In
writingWriting is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
and
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, a
ligature occurs where two or more
graphemes are joined as a single
glyphA glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
. Ligatures usually replace consecutive 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.
History
At the origin of typographical ligatures is the simple running together of letters in
manuscriptA manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
s. Already the earliest known script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that over the script's history gradually evolve from a ligature into an independent character in its own right. Ligatures figure prominently in many historical scripts, notably the
BrahmicThe Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia , Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient Indian subcontinent...
abugidaAn abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is obligatory but secondary...
s, or the
bind runeA bind rune is a ligature of two or more runes. They are extremely rare in Viking Age inscriptions, but are common in pre-Viking Age and in post-Viking Age inscriptions....
of the
Migration PeriodThe Migration Period, also called the Barbarian Invasions , was a period of intensified human migration in Europe that occurred from c. 400 to 800 CE. This period marked the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages...
Germanic runic inscriptions.
Medieval scribes, writing in
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, increased writing speed by combining characters and by introduction of
scribal abbreviationScribal abbreviations are the abbreviations used by ancient and mediæval scribes writing in Latin and, later, in Greek and Old Norse...
. For example, in
blackletterBlackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
, letters with right-facing bowls (
b,
o, and
p) and those with left-facing bowls (
c,
e,
o,
d,
g 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 used scribal abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character at a stroke. Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations.
In
hand writingHandwriting is a person's particular & individual style of writing with pen or pencil, which contrasts with "Hand" which is an impersonal and formalised writing style in several historical varieties...
, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in a way they wouldn't usually be, either by merging their parts, writing one above another or one inside another; while in printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, and the characters don't have to be joined — for example, in some cases fi ligature prints letters f and i more separated than when they are typeset as separate letters.
When
printing with movable typeA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, such as the letter
þ (thorn)Thorn or þorn , is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from the rune in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the...
which was first substituted in English with y (
e.g. ye olde shoppe), but later written as th. However, they began to fall out of use with the advent of the wide use of sans serif machine-set body text in the 1950s and the development of inexpensive
phototypesettingPhototypesetting was a method of setting type, rendered obsolete with the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing software, that uses a photographic process to generate columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper...
machines in the 1970s, which did not require
journeymanA journeyman is someone who completed an apprenticeship and was fully educated in a trade or craft, but not yet a master. To become a master, a journeyman had to submit a master work piece to a guild for evaluation and be admitted to the guild as a master....
knowledge or training to operate. One of the first computer typesetting programs to take advantage of computer-driven typesetting (and later laser printers) was the
TeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
program of
Donald KnuthDonald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...
(see below for more on this). The trend was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution around 1985. Early computer software in particular (except for TeX) had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), and in any case most new digital fonts did not include any ligatures. 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. Ligature use fell as the number of employed, traditionally-trained hand compositors and
hot metal typesettingIn printing and typography, hot metal typesetting refers to 19th-century technologies for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mold that has the shape of one or more glyphs...
machine operators dropped.
With the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, and the resulting improved digital typesetting techniques such as
OpenTypeOpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...
, ligatures are slowly coming back into use.
Stylistic ligatures
Many ligatures combine
f with an adjacent letter. The most prominent example is
fi (or
fi, rendered with two normal letters). The
tittleA tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages...
above the
i in many typefaces collides with the hood of the
f when placed beside each other in a word, and are combined into a single glyph with the
tittleA tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages...
absorbed into the
f. Other ligatures with the letter f include
fj,
fl (fl),
ff (ff),
ffi (ffi), and
ffl (ffl). Ligatures for
fa,
fe,
fo,
fr,
fs,
ft,
fb,
fh,
fu,
fy, and for
f followed by a
full stopA full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...
,
commaA comma is a type of punctuation mark . The word comes from the Greek komma , which means something cut off or a short clause.Comma may also refer to:* Comma , a type of interval in music theory...
, or
hyphenThe hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes , which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign which is also longer...
, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled
ff and
fft are also used, though are less common.
These arose because with the usual type sort for lowercase
f, the end of its hood is on a
kernIn typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual letter forms vs. tracking which is the uniform adjustment of spacing applied over a...
, which would be damaged by collision with raised parts of the next letter.
Sometimes, a ligature crossing the
morphemeIn linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
boundary of a composite word (e.g.,
ff in
shelfful) is considered undesirable, and some computer programs (such as
TeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
) provide a means of suppressing ligatures.
Some fonts include an
fff ligature (the
RequiemRequiem is an old style serif typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1992 for Travel & Leisure magazine. The typeface takes inspiration from a set of inscriptional capitals found in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's 1523 writing manual, Il Modo de Temperare le Penne. Italics are based on the...
font by
Jonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
even contains an
fffl ligature), intended for German compound words like
("oxygen tank") and
("boat trip") (the latter word is written with
fff only if the writer follows the
spelling reform of 1996The German orthography reform of 1996 was an attempt to simplify the spelling of the German language and thus to make it easier to learn, without substantially changing the rules familiar to all living users of the language....
). Official
German orthographyGerman orthography, although largely phonemic, shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. The pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling, once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the...
as outlined in the
DudenThe Duden is a German dictionary, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880.Currently the Duden is in its 25th edition and published in 12 volumes, each covering different aspects like loan words, etymology, pronunciation, synonyms, etc...
however prohibits ligatures across composition boundaries, and since the sequence
fff in German only ever occurs across such boundaries (
,
), these ligatures cannot be correctly employed for German.
TurkishThe Turkish alphabet is a Latin alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy...
has a dotted and dotless "I" next to "f" in words like
("oven") and
fikir ("idea"). The
fi ligature would obscure the distinction and is therefore not used in Turkish typography, and neither are other ligatures like that for
fl, which correspond to rare letter combinations anyway.
Remnants of
("sz") and
("tz") ligatures from Fraktur, a family of
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
blackletterBlackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
typefaces, originally mandatory in Fraktur but now employed only stylistically, can be seen to this day on street signs for city squares whose name contains
Platz or ends in
-platz.
Sometimes ligatures for
st (st),
ſt (ſt),
ch,
ct,
Qu and
Th are used (e.g. in the typeface
Linux LibertineLinux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to Proprietary software typefaces such Times Roman...
).
German ß
The
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
esszett ligature (also called the
(sharp s))
ßIn the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
evolved from the ligature "long s over round s" or, in Fraktur, "long s and z". Even though "long s"
ſThe long, medial or descending s is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example "ſinfulneſs" . The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.-History:The long s is derived from the old Roman cursive...
has otherwise disappeared from German orthography, ß is still considered a ligature, and is replaced by 'SS' in capitalized spelling and in alphabetic ordering. ß is only used in Germany and Austria, nowadays generally never in Switzerland.
Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures
As the letter
WW is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...
is an addition to the
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
which originated in the seventh century, the phoneme it represents was formerly written in various ways. In
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
the Runic letter
WynnWynn is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound ....
was used, but
NormanThe Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
influence forced Wynn out of use. By the 14th century, the "new" letter
W, originated as two
VV is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
s or
UU is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
s 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 a few European languages (English, Dutch, German, Polish, Welsh, Maltese, and Walloon) use the letter in native words.
The character
ÆÆ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic...
– lower case
æ (in ancient times named
æsc) when used in the
DanishDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
,
NorwegianNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, or
IcelandicIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
languages, or
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
, is not a typographic ligature. It is a distinct
letterA letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
—a
vowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
—and when alphabetised, is given a different place in the
alphabetic orderCollation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
. In modern
English orthographyEnglish orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetic orthographies, uses a set of habits to represent speech sounds in writing. In most other languages, these habits are regular enough so that they may be called rules...
Æ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: "encyclopædia" versus "encyclopaedia" or "encyclopedia".
Æ comes from
Medieval LatinMedieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...
, where it was 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. Similarly,
ŒŒ œŒ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι, a usage which continues in English and French...
and
œ, while normally printed as ligatures in French, can be replaced by component letters if technical restrictions require it.
In
German orthographyGerman orthography, although largely phonemic, shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. The pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling, once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the...
, the
umlautedThe diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
vowels
ä"Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :...
,
ö"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...
, and
üÜ, or ü, is a character which can be either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter U with an umlaut or a diaeresis...
historically arose from
ae,
oe,
ue ligatures (strictly, from superscript
e, viz.
,
,
). It is still acceptable to replace them with
ae, oe, ue digraphs when the diacritics are unavailable. While in alphabetic order, they are equivalent not to
ae,
oe,
ue, but to simple
a,
o,
u except in phone books. The convention in Scandinavian languages is different: there the umlaut vowels are treated as independent letters with positions at the end of the alphabet.
The
ringA ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.-Ring above:...
diacriticA diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
used in vowels such as
åÅ represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German...
likewise originated as an
o-ligature. Before the replacement of the older aa with å became a de facto practice, an a with another a on top could sometimes be used, for example in
Johannes BureusJohannes Thomae Bureus Agrivillensis was a Swedish antiquarian, polymath and mystic. He was royal librarian, tutor, and adviser of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden....
's,
Runa: ABC-Boken (1611). The
uo ligature
{{Contains Indic text}}
In writingWriting is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
and
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, a
ligature occurs where two or more
graphemes are joined as a single
glyphA glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
. Ligatures usually replace consecutive 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.
History
{{see also|Bind rune|scribal abbreviation}}
At the origin of typographical ligatures is the simple running together of letters in
manuscriptA manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
s. Already the earliest known script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that over the script's history gradually evolve from a ligature into an independent character in its own right. Ligatures figure prominently in many historical scripts, notably the
BrahmicThe Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia , Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient Indian subcontinent...
abugidaAn abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is obligatory but secondary...
s, or the
bind runeA bind rune is a ligature of two or more runes. They are extremely rare in Viking Age inscriptions, but are common in pre-Viking Age and in post-Viking Age inscriptions....
of the
Migration PeriodThe Migration Period, also called the Barbarian Invasions , was a period of intensified human migration in Europe that occurred from c. 400 to 800 CE. This period marked the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages...
Germanic runic inscriptions.
Medieval scribes, writing in
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, increased writing speed by combining characters and by introduction of
scribal abbreviationScribal abbreviations are the abbreviations used by ancient and mediæval scribes writing in Latin and, later, in Greek and Old Norse...
. For example, in
blackletterBlackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
, letters with right-facing bowls (
b,
o, and
p) and those with left-facing bowls (
c,
e,
o,
d,
g 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 used scribal abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character at a stroke. Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations.
In
hand writingHandwriting is a person's particular & individual style of writing with pen or pencil, which contrasts with "Hand" which is an impersonal and formalised writing style in several historical varieties...
, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in a way they wouldn't usually be, either by merging their parts, writing one above another or one inside another; while in printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, and the characters don't have to be joined — for example, in some cases fi ligature prints letters f and i more separated than when they are typeset as separate letters.
When
printing with movable typeA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, such as the letter
þ (thorn)Thorn or þorn , is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from the rune in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the...
which was first substituted in English with y (
e.g. ye olde shoppe), but later written as th. However, they began to fall out of use with the advent of the wide use of sans serif machine-set body text in the 1950s and the development of inexpensive
phototypesettingPhototypesetting was a method of setting type, rendered obsolete with the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing software, that uses a photographic process to generate columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper...
machines in the 1970s, which did not require
journeymanA journeyman is someone who completed an apprenticeship and was fully educated in a trade or craft, but not yet a master. To become a master, a journeyman had to submit a master work piece to a guild for evaluation and be admitted to the guild as a master....
knowledge or training to operate. One of the first computer typesetting programs to take advantage of computer-driven typesetting (and later laser printers) was the
TeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
program of
Donald KnuthDonald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...
(see below for more on this). The trend was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution around 1985. Early computer software in particular (except for TeX) had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), and in any case most new digital fonts did not include any ligatures. 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. Ligature use fell as the number of employed, traditionally-trained hand compositors and
hot metal typesettingIn printing and typography, hot metal typesetting refers to 19th-century technologies for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mold that has the shape of one or more glyphs...
machine operators dropped.
With the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, and the resulting improved digital typesetting techniques such as
OpenTypeOpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...
, ligatures are slowly coming back into use.
Stylistic ligatures
Many ligatures combine
f with an adjacent letter. The most prominent example is
fi (or
fi, rendered with two normal letters). The
tittleA tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages...
above the
i in many typefaces collides with the hood of the
f when placed beside each other in a word, and are combined into a single glyph with the
tittleA tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages...
absorbed into the
f. Other ligatures with the letter f include
fj,
fl (fl),
ff (ff),
ffi (ffi), and
ffl (ffl). Ligatures for
fa,
fe,
fo,
fr,
fs,
ft,
fb,
fh,
fu,
fy, and for
f followed by a
full stopA full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...
,
commaA comma is a type of punctuation mark . The word comes from the Greek komma , which means something cut off or a short clause.Comma may also refer to:* Comma , a type of interval in music theory...
, or
hyphenThe hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes , which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign which is also longer...
, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled
ff and
fft are also used, though are less common.
These arose because with the usual type sort for lowercase
f, the end of its hood is on a
kernIn typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual letter forms vs. tracking which is the uniform adjustment of spacing applied over a...
, which would be damaged by collision with raised parts of the next letter.
