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 related to final 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)