It was to distinguish between a hard 's' and a soft 's'. The 'f' represented the soft 's' which is why you will find it spelt 'houfe' and 'houses' in old English texts.
Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the middle of the 19th century; in French the change occurred from about 1780 onwards, in English in the decades before and after 1800, and in the United States around 1820.
The long s ⟨ſ⟩, also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter ⟨s⟩. It replaced the single s, or one or both of the letters s in a "double s" sequence (e.g., "ſinfulneſs" for "sinfulness" and "poſſeſs" or "poſseſs" for "possess", but never *"poſſeſſ").
By the late 19th century, condensed layouts such as California Case had simplified the process of setting type by hand by eliminating the long s and its ligatures. The long s stopped being used in printed materials in England during the 1810s and 1820s, while it died out a little earlier in the United States.
That letter that looks like an f to us today is actually an s, one of the two that were in use at the time the Bill of Rights was written. It's called the long s. Here's a tip: Want to make sure your writing shines? Grammarly can check your spelling and save you from grammar and punctuation mistakes.
There are four letters which we don't use any more ('thorn', 'eth', 'ash' and 'wynn') and two letters which we use but which the Anglo-Saxons didn't ('j' and 'v'). Until the late Old and early Middle English period, they also rarely used the letters 'k', 'q' and 'z'.
In the orthography of Modern English, the letters thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (ȝ), ash (æ), and ethel (œ) are obsolete.
The letter 'O' is unchanged in shape since its adoption in the Phoenician alphabet c. 1300BC. Information from Archives (e.e. 1996).
Perhaps around 85% of Old English words are no longer in use, but those that survived are the basic elements of Modern English vocabulary. Old English is a West Germanic language, and developed out of Ingvaeonic (also known as North Sea Germanic) dialects from the 5th century.
The anonymous author uses ond for “and” only a few times, but the Tironian symbol appears scores of times. However, modern transcriptions of the Old English in Beowulf often replace the “⁊” with ond or “&.” When the Tironian character does appear, it's often written as the numeral “7.”
c can be pronounced either as a hard "c" sound, represented in Modern English by "k," or as the sound that is represented in Modern English by "ch." If c precedes a front vowel, it is pronounced like "ch": ceosan ("chay-oh-san"). If c precedes a back vowel, it is pronounced like "k": cyning ("koo-ning").
I originates from Old English (OE) ic, which had in turn originated from the continuation of Proto-Germanic *ik, and ek; The asterisk denotes an unattested form, but ek was attested in the Elder Futhark inscriptions (in some cases notably showing the variant eka; see also ek erilaz).
Letter F. The letter 'F' was from the Phoenicians and it looked more like a 'Y. ' When it was pronounced at that time, the sound made was close to 'waw. ' The ancient Greeks renamed it 'digamma' and tipped it to resemble the present-day F.
The Latin cursive of the 5th century ce employed a lengthened form, and the letter was generally extended below the line in uncial writing. In Irish writing of the 7th century the form came to resemble the modern f, and the Carolingian added further rounding of the top. From this developed the modern minuscule f.
The italic ƒ has been used to denote mathematical functions, or to indicate aperture in photography (e.g. ƒ/2.8) in place of the more common italic f (in serif fonts) or oblique f (in sans-serif fonts).
The loss of the first "r" in the pronunciation of February is (in part) the result of a process called dissimilation (or haplology), where one of two similar sounds in a word is sometimes changed or dropped to avoid the repetition of that sound. (A similar process sometimes occurs with the pronunciation of library.)
Silent “L” Patterns
Admittedly, the silent “L” isn't that predictable. If an “L” is found towards the end of the word, before the letters “f,” “v”, “k” and “m,” but after the letter “a,” then it's usually silent (behalf, calve, walk, almond).
But as Merriam-Webster Dictionary points out, one unusual letter is never silent: the letter V. While it makes an appearance in words like quiver and vivid, you can rest assured it always behaves the exact same way.
In dictionaries, j, q, and z are found the least, but some of the words are rarely used. And if you value the opinion of cryptologists (people who study secret codes and communication), x, q, and z make the fewest appearances in the writing scene.
Until 1835, the English Alphabet consisted of 27 letters: right after "Z" the 27th letter of the alphabet was ampersand (&). The English Alphabet (or Modern English Alphabet) today consists of 26 letters: 23 from Old English and 3 added later.
Why Lowercase G Is the Alphabet's Hardest Letter to Write | Time.
As you can guess, the letter Z is the least commonly used letter in the English alphabet. (In American English, this letter is “zee.”) The letter Q is the second least commonly used letter. In English words, Q is almost always followed by the letter U.
Of the 676 total possible bigrams "there are only seven bigrams that do not occur among the 2.8 trillion mentions: JQ, QG, QK, QY, QZ, WQ, and WZ."