Sometimes, a ligature crossing the
morphemeIn linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
boundary of a composite word (e.g.,
ff in
shelfful) is considered undesirable, and some computer programs (such as
TeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
) provide a means of suppressing ligatures.
Some fonts include an
fff ligature (the
RequiemRequiem is an old style serif typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1992 for Travel & Leisure magazine. The typeface takes inspiration from a set of inscriptional capitals found in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's 1523 writing manual, Il Modo de Temperare le Penne. Italics are based on the...
font by
Jonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
even contains an
fffl ligature), intended for German compound words like
{{lang|de|Sauerstoffflasche}} ("oxygen tank") and
{{lang|de|Schifffahrt}} ("boat trip") (the latter word is written with
fff only if the writer follows the
spelling reform of 1996The German orthography reform of 1996 was an attempt to simplify the spelling of the German language and thus to make it easier to learn, without substantially changing the rules familiar to all living users of the language....
). Official
German orthographyGerman orthography, although largely phonemic, shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. The pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling, once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the...
as outlined in the
DudenThe Duden is a German dictionary, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880.Currently the Duden is in its 25th edition and published in 12 volumes, each covering different aspects like loan words, etymology, pronunciation, synonyms, etc...
however prohibits ligatures across composition boundaries, and since the sequence
fff in German only ever occurs across such boundaries (
{{lang|de|Schiff-fahrt}},
{{lang|de|Sauerstoff-flasche}}), these ligatures cannot be correctly employed for German.
TurkishThe Turkish alphabet is a Latin alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy...
has a dotted and dotless "I" next to "f" in words like
{{lang|tr|fırın}} ("oven") and
fikir ("idea"). The
fi ligature would obscure the distinction and is therefore not used in Turkish typography, and neither are other ligatures like that for
fl, which correspond to rare letter combinations anyway.
Remnants of
{{Unicode|ſʒ}} ("sz") and
{{Unicode|tʒ}} ("tz") ligatures from Fraktur, a family of
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
blackletterBlackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
typefaces, originally mandatory in Fraktur but now employed only stylistically, can be seen to this day on street signs for city squares whose name contains
Platz or ends in
-platz.
Sometimes ligatures for
st (st),
ſt (ſt),
ch,
ct,
Qu and
Th are used (e.g. in the typeface
Linux LibertineLinux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to Proprietary software typefaces such Times Roman...
).
German ß
{{main|ß}}
The
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
esszett ligature (also called the
{{lang|de|scharfes s}} (sharp s))
ßIn the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
evolved from the ligature "long s over round s" or, in Fraktur, "long s and z". Even though "long s"
ſThe long, medial or descending s is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example "ſinfulneſs" . The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.-History:The long s is derived from the old Roman cursive...
has otherwise disappeared from German orthography, ß is still considered a ligature, and is replaced by 'SS' in capitalized spelling and in alphabetic ordering. ß is only used in Germany and Austria, nowadays generally never in Switzerland.
Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures
{{further|List of Latin letters}}
As the letter
WW is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...
is an addition to the
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
which originated in the seventh century, the phoneme it represents was formerly written in various ways. In
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
the Runic letter
WynnWynn is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound ....
({{Unicode|Ƿ}}) was used, but
NormanThe Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
influence forced Wynn out of use. By the 14th century, the "new" letter
W, originated as two
VV is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
s or
UU is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
s 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 a few European languages (English, Dutch, German, Polish, Welsh, Maltese, and Walloon) use the letter in native words.
The character
ÆÆ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic...
– lower case
æ (in ancient times named
æsc) when used in the
DanishDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
,
NorwegianNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, or
IcelandicIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
languages, or
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
, is not a typographic ligature. It is a distinct
letterA letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
—a
vowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
—and when alphabetised, is given a different place in the
alphabetic orderCollation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
. In modern
English orthographyEnglish orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetic orthographies, uses a set of habits to represent speech sounds in writing. In most other languages, these habits are regular enough so that they may be called rules...
Æ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: "encyclopædia" versus "encyclopaedia" or "encyclopedia".
Æ comes from
Medieval LatinMedieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...
, where it was 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. Similarly,
ŒŒ œŒ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι, a usage which continues in English and French...
and
œ, while normally printed as ligatures in French, can be replaced by component letters if technical restrictions require it.
In
German orthographyGerman orthography, although largely phonemic, shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. The pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling, once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the...
, the
umlautedThe diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
vowels
ä"Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :...
,
ö"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...
, and
üÜ, or ü, is a character which can be either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter U with an umlaut or a diaeresis...
historically arose from
ae,
oe,
ue ligatures (strictly, from superscript
e, viz.
{{Unicode|aͤ}},
{{Unicode|oͤ}},
{{Unicode|uͤ}}). It is still acceptable to replace them with
ae, oe, ue digraphs when the diacritics are unavailable. While in alphabetic order, they are equivalent not to
ae,
oe,
ue, but to simple
a,
o,
u except in phone books. The convention in Scandinavian languages is different: there the umlaut vowels are treated as independent letters with positions at the end of the alphabet.
The
ringA ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.-Ring above:...
diacriticA diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
used in vowels such as
åÅ represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German...
likewise originated as an
o-ligature. Before the replacement of the older aa with å became a de facto practice, an a with another a on top ({{Unicode|aͣ}}) could sometimes be used, for example in
Johannes BureusJohannes Thomae Bureus Agrivillensis was a Swedish antiquarian, polymath and mystic. He was royal librarian, tutor, and adviser of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden....
's,
Runa: ABC-Boken (1611). The
uo ligature
{{Contains Indic text}}
In writingWriting is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
and
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, a
ligature occurs where two or more
graphemes are joined as a single
glyphA glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
. Ligatures usually replace consecutive 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.
History
{{see also|Bind rune|scribal abbreviation}}
At the origin of typographical ligatures is the simple running together of letters in
manuscriptA manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
s. Already the earliest known script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that over the script's history gradually evolve from a ligature into an independent character in its own right. Ligatures figure prominently in many historical scripts, notably the
BrahmicThe Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia , Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient Indian subcontinent...
abugidaAn abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is obligatory but secondary...
s, or the
bind runeA bind rune is a ligature of two or more runes. They are extremely rare in Viking Age inscriptions, but are common in pre-Viking Age and in post-Viking Age inscriptions....
of the
Migration PeriodThe Migration Period, also called the Barbarian Invasions , was a period of intensified human migration in Europe that occurred from c. 400 to 800 CE. This period marked the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages...
Germanic runic inscriptions.
Medieval scribes, writing in
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, increased writing speed by combining characters and by introduction of
scribal abbreviationScribal abbreviations are the abbreviations used by ancient and mediæval scribes writing in Latin and, later, in Greek and Old Norse...
