Final Form

In many languages, the final form is a special character used to represent a letter only when it occurs at the end of a word. For example, in Hebrew:

kaf כ, mem מ, nun נ, pe פ, and tsadi צ

have the final forms

kaf ך, mem ם, nun ן, pe ף, and tsadi ץ

Some languages that use final form characters are:

  • Arabic
  • Hebrew
  • Manchu
  • Greek

The lowercase Latin letter "s" had separate medial (ſ) and final (s) in the orthographies of many European languages from the medieval period to the early 19th century; it survived in the German Fraktur script until the 1940s.

This writing system–related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Famous quotes containing the words final form, final and/or form:

    “The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
    —Harold Bloom (b. 1930)

    “After a month or so I get used to the book’s final stage, to its having been weaned from my brain. I now regard it with a kind of amused tenderness as a man regards not his son, but the young wife of his son.”
    —Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    “and so this tree—
    Oh, that such our death may be!—
    Died in sleep, and felt no pain,
    To live in happier form again:
    From which, beneath Heaven’s fairest star,
    The artist wrought this loved guitar;”
    —Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)