С, the letter es

History

Es is the nineteenth letter of the modern Russian alphabet and is written s in transliteration. It commonly represents the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/, the sound of s in the English word sand.

Handwritten Russian is written in cursive as a matter of course. Russian cursive is the handwritten form of the modern Russian Cyrillic script, used instead of the block letters of printed material, and most handwriting, whether a personal letter or a piece of schoolwork, uses it. Latin handwriting ranges freely between fully cursive hands and hands that heavily resemble printed type, with mixed personal systems common; in Russian it is standard practice to write in cursive almost exclusively, so a document in a Russian hand tends to be consistent in kind even where it is hard to read.

Russian cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the 14th to 17th century chancery hand that descended from the older Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav, and it became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books.

Skoropis was the writing of offices and of private office work, and several of its habits still slow a reader down: words are abbreviated, letters reach up to the top of the line, the etymological hard and soft signs are omitted, spelling is simplified overall, and letter shapes vary depending on what stands next to them. Because each scribe wrote with his own peculiarities, unclear places have to be read against passages of the same text already deciphered, a skill acquired mainly from practice.