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.

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