginning of words, but not combined with other consonants, it can be ‘s’ as in ‘simple’ or a ‘sh’ sound as in ‘sure’ and ‘sugar’. We combine it with ‘h’ to make ‘sh’ and it can also combine with consonants after it to make ‘Sri Lanka’, ‘stew’, ‘swing’, ‘spin, ‘ski’, ‘slow’, ‘scowl’, ‘Svetlana’, ‘snoop’, ‘smile’, ‘squeal’, ‘stroke’, ‘spring’ and ‘school’; and in various Yiddishisms as ‘shlemiel’, ‘shmendrik’ and the famous ‘Oedipus, shmoedipus, what’s it matter so long as he loves his mother?’ In the ‘-sion’ suffix it is usually pronounced as a ‘sh’ as in ‘pension’, though it can be ‘zh’ as in ‘explosion’ or ‘erasure’.

In various places in words it can be a ‘hard s’ sounding like a ‘z sound’ as in ‘exercise’.

It’s the most common plural in English, with only a few words like ‘oxen’, ‘children’, ‘women’, ‘men’ and ‘brethren’ showing the Old Germanic plural. It’s also the most common way in which we conjugate the third person singular, as in ‘he eats’ (‘soft s’) or ‘she hums’ (‘hard s’). Non-natives find this hard to remember and if you’re a spy, it’s one of the ways you can spot that someone is unlikely to have been brought up speaking English as a first language. We don’t like the ‘s’ or ‘z’ sound abutting up to another ‘s’ so we insert an ‘e’ or an ‘e’ sound to make it easier for ourselves. So it’s ‘cats’, ‘dogs’, ‘hits’ and ‘shops’ but ‘misses’, ‘mixes’ and ‘fizzes’. One kind of plural causes difficulties: ‘potatoes’, ‘mangos’, ‘tomatoes’, ‘tangos’, ‘pinkos’, ‘lingoes’, ‘dingos’, ‘hellos’ . . .

At the ends of single-syllable words, an ‘s’ on its own is usually double: ‘pass’, ‘boss’, ‘hiss’ and ‘mess’, but we have the word ‘pus’ which is not the same as ‘puss’, and the words ‘has’, ‘was’, ‘yes’, ‘bus’, ‘is’ and ‘as’, and, since the popularity of Les Misérables, there are people saying ‘Les Mis’. This seems to follow on from some other abbreviated words ending in a ‘hard s’ like ‘biz’ and ‘showbiz’, ‘Pres.’, ‘des. res.’ and the shortened names Les, Des and Baz. Shakespeare’s close friends called each other ‘coz’ for ‘cousin’; we say ‘cos’ for ‘because’ but the Wizard of Oz is a wonderful ‘wiz’.

The ‘sh’ combination gives us an ‘imperative’ ‘Sh!’ or ‘Shhhhh!’ which may come from the verb ‘shush’, as in, ‘I shushed them up . . .’

Loan words allow us to borrow German ways of using ‘s’ as in ‘kitsch’, ‘schadenfreude’ and the stunningly spelled ‘Nietzsche’.

In some words the ‘s’ is not voiced as in ‘island’, ‘aisle’ and ‘isle’.

Sound-play with ‘s’ gives us words like ‘sizzle’, the ‘sssss’ of hissing disapproval, ‘sassy’, ‘sis’ for ‘sister’, ‘suss’ as an abbreviation for ‘suspect’ or ‘suspicion’, and a host of words using the ‘s’ combinations like ‘shloosh’, ‘slosh’, ‘smash’, ‘splosh’, ‘splash’, ‘swish’ . . . And there’s ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ which shares out Bs and Ss.

I look at the now-extinct ‘f’-looking ‘s’ in ‘S is for Signs and Sign Systems’, below.