Talk:United States Declaration of Independence (engrossed copy)

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I wanted to include typos in this version, just as they appeared in the original, and with paragraphs "drawn" as they are in the original. The problem I came across was A) That the original contained two carrots (I ignored these), and B) that what is supposed to be Ss look like Fs. I'm not sure if they actually wrote these words with Fs, or if they just look like Fs.  If it can be concluded that the authors never intended for these F-like characters to be Fs, then we should change them to Ss.  But can this be confirmed by anyone here? Allixpeeke 01:19, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Again, if anybody has an answer regarding the Fs and Ss, that'd be great. Fixing the Fs that should be Ss (assuming this is actually what is needed) would be easy for me to do.  Allixpeeke 20:03, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

What looks like f's are not actually f's but an old form of lowercase s, the so-called long s. To the modern eye, they look similar to f's, but they actually lack part of the horizontal line that f's have. So, the f's should in fact be changed to s's —unsigned comment by 129.170.202.3 (talk).
 * I've reverted the text to a version with the ſ (that is, long s, not f) and added an explanation in the  section.--GrafZahl (talk) 11:44, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

In the handwritten version, the letters in question (long s) appear to have a clockwise loop on the bottom similar to the cursive 'g' - but the letters 'f' in the document seem to mostly loop counterclockwise on the bottom of the stroke similar to what a cursive 'q' would have. —unsigned comment by 76.102.141.216 (talk).