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2023-02-26 15:21 dustin  
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while trying to avoid way too many fireflies in the third “big intermission“ of his journey, ^ learns that “s“ is a tooth which has been drilled by etruscian dentists. He reminds himself to never forget to brush his teeth again!  
  
history of the letter "s":  
  
| the egyptian/ proto-sinaitic root was a hieroglyph/ pictogram for a tooth (see top-left shape in the cave). i also found theories that this letter symbolizes the sun, but i really can't see a sun in this... :d  
  
| the phoenicians made the shape more angular, so their 21st and second-last letter "shin" looked much like a "w" (second shape). "shin" meant "tooth", and the letter was spoken [sh] as in "she".  
  
| the phoenician language did also use the [s] sound (as in "slime"), which was represented by their 15th letter "samekh" (positioned between their "n" and "o" equivalents). and they had another letter "sade" in 18th position (between the "p" and "q" equivalents), which made a sound somewhere between [s] and [sh].   
  
| the ancient greeks did not use the [sh] sound at all in their language (and still don't today), so one might think they would only keep "samekh" for [s] while dropping "sade" and "shin". however, this was not the case. the greeks also wanted an own letter for the double sound [ks], so they handled the three phoenician letters in the following way:  
\ phoenician "samekh" (alphabetical position between "n" and "o", [s] sound) was turned into greek "xi" ([ks] sound).  
\ phoenician "shin" (between "r" and "t", [sh] sound) became greek "sigma" ([s] sound), which went on to become latin "s".  
\ phoenician "sade" (between "p" and "q", sound between [s] and [sh]) was dropped.  
  
so here we also have the reason why there's no seperate letter for the [sh] sound in the latin alphabet today - because the greeks don't use that sound and re-defined that phoenician [sh] letter to be spoken [s]! for this reason, many modern latin-based languages which use the [sh] sound have to help themselves by adding accents to the „s“ (for example, czech language) or by using digraphs (like english "sh") or even trigraphs (like german "sch") to write the [sh] sound!  However, i found an exception: in hungarian, the letter „s“ alone makes the [sh] sound, while the digraph-letter „sz“ is spoken [s] (as in „ krissz “! btw, a "ssz" works like a double "sz", i.e. it makes the [s] sound longer.) ;)  
  
as for the letter shape, the greeks rotated the phoenician letter by 90 degrees (see the third shape in the top row).  
  
| so how did this letter become latin "s"? it happened in two steps: the etruscians first adopted the greek letter without much change, but as time went on, they started to become a bit lazy and didn't write the fourth line anymore (see bottom-left shape).  
  
| finally, the romans adopted the "lazy" variant from the etruscians, rounded the angles and (re-)symmetrized the shape (bottom-right shape). et voila! :d  
  
to sum it up, "s" is a tooth which is hard to recognize because etruscian dentists drilled it! :d  
  
for puzzle fans:  
the next letter “t“ symbolizes something very simple and has barely changed its shape through the milleniums. So, without giving any further hints, what do you think "t" originally symbolized? solution, of course, in the next cave! :d  
  
cave difficulty: 5/10

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2023-02-26 15:35 dustin  
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small correction:  
  
actually the phoenician "shin" (top-middle shape) was rotated by 90 degrees c o u n t e r- clockwise at first, so it looked like an angular §3§. the top-right shape was then the result when the greeks mirrored the letter because the writing direction changed.   
when the etruscians adopted the letter, it still looked like the angular "3". the etruscians then stopped writing the t o p line, which made their letter look like an angular "s". the romans rounded the angles.  
  
it doesn't make a big difference though, so i don't want to re-create the cave ;)