. For example, in
blackletterBlackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
, letters with right-facing bowls (
b,
o, and
p) and those with left-facing bowls (
c,
e,
o,
d,
g 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 used scribal abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character at a stroke. Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations.
In
hand writingHandwriting is a person's particular & individual style of writing with pen or pencil, which contrasts with "Hand" which is an impersonal and formalised writing style in several historical varieties...
, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in a way they wouldn't usually be, either by merging their parts, writing one above another or one inside another; while in printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, and the characters don't have to be joined — for example, in some cases fi ligature prints letters f and i more separated than when they are typeset as separate letters.
When
printing with movable typeA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, such as the letter
þ (thorn)Thorn or þorn , is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from the rune in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the...
which was first substituted in English with y (
e.g. ye olde shoppe), but later written as th. However, they began to fall out of use with the advent of the wide use of sans serif machine-set body text in the 1950s and the development of inexpensive
phototypesettingPhototypesetting was a method of setting type, rendered obsolete with the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing software, that uses a photographic process to generate columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper...
machines in the 1970s, which did not require
journeymanA journeyman is someone who completed an apprenticeship and was fully educated in a trade or craft, but not yet a master. To become a master, a journeyman had to submit a master work piece to a guild for evaluation and be admitted to the guild as a master....
knowledge or training to operate. One of the first computer typesetting programs to take advantage of computer-driven typesetting (and later laser printers) was the
TeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
program of
Donald KnuthDonald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...
(see below for more on this). The trend was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution around 1985. Early computer software in particular (except for TeX) had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), and in any case most new digital fonts did not include any ligatures. 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. Ligature use fell as the number of employed, traditionally-trained hand compositors and
hot metal typesettingIn printing and typography, hot metal typesetting refers to 19th-century technologies for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mold that has the shape of one or more glyphs...
machine operators dropped.
With the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, and the resulting improved digital typesetting techniques such as
OpenTypeOpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...
, ligatures are slowly coming back into use.
Stylistic ligatures
Many ligatures combine
f with an adjacent letter. The most prominent example is
fi (or
fi, rendered with two normal letters). The
tittleA tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages...
above the
i in many typefaces collides with the hood of the
f when placed beside each other in a word, and are combined into a single glyph with the
tittleA tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages...
absorbed into the
f. Other ligatures with the letter f include
fj,
fl (fl),
ff (ff),
ffi (ffi), and
ffl (ffl). Ligatures for
fa,
fe,
fo,
fr,
fs,
ft,
fb,
fh,
fu,
fy, and for
f followed by a
full stopA full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...
,
commaA comma is a type of punctuation mark . The word comes from the Greek komma , which means something cut off or a short clause.Comma may also refer to:* Comma , a type of interval in music theory...
, or
hyphenThe hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes , which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign which is also longer...
, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled
ff and
fft are also used, though are less common.
These arose because with the usual type sort for lowercase
f, the end of its hood is on a
kernIn typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual letter forms vs. tracking which is the uniform adjustment of spacing applied over a...
, which would be damaged by collision with raised parts of the next letter.
Sometimes, a ligature crossing the
morphemeIn linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
boundary of a composite word (e.g.,
ff in
shelfful) is considered undesirable, and some computer programs (such as
TeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
) provide a means of suppressing ligatures.
Some fonts include an
fff ligature (the
RequiemRequiem is an old style serif typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1992 for Travel & Leisure magazine. The typeface takes inspiration from a set of inscriptional capitals found in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's 1523 writing manual, Il Modo de Temperare le Penne. Italics are based on the...
font by
Jonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
even contains an
fffl ligature), intended for German compound words like
{{lang|de|Sauerstoffflasche}} ("oxygen tank") and
{{lang|de|Schifffahrt}} ("boat trip") (the latter word is written with
fff only if the writer follows the
spelling reform of 1996The German orthography reform of 1996 was an attempt to simplify the spelling of the German language and thus to make it easier to learn, without substantially changing the rules familiar to all living users of the language....
). Official
German orthographyGerman orthography, although largely phonemic, shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. The pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling, once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the...
as outlined in the
DudenThe Duden is a German dictionary, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880.Currently the Duden is in its 25th edition and published in 12 volumes, each covering different aspects like loan words, etymology, pronunciation, synonyms, etc...
however prohibits ligatures across composition boundaries, and since the sequence
fff in German only ever occurs across such boundaries (
{{lang|de|Schiff-fahrt}},
{{lang|de|Sauerstoff-flasche}}), these ligatures cannot be correctly employed for German.
TurkishThe Turkish alphabet is a Latin alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy...
has a dotted and dotless "I" next to "f" in words like
{{lang|tr|fırın}} ("oven") and
fikir ("idea"). The
fi ligature would obscure the distinction and is therefore not used in Turkish typography, and neither are other ligatures like that for
fl, which correspond to rare letter combinations anyway.
Remnants of
{{Unicode|ſʒ}} ("sz") and
{{Unicode|tʒ}} ("tz") ligatures from Fraktur, a family of
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
blackletterBlackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
typefaces, originally mandatory in Fraktur but now employed only stylistically, can be seen to this day on street signs for city squares whose name contains
Platz or ends in
-platz.
Sometimes ligatures for
st (st),
ſt (ſt),
ch,
ct,
Qu and
Th are used (e.g. in the typeface
Linux LibertineLinux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to Proprietary software typefaces such Times Roman...
).
German ß
{{main|ß}}
The
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
esszett ligature (also called the
{{lang|de|scharfes s}} (sharp s))
ßIn the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
evolved from the ligature "long s over round s" or, in Fraktur, "long s and z". Even though "long s"
ſThe long, medial or descending s is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example "ſinfulneſs" . The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.-History:The long s is derived from the old Roman cursive...
has otherwise disappeared from German orthography, ß is still considered a ligature, and is replaced by 'SS' in capitalized spelling and in alphabetic ordering. ß is only used in Germany and Austria, nowadays generally never in Switzerland.
Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures
{{further|List of Latin letters}}
As the letter
WW is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...
is an addition to the
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
which originated in the seventh century, the phoneme it represents was formerly written in various ways. In
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
the Runic letter
WynnWynn is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound ....
({{Unicode|Ƿ}}) was used, but
NormanThe Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
influence forced Wynn out of use. By the 14th century, the "new" letter
W, originated as two
VV is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
s or
UU is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
s 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 a few European languages (English, Dutch, German, Polish, Welsh, Maltese, and Walloon) use the letter in native words.
The character
ÆÆ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic...
