Ligature (typography)
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In writing and typography a ligature occurs where two or more letter-forms are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace two sequential characters sharing common components, and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line.
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[edit] Latin alphabet
[edit] Stylistic ligatures
One of the most common ligatures is fi. Since the dot above the i in most text fonts collides with the hood of the f when i occurs after f, they are combined into a single glyph with the dot absorbed into the f, which appears as fi (In some fonts this ligature is rendered as fi, the two characters presented separately.) fi is one of the f ligature series, which includes fi fj (represented in English only in "fjord", but encountered in Esperanto, Norwegian, and other languages where j represents a vocalic or semi-vocalic sound), fl, ff, ffi, and ffl. Ligatures for fa, fe, fo, fr, fs, ft, fu, fy, and for f followed by a period, comma, or hyphen, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled ff and "fft" are also seen, if less common.
[edit] In modern use
With the exception of a few logograms (see below), the only ligature still in wide use in a Latin alphabet is the German esszett ligature, ß, which evolved from the ligature "long s over round s". Even though "long s" ſ has otherwise disappeared from German orthograpy, ß is still considered a ligature, and is replaced by SS in capitalized spelling.
[edit] Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures
The character Æ (æ, or aesc) when used in the Danish, Norwegian, or Icelandic languages, or Old English, is not a typographic ligature. It is a distinct letter—a vowel—and when alphabeticized, is given a different place in the alphabetic order, rather than coming between ad and af. In modern English orthography Æ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: "encyclopædia" versus "encyclopaedia" or "encyclopedia".
Æ comes from classical Latin literature, where it is an optional ligature in some words, for example, "Æneas". It is still found as a variant in English and French, but the trend has recently been towards printing the A and E separately[citation needed]. Similarly, Œ and œ, while normally printed as ligatures in French, can be replaced by component letters if technical restrictions require it.
As the letter W is an addition to the Latin alphabet which originated in the seventh century, the phoneme it represents was formerly written in various ways. In Old English the Runic letter Wynn (Ƿ) was used, but Norman influence forced Wynn out of use. By the 14th century, the "new" letter W, originated as two Vs or Us joined together, developed into a legitimate letter with its own position in the alphabet. Because of its relative youth compared to other letters of the alphabet, only few European languages (English, Dutch, German, Polish, and Welsh) use the letter in native words.
The letter hwair (ƕ), only used in transliteration of the Gothic language, resembles a hw ligature. It was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph hv formerly used to express the phoneme in question, e.g. by Migne in the 1860s.[citation needed]
In German orthography, while ß retains the status of a ligature, the umlaut vowels, ä ö ü are independent letters that historically arose from ae, oe, ue ligatures.
The ring diacritic used in vowels such as å likewise originated as an o-ligature.[citation needed] The uo ligature ů in particular saw use in Early Modern High German, but it merged in later Germanic languages with u (e.g. MHG fuosz, EMHG fuͦß, Modern German Fuß "foot"). It survives in Czech, where it is called krouzék.
The tilde diacritic as used in Castillian and Portuguese, now representing nasalization of the afflected vowel or consonant, originated as an n-ligature.[citation needed]
[edit] Ligatures versus digraphs
Digraphs, such as ij in Dutch and ll in Castillian or Welsh, are not ligatures as the two letters still are separate glyphs: although written together they do not join and the base form of the letters is not changed. Like some ligatures discussed above, these digraphs may or may not be considered individual letters in their respective languages.
[edit] Symbols originating as ligatures
The most common ligature is the ampersand &. This was originally a ligature of E and t, the Latin word for "and". It has exactly the same use (except for pronunciation) in French, and is used in the English language. The ampersand comes in many different forms. Because of its ubiquity it is generally no longer considered a ligature, but a logogram. Like many other ligatures, it has at times been considered a letter (e.g. in early Modern English). In English it is pronounced "and", not "et". Similarly, the Dollar sign, $, originated as a ligature but is now a logogram.<ref>Cajori, Florian (1993). A History of Mathematical Notations. New York: Dover (reprint). ISBN 0-486-67766-4. - contains section on the history of the dollar sign, with much documentary evidence supporting the theory $ began as a ligature for "pesos".</ref>
[edit] History in Western languages
Medieval scribes writing in Latin, conserved space and increased writing speed by combining characters. For example, in blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls (b, o, and p) and those with left-facing bowls (c, e, o, and q) were written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. In many script forms characters such as h, m, and n had their vertical strokes superimposed. Scribes also added special marks called "scribal abbreviations" to avoid having to write a whole character "at a stroke". Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations.