– lower case
æ (in ancient times named
æsc) when used in the
DanishDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
,
NorwegianNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, or
IcelandicIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
languages, or
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
, is not a typographic ligature. It is a distinct
letterA letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
—a
vowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
—and when alphabetised, is given a different place in the
alphabetic orderCollation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
. In modern
English orthographyEnglish orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetic orthographies, uses a set of habits to represent speech sounds in writing. In most other languages, these habits are regular enough so that they may be called rules...
Æ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: "encyclopædia" versus "encyclopaedia" or "encyclopedia".
Æ comes from
Medieval LatinMedieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...
, where it was 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. Similarly,
ŒŒ œŒ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι, a usage which continues in English and French...
and
œ, while normally printed as ligatures in French, can be replaced by component letters if technical restrictions require it.
In
German orthographyGerman orthography, although largely phonemic, shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. The pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling, once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the...
, the
umlautedThe diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
vowels
ä"Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :...
,
ö"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...
, and
üÜ, or ü, is a character which can be either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter U with an umlaut or a diaeresis...
historically arose from
ae,
oe,
ue ligatures (strictly, from superscript
e, viz.
{{Unicode|aͤ}},
{{Unicode|oͤ}},
{{Unicode|uͤ}}). It is still acceptable to replace them with
ae, oe, ue digraphs when the diacritics are unavailable. While in alphabetic order, they are equivalent not to
ae,
oe,
ue, but to simple
a,
o,
u except in phone books. The convention in Scandinavian languages is different: there the umlaut vowels are treated as independent letters with positions at the end of the alphabet.
The
ringA ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.-Ring above:...
diacriticA diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
used in vowels such as
åÅ represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German...
likewise originated as an
o-ligature. Before the replacement of the older aa with å became a de facto practice, an a with another a on top ({{Unicode|aͣ}}) could sometimes be used, for example in
Johannes BureusJohannes Thomae Bureus Agrivillensis was a Swedish antiquarian, polymath and mystic. He was royal librarian, tutor, and adviser of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden....
's,
Runa: ABC-Boken (1611). The
uo ligature
{{UnicodeU is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
in particular saw use in Early Modern High German, but it merged in later Germanic languages with
u (e.g.
MHGMiddle High German , abbreviated MHG , is the term used for the period in the history of the German language between 1050 and 1350. It is preceded by Old High German and followed by Early New High German...
fuosz,
ENHGEarly New High German is a term for the period in the history of the German language, generally defined, following Wilhelm Scherer, as the period 1350 to 1650.Alternative periodisations take the period to begin later; e.g...
{{unicode|fuͦß}}, Modern German
Fuß "foot"). It survives in
CzechCzech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
, where it is called
kroužek.
The
tildeThe tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....
diacritic as used in
SpanishSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and
PortuguesePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, now representing the
palatal nasalThe palatal nasal is a type of consonant, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a lowercase letter n with a leftward-pointing tail protruding from the bottom of the left stem of the letter. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is J...
sound in the letter
ñÑ is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. It is used in the Spanish alphabet, Galician alphabet, Asturian alphabet, Basque alphabet, Aragonese old alphabet , Filipino alphabet, Chamorro alphabet and the Guarani alphabet, where it represents...
and
nasalizationIn phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth...
of the affected vowel, respectively, originated as an
nn ligature (Espanna = España, anno = año). Similarly, the
circumflexThe circumflex is a diacritic used in the written forms of many languages, and is also commonly used in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus —a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη...
in
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
spelling stems from the ligature of a silent s. The French, Portuguese, Catalan and old Spanish letter
çis a Latin script letter, used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Ligurian, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Kurdish and Zazaki alphabets. This letter also appears in Catalan, French, Friulian, Occitan and Portuguese as a variant of the letter “c”...
represents a "c" over a "z".
The letter
hwairHwair is the name of , the Gothic letter expressing the or sound . Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature .-Name:...
({{Unicode|ƕ}}), used only in
transliterationTransliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
of the
Gothic languageGothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...
, resembles a
hw ligature. It was introduced by
philologistsPhilology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
around 1900 to replace the
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
hv formerly used to express the phoneme in question, e.g. by
MigneJacques Paul Migne was a French priest who published inexpensive and widely-distributed editions of theological works, encyclopedias and the texts of the Church Fathers, with the goal of providing a universal library for the Catholic priesthood.He was born at Saint-Flour, Cantal and studied...
in the 1860s (
Patrologia LatinaThe Patrologia Latina is an enormous collection of the writings of the Church Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers published by Jacques-Paul Migne between 1844 and 1855, with indices published between 1862 and 1865....
vol. 18).
The
ByzantineByzantine usually refers to the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages.Byzantine may also refer to:* A citizen of the Byzantine Empire, or native Greek during the Middle Ages...
s had a unique o-u ligature ({{Unicode|Ȣ}}) that, while originally based on the
Greek alphabetThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
's ο-υ, carried over into Latin-based alphabets as well.
GhaThe letter ' has been used in various Latin orthographies for Turkic languages, such as Azeri or the Jaŋalif orthography for Tatar. It usually represents a voiced velar fricative, but is sometimes used for a voiced uvular fricative. All orthographies using it have been phased out, so the letter is...
(ƣ), a rarely used letter based on Q and G, was misconstrued by the
ISOThe International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...
to be an O-I ligature due to its appearance, and is thus known (to the ISO and, in turn,
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
) as "Oi."
The
International Phonetic AlphabetThe International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
formerly used ligatures to represent
affricate consonantAffricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...
s, of which six are encoded in Unicode: ʣ, ʤ, ʥ, ʦ, ʧ and ʨ. One
fricative consonantFricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...
is still represented with a ligature: ɮ, and the
Extensions to the IPAThe Extensions to the IPA are extensions of the International Phonetic Alphabet and were designed for disordered speech. However, some of the symbols are occasionally used for transcribing normal speech as well, particularly in certain languages.-Brackets:The Extended IPA for speech pathology has...
contain three more: ʩ , ʪ and ʫ.
Rarer ligatures also exist, such as {{Unicode|Ꜳꜳ, Ꜵꜵ, Ꜷꜷ, Ꜹꜹ, Ꜻꜻ, Ꜽꜽ, Ꝏꝏ, ᵫ, ᵺ, Ỻỻ, Ꜩꜩ ᴂ and ᴔ}}.
Symbols originating as ligatures
The most common ligature is the
ampersandAn ampersand is a logogram representing the conjunction word "and". The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for "and".-Etymology:...
&. This was originally a ligature of
E and
t, forming the
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
word "et", meaning "
and". It has exactly the same use (except for pronunciation) in
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and is used in
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
. The ampersand comes in many different forms. Because of its ubiquity, it is generally no longer considered a ligature, but a
logogramA logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
.
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," except in the case of
&c, pronounced "
et ceteraEt cetera is a Latin expression that means "and other things", or "and so forth". It is taken directly from the Latin expression which literally means "and the rest " and is a loan-translation of the Greek "καὶ τὰ ἕτερα"...
." In most fonts, it does not immediately resemble the two letters used to form it, although certain typefaces (such as
Trebuchet MSTrebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Vincent Connare for the Microsoft Corporation in 1996. It is named after the trebuchet, a medieval catapult...
) design
& in the form of a ligature.
Similarly, the dollar sign,
$The dollar or peso sign is a symbol primarily used to indicate the various peso and dollar units of currency around the world.- Origin :...
, possibly originated as a ligature (for "pesos", although there are other theories as well) but is now a logogram.
The
Spanish pesetaThe peseta was the currency of Spain between 1869 and 2002. Along with the French franc, it was also a de facto currency used in Andorra .- Etymology :...
was sometimes symbolized by a ligature ₧ (from Pts).
Digraphs
DigraphsA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
, such as
llLl/ll is a digraph which occurs in several natural languages.-In English:In English, ll represents the same sound as single l:...
in
SpanishSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
or
WelshWelsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
, are not ligatures in the general case as the two letters are displayed as separate glyphs: although written together, when they are joined in handwriting or
italicIn typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
fonts the base form of the letters is not changed and the individual glyphs remain separate. Like some ligatures discussed above, these digraphs may or may not be considered individual letters in their respective languages. Until the 1994 spelling reform, the digraphs
ch-Business:* Bemidji Airlines IATA code* Carolina Herrera, a fashion designer based in New York.-Entertainment and sports:* Channel * College Humor.com, a comedy website...
and
ll were considered separate letters in Spanish for
collationCollation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
purposes.
The difference can be illustrated with the French digraph
œu, which is composed of the ligature
œŒ œŒ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι, a usage which continues in English and French...
and the simplex letter
u.
DutchDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
ij, however, is somewhat more ambiguous. Depending on the standard used, it can be considered a digraph, a ligature or a letter in itself, and its uppercase and lowercase forms are often available as a single glyph with a distinctive ligature in several professional fonts (e.g.
ZapfinoZapfino is a calligraphic typeface designed for Linotype by typeface designer Hermann Zapf in 1998. It is based on an alphabet Zapf originally penned in 1944...
). Sans serif uppercase
IJ glyphs, popular in the
NetherlandsThe Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, typically use a ligature resembling a
U with a broken left-hand stroke. Adding to the confusion, Dutch handwriting can render
y (which is not found in native Dutch words, but occurs in words borrowed from other languages) as a
ij-glyph without the dots in its lowercase form and the
IJ in its uppercase form looking virtually identical (only slightly bigger). When written/typed as two separate letters, both should be capitalized —or not— to form a correctly spelled word, like
IJs or
ijs (
iceIce is water frozen into the solid state. Usually ice is the phase known as ice Ih, which is the most abundant of the varying solid phases on the Earth's surface. It can appear transparent or opaque bluish-white color, depending on the presence of impurities or air inclusions...
).
Latin-derived alphabets that use special ligatures
- Danish and Norwegian
The Danish and Norwegian alphabet is based upon the Latin alphabet and has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 and 1955 , although Danish did not officially recognize the W as a separate letter until 1980....
- Faroese
The Faroese alphabet consists of 29 letters derived from the Latin alphabet:- See also :* Alphabets derived from the Latin* Icelandic alphabet* Faroese language* Faroese orthography* Danish and Norwegian alphabet...
- French
The French alphabet is based on the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, with five diacritics and two orthographic ligatures.-Letter names:- Diacritics :...
- German
The modern German alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet consisting of 30 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet plus four extra letters.In German, the individual letters have neuter gender: das A, das B etc....
- Icelandic
The modern Icelandic alphabet consists of the following 32 letters:It is a Latin alphabet with diacritics, in addition it includes the character eth Ðð and the runic letter thorn Þþ...
Non-Latin alphabets
{{see also|Complex Text Layout}}
Ligatures are not limited to Latin script:
- The Brahmic
The Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia , Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient Indian subcontinent...
abugidaAn abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is obligatory but secondary...
s make frequent use of ligatures in consonant clusters. The number of ligatures employed may be language-dependent; thus many more ligatures are conventionally used in DevanagariDevanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
when writing SanskritSanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
than when writing HindiStandard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
. Having 37 consonants in total, the total number of ligatures that can be formed in Devanagari using only two letters is 1369, though few fonts are able to render all of them. In particular, Mangal.ttfMangal is an OpenType Font for the Devanagari script that is included as part of Microsoft Windows' optional support for Indic text in Windows XP and subsequent Windows versions. It is the default font for all languages which are in the Devanagari script, including Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and...
, which is included with Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
' Indic support, does not correctly handle ligatures with consonants attached to the right of the characters द, ट, ठ, ड, and ढ, leaving the viramaVirama is a generic term for the diacritic in many Brahmic scripts, including Devanagari and East Nagari, that is used to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter. The name is Sanskrit for "cessation, termination, end"...
attached to them and displaying the following consonant in its standard form.
- A number of ligatures have been employed in the Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, in particular a combination of omicron (Ο) and upsilon (Υ) which later gave rise to a letter of the Cyrillic alphabetThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
— see Ou (letter)Ou is a ligature of the Greek letters ο and υ which was frequently used in Byzantine manuscripts. This ligature is still seen today on icon artwork in Greek Orthodox churches, and sometimes in graffiti or other forms of informal or decorative writing.The ligature is now mostly used in the context...
.
- Cyrillic ligatures: Љ
Lje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.Lje represents a palatal lateral , a sound similar to the palatalized alveolar lateral which is represented by the digraph ЛЬ and pronounced like the ⟨ll⟩ in "million".Lje was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić...
, ЊNje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It is a ligature of the Cyrillic letters En ⟨Н⟩ and Soft Sign ⟨Ь⟩. It was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. It corresponds to the digraph ⟨nj⟩ in the Serbian Latin and Croatian alphabets.It is used in Macedonian and Serbian, where it represents a...
, ЫYery or Yeru is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. It represents the phoneme after non-palatalised consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets...
, {{unicodeOt is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet. Though it originated as a ligature of the letters Omega and Te , it functions as a discrete letter of the alphabet, placed between х and ц...
. Iotified Cyrillic letters are ligatures of the early Cyrillic decimal I and another vowel: Ꙗ (ancestor of ЯYa is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, the civil script variant of Old Cyrillic Little Yus . Among modern Slavonic languages it is used by Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian to represent both the combination in initial or post-vocalic position and after a palatalised consonant; in...
), {{unicodeIotated E is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It is no longer used in any modern language.-History:Iotated E has no equivalent in the Glagolitic alphabet, and probably originated as a ligature of ⟨⟩ and ⟨⟩ to represent [je]....