When printing with movable type was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures, however they had begun to fall out of use with the advent of the desktop publishing revolution around 1985. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), and most new digital fonts did not include any ligatures in any case. As most of the early PC development was designed for and in the English language, which already saw ligatures as optional at best, a need for ligatures was not seen.
With the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, and the resulting improved digital typesetting techniques such as OpenType, ligatures are slowly coming back in use.
[edit] Ligatures in other alphabets
- See also Complex Text Layout.
Ligatures are not limited to Latin script. Some forms of the Glagolitic script, used from Middle Ages to the 19th century to write some Slavic languages, have a box-like shape that lends itself to more frequent use of ligatures.
The script used to write modern Arabic employs two very common ligatures representing the combination of the letters 'Laam' and 'Alif' (letters comparable to the latin 'L' and 'A,' respectively).
A number of ligatures have been employed in the Greek alphabet, in particular a combination of omicron (Ο) and upsilon (Υ) which later gave rise to one of the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet — see Ou (letter).
Two letters of the Macedonian and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets, lje and nje (љ, њ), were developed in the nineteenth century as ligatures of Cyrillic El and En (л, н) with the soft sign (ь).
Cyrillic ligatures: Љ, Њ, Ы, Ѿ. Iotified Cyrillic letters are ligatures of the early Cyrillic decimal I and another vowel: ІА (not in Unicode, ancestor of Я), Ѥ, Ѩ, Ѭ, Ю (descended from another ligature, Оу or Ѹ, an early version of У).
An example of a more general contextual form is the Greek lowercase sigma. When typesetting Greek, the selection of which sigma to use is determined by whether or not the letter occurs at the end of the word. From these particulars derived the rules for the "long s" in Western languages formerly.
[edit] Computer typesetting
TeX is an example of a computer typesetting system that makes use of ligatures automatically. The Computer Modern Roman typeface provided with TeX includes the five common ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. When TeX finds these combinations in a text it substitutes the appropriate ligature, unless overridden by the typesetter. Opinion is divided over whether writers should decide where to use ligatures, of if it is the job of a typesetter.
The OpenType font format includes features for associating multiple glyphs with a single glyph, used for ligature substitution. Typesetting software may or may not implement this feature, even if it is explicitly present in the font's metadata. This type of substitution is used mainly for Arabic texts.[citation needed]
This table shows discrete letter pairs on the left, the corresponding Unicode ligature in the middle column, and the Unicode code points on the right. Provided you are using an operating system and browser that can handle Unicode, and have the correct Unicode fonts installed, some or all of these will display correctly. See also the provided graphic.
[edit] Unicode
| Non-Ligature | Ligature | Unicode |
|---|---|---|
| Et | & | U+0026 |
| ss | ß | U+00DF |
| AE, ae | Æ, æ | U+00E6, U+00C6 |
| OE, oe | Œ, œ | U+0152, U+0153 |
| Ng, ng | Ŋ, ŋ | U+014A, U+14B |
| fŋ | ʩ | U+02A9 |
| ue | ᵫ | U+1D6B |
| ff | ff | U+FB00 |
| fi | fi | U+FB01 |
| fl | fl | U+FB02 |
| ffi | ffi | U+FB03 |
| ffl | ffl | U+FB04 |
| ſt | ſt | U+FB05 |
| st | st | U+FB06 |
[edit] References
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[edit] Language alphabets with ligatures
[edit] See also
- Category:Uncommon Latin letters
- Digraph (orthography)
- Sigla
- Complex Text Layout
- List of words that may be spelled with a ligature
- Diacritic
[edit] External links
- Blogdorf on ligatures
- Hoefler & Frere-Jones Requiem font
- Emigre: Mrs Eaves ligaturescs:Ligatura (typografie)
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