, {{unicode, {{unicode, ЮYu is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. After a palatalized consonant, it represents the close back rounded vowel , somewhat like the pronunciation of ⟨oo⟩ in "boot"; elsewhere it is a so-called iotated vowel representing the combination , like the pronunciation of ⟨you⟩ in "youth"...
(descended from another ligature, ОуUk is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet. It was originally a digraph of the Cyrillic letters O and U or less frequently O and Izhitsa . To save space, it was often written as a vertical ligature , called "monograph Uk"...
, an early version of У). Two letters of the Macedonian and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets, ljeLje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.Lje represents a palatal lateral , a sound similar to the palatalized alveolar lateral which is represented by the digraph ЛЬ and pronounced like the ⟨ll⟩ in "million".Lje was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić...
and njeNje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It is a ligature of the Cyrillic letters En ⟨Н⟩ and Soft Sign ⟨Ь⟩. It was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. It corresponds to the digraph ⟨nj⟩ in the Serbian Latin and Croatian alphabets.It is used in Macedonian and Serbian, where it represents a...
(љ, њ), were developed in the nineteenth century as ligatures of Cyrillic ElEl is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.El commonly represents the alveolar lateral approximant , like the pronunciation of ⟨l⟩ in "lip".-Form:...
and EnEn is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents the alveolar nasal consonant , like the pronunciation of ⟨n⟩ in "nice".-History:The Cyrillic letter En was derived from the Greek letter Nu ....
(л, н) with the soft signThe soft sign , also known as yer, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short front vowel. As with its companion, the back yer, the vowel phoneme it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels...
(ь). A ligature of ya (Я) and e also exists: {{Unicode|Ԙԙ}}, as do some more ligatures: {{Unicode|Ꚅꚅ and Ꚉꚉ}}.
- 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.In the Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
, the letters aleph* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...
and lamed can form a ligature (ﭏ). The ligature appears in some pre-modern texts (mainly religious), or in Judeo-Arabic texts, where that combination is very frequent, since [ʔ] [a]l- (written aleph* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...
plus lamed, in the Hebrew script) is the definite article in Arabic.
- In the Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
, historically a cursiveCursive, also known as joined-up writing, joint writing, or running writing, is any style of handwriting in which the symbols of the language are written in a simplified and/or flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing easier or faster...
derived from the Nabataean alphabet, most letters' shapes depend on whether they are followed (word-initial), preceded (word-final) or both (medial) by other letters. For example, Arabic mīm, isolated {{lang|ar|م}}, tripled (mmm, rendering as initial, medial and final): {{lang|ar| ممم }}. Notable are the shapes taken by lām-Lam:*Mor lam, an ancient Lao form of song in Laos and Isan*Lam saravane, a music genre*Lam luang, a music genre*Lam, Germany, a town in Bavaria-LAM:*Lactational amenorrhea method, a contraceptive method...
+ [[ʼalif]] isolated: {{lang|ar|ﻻ}}, and lām + ʾalif medial or final: {{lang|ar|ﻼ}}. Unicode has a special AllahAllah is a word for God used in the context of Islam. In Arabic, the word means simply "God". It is used primarily by Muslims and Bahá'ís, and often, albeit not exclusively, used by Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic Christians, Maltese Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mizrahi Jews and...
ligature at U+FDF2: {{lang|ar| ﷲ}}.
- Urdu
Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...
(one of the main languages of South Asia), which uses a calligraphic version of the Arabic-based Nasta`liq script, requires a great number of ligatures in digital typography. InPageInPage is a page layout software for languages such as Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic under Windows which was first developed in 1994. It is primarily used for creating pages in the language of Urdu, using the Nasta`līq style of Arabic script...
, a widely used desktop publishingDesktop publishing is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal computer.The term has been used for publishing at all levels, from small-circulation documents such as local newsletters to books, magazines and newspapers...
tool for Urdu, uses Nasta`liq fonts with over 20,000 ligatures.
- In ASL, a ligature of the American manual alphabet is used to sign 'I love you', from the English initialism ILY. It consists of the little finger of the letter I plus the thumb and forefinger of the letter L. The letter Y (little finger and thumb) overlaps with the other two letters.
- The Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
uses two ligatures, one for hiraganais a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
, ゟ, read as yori, is a typographic ligature in the Japanese language, consisting of a combination of the hiragana graphs of and , and thus represents their combined sound, より . It is drawn with two strokes. It is uncommon and found almost exclusively in vertical writing.-In Unicode:...
, which is a vertical writing ligature of the characters よよ, in hiragana, or ヨ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. The hiragana is made in two strokes, while the katakana in three. Both represent ....
and りり, in hiragana, or リ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represent one mora. Both are written with two strokes and both represent the sound . Both originate from the character 利...
, and one for katakanais a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
, ヿ, read as koto, is a typographic ligature in the Japanese language, consisting of a combination of the katakana graphs of and , and thus represents their combined sound, コト . It is drawn with one stroke. It is uncommon and used only in vertical writing....
, which is a vertical writing ligature of the characters コこ, in hiragana, or コ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. Both represent . The shape of these kana comes from the kanji 己....
and トと, in hiragana, or ト in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. Both represent the sound , and when written with dakuten represent the sound...
.
- Lao
Lao or Laotian is a tonal language of the Tai–Kadai language family. It is the official language of Laos, and also spoken in the northeast of Thailand, where it is usually referred to as the Isan language. Being the primary language of the Lao people, Lao is also an important second language for...
uses three ligatures, all comprising the letter ຫ (h). As a tonal language, most consonant sounds in Lao are represented by two consonants, which will govern the tone of the syllable. Five consonant sounds are only represented by a single consonant letter (ງ, ນ, ມ, ລ, ວ), meaning that one cannot render all the tones for words beginning with these sounds. A silent ຫ indicates that the syllable should be read with the tone rules for ຫ, rather than the following consonant. Three consonants can form ligatures with the letter ຫ. ຫ+ນ=ໜ, ຫ+ມ=ໝ and ຫ+ລ=ຫຼ.
Chinese ligatures
Written Chinese has a long history of creating new characters by merging parts or wholes of other
Chinese characterChinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
s. However, a few of these combinations do not represent
morphemeIn linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s but retain the original multi-character (multiple morpheme) reading and are therefore not considered true characters themselves. In Chinese, these ligatures are called
héwén (合文) or
héshū (合書).
One popular ligature used on
chūntiē decorations used for Chinese Lunar New Year is a combination of the four characters for
zhāocái jìnbǎo (招財進寶), meaning "ushering in wealth and prosperity" and used as a popular New Year's greeting.
{{multiple image
| width = 110
| header = Chinese ligatures
| header_align = center
| background color = #E6FFFB
| image1 = Chinese Character zhao1 cai2 jin4 bao3.png
| alt1 =
Kǒng Mènghàoxué (孔孟好學)
| caption1 = A Chinese ligature for
zhāocái jìnbǎo (招財進寶), a popular New Year's greeting
| image2 = Caonima word-150x150.jpg
| alt2 =
Cǎonímǎ (草泥马)
| caption2 = The
Cǎonímǎ (草泥马) ligature combining the three constituent characters
}}
In 1924, Du Dingyou (杜定友; 1898–1967) created the ligature "圕" from two of the three characters 圖書館
(túshūguǎn), meaning "library". Although it does have an assigned pronunciation of
tuān and appears in many dictionaries, it is not a
morphemeIn linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
and cannot be used as such in Chinese. Instead, it is usually considered a graphic representation of
túshūguǎn.
In recent years, a Chinese
internet memeThe term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...
, the
Grass Mud HorseThe Grass Mud Horse or Cao Ní Ma is a Chinese Internet meme widely used as a form of symbolic defiance of the widespread Internet censorship in China. It is a play on the Mandarin language words "fuck your mother", and one of the so-called 10 mythical creatures created in a hoax article on Baidu...
, has had such a ligature associated with it combining the three relevant Chinese characters 草, 泥, and 马
(Cǎonímǎ).
Similar to the ligatures were several "two-syllable Chinese characters" (雙音節漢字) created in the 19th century for expressing non-Chinese measurement units which have since largely disappeared.
Computer typesetting
TeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
is an example of a computer typesetting system that makes use of ligatures automatically. The
Computer Modern RomanComputer Modern is the family of typefaces used by default by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his METAFONT program, and was most recently updated in 1992. However, the family font was superseded by CM-Super , the latest release dating 2008...
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 it is the job of writers or typesetters to decide where to use ligatures.
The
OpenTypeOpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...
font format includes features for associating multiple
glyphA glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
s to a single character, used for ligature substitution. Typesetting software may or may not implement this feature, even if it is explicitly present in the font's metadata.
XeTeXXeTeX is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType or Apple Advanced Typography...
is a TeX typesetting engine designed to make the most of such advanced features. This type of substitution used to be needed mainly for typesetting Arabic texts, but ligature lookups and substitutions are being put into all kinds of Western Latin OpenType fonts.
This table below shows discrete letter pairs on the left, the corresponding
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
ligature in the middle column, and the Unicode code point on the right. Provided you are using an
operating systemAn operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
and
browserA web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
that can handle Unicode, and have the correct Unicode
fontsIn typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
installed, some or all of these will display correctly. See also the provided graphic.
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
maintains that ligaturing is a presentation issue rather than a character definition issue, and that, for example, "if a modern font is asked to display 'h' followed by 'r', and the font has an 'hr' ligature in it, it can display the ligature." Accordingly, the use of the special Unicode ligature characters is "discouraged", and "no more will be encoded in any circumstances". Note however that ligatures such as æ and œ are never used to replace arbitrary 'ae' or 'oe' sequences – 'does' can never be written 'dœs'.
Ligatures in Unicode (Latin-derived alphabets)
{{see also|List of precomposed Latin characters in Unicode#Ligatures}}
- This list is incomplete; several medieval ligatures in the U+A732 to U+A73D range, as well as a few others in that vicinity, are not yet listed.
| Non-ligature |
Ligature |
Unicode |
HTML |
| Et |
{{unicode|&}} |
U+0026 |
& |
| ſs, ſz |
{{unicode|ß In the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
}} |
U+00DF |
ß |
| AE, ae |
{{unicode|Æ Æ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic...
, æ}} |
U+00C6, U+00E6 |
Æ æ |
| OE, oe |
{{unicode|ŒŒ œŒ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι, a usage which continues in English and French...
, œ}} |
U+0152, U+0153 |
Œ œ |
| IJ, ij |
{{unicode|IJ}}, {{unicode|ij}} |
U+0132, U+0133 |
IJ ij |
| ue |
{{unicode|ᵫ}} |
U+1D6B |
ᵫ |
| ff |
{{unicode|ff}} |
U+FB00 |
ff |
| fi |
{{unicode|fi}} |
U+FB01 |
fi |
| fl |
{{unicode|fl}} |
U+FB02 |
fl |
| ffi |
{{unicode|ffi}} |
U+FB03 |
ffi |
| ffl |
{{unicode|ffl}} |
U+FB04 |
ffl |
| ſt |
{{unicode|ſt}} |
U+FB05 |
ſt |
| st |
{{unicode|st}} |
U+FB06 |
st |
Also, there are separate
code pointIn character encoding terminology, a code point or code position is any of the numerical values that make up the code space . For example, ASCII comprises 128 code points in the range 0hex to 7Fhex, Extended ASCII comprises 256 code points in the range 0hex to FFhex, and Unicode comprises 1,114,112...
s for the
digraph DZDz is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, used in Polish, Kashubian, Macedonian, Slovak, and Hungarian to represent . In Dene Suline and Cantonese Pinyin it represents .-In Polish:dz generally represents...
and for the Croatian digraphs DŽ, LJ, and NJ. They are not ligatures but
digraphsA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
. See Digraphs in Unicode.
Ligatures used only in phonetic transcriptionPhonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds . The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, e.g., the International Phonetic Alphabet....
:
| Non-ligature |
Ligature |
Unicode |
HTML |
| db |
{{Unicode|ȸ}} |
U+0238 |
ȸ |
| qp (cp) |
{{Unicode|ȹ}} |
U+0239 |
ȹ |
| {{Unicode|lʒ}} (or lezh) |
{{Unicode|ɮ}} |
U+026E |
ɮ |
| dz |
{{Unicode|ʣ}} |
U+02A3 |
ʣ |
| {{Unicode|dʒ}} (or dezh) |
{{Unicode|ʤ}} |
U+02A4 |
ʤ |
| {{Unicode|dʑ}} (or dz curl) |
{{Unicode|ʥ}} |
U+02A5 |
ʥ |
| ts |
{{Unicode|ʦ}} |
U+02A6 |
ʦ |
| {{Unicode|tʃ}} (or tesh) |
{{Unicode|ʧ}} |
U+02A7 |
ʧ |
| {{Unicode|tɕ}} (or tc curl) |
{{Unicode|ʨ}} |
U+02A8 |
ʨ |
| {{Unicode|fŋ}} |
{{unicode|ʩ}} |
U+02A9 |
ʩ |
| ls |
{{Unicode|ʪ}} |
U+02AA |
ʪ |
| lz |
{{Unicode|ʫ}} |
U+02AB |
ʫ |
U+0238 and U+0239 are called digraphs, but are actually ligatures.
External links
{{Latin alphabet}}
{{Typography terms}}