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In writing and typography a 'ligature' occurs where two or more letter-forms are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace two sequential characters sharing common components, and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line.

Contents

History

Latin alphabet

Stylistic ligatures

German ß

Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures

Symbols originating as ligatures

Digraphs

Languages that use special ligatures

Non-Latin alphabets

Computer typesetting

Notes and references

See also

External links

History

At the origin of typographical ligatures is the simple running together of letters in manuscripts. 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 Brahmic abugidas, or the bind rune in Migration Period Germanic inscriptions.
Medieval scribes, writing in Latin, conserved space and increased writing speed by combining characters and by introduction of scribal abbreviation. For example, in blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls ('b', 'o', and 'p') and those with left-facing bowls ('c', 'e', 'o', and 'q') were written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. In many script forms characters such as 'h', 'm', and 'n' had their vertical strokes superimposed. Scribes also added special marks called "scribal abbreviations" to avoid having to write a whole character "at a stroke". Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations.
When printing with movable type was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures. However they 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 phototypesetting machines in the 1970s, which did not require journeyman knowledge nor training to operate. This trend was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution around 1985. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), and 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. In essence, the use of ligatures dropped as the number of employed traditionally trained hand compositors and hot metal typesetting machine operators dropped.
With the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, and the resulting improved digital typesetting techniques such as OpenType, ligatures are slowly coming back in use.

Latin alphabet

Stylistic ligatures

Many ligatures combine 'f' with an adjacent letter. The most prominent example is
'fi' (or 'fi', rendered with two normal letters). The dot 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 dot absorbed into the 'f'. Other ligatures with the letter f includes 'fi', 'fj',^[1] 'fl', 'ff', 'ffi', 'ffl', and specific Slovak ligature fľ (and in theory also ffľ, fĺ, ffĺ). Ligatures for 'fa', 'fe', 'fo', 'fr', 'fs', 'ft', 'fu', 'fy', and for 'f' followed by a full stop, comma, or hyphen, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled 'ff' and 'fft' are also used, if less common.
Some fonts include an 'fff' ligature (the Requiem Italic font by Jonathan Hoefler even an ' fffl ' ligature), intended for German compound words like ''Sauerstoffflasche'' "oxygen tank", ''Schifffahrt'' "boat trip" (the latter word is only written with ''fff'' if the writer follows the spelling reform of 1996). Official German orthography as outlined in the Duden however prohibits ligatures across composition boundaries, and since the sequence ''fff'' in German only ever occurs across such boundaries (''Schiff-fahrt'', ''Sauerstoff-flasche''), these ligatures cannot be correctly employed for German.^[2]

German ß

Main articles: ß

The German 'esszett' ligature (also called ''scharfes s'' (sharp s)), ß evolved from the ligature "long s over round s" or "long s and z". Even though "long s" ſ has otherwise disappeared from German orthography, ß is still considered a ligature, and is replaced by ''SS'' in capitalized spelling and in alphabetic ordering.

Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures

As the letter 'W' is an addition to the Latin alphabet which originated in the seventh century, the phoneme it represents was formerly written in various ways. In Old English the Runic letter Wynn () was used, but Norman influence forced Wynn out of use. By the 14th century, the "new" letter ''W'', originated as two 'V's or 'U'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, and Welsh) use the letter in native words.
The character 'Æ' ('æ', or 'aesc') when used in the Danish, Norwegian, or Icelandic languages, or Old English, is not a typographic ligature. It is a distinct letter—a vowel—and when alphabeticized, is given a different place in the alphabetic order, rather than coming between 'ad' and 'af'. In modern English orthography 'Æ' is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: "encyclopædia" versus "encyclopaedia" or "encyclopedia".
'Æ' comes from classical Latin literature, where it is an optional ligature in some words, for example, "Æneas". It is still found as a variant in English and French, but the trend has recently been towards printing the 'A' and 'E' separately.^[3] Similarly, 'Œ' and 'œ', while normally printed as ligatures in French, can be replaced by component letters if technical restrictions require it.
In German orthography, the umlaut vowels, ä ö ü historically arose from ''ae'', ''oe'', ''ue'' ligatures (strictly, from superscript ''e'', viz. ''a ͤ'', ''o ͤ'', ''u ͤ''). 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), unlike the convention in Scandinavian languages, where the umlaut vowels are treated as independent letters with positions at the end of the alphabet.
The ''ring'' diacritic used in vowels such as å likewise originated as an 'o'-ligature.
The 'uo' ligature in particular saw use in Early Modern High German, but it merged in later Germanic languages with 'u' (e.g. MHG ''fuosz'', ENHG '', Modern German ''Fuß'' "foot"). It survives in Czech, where it is called ''kroužek''.
The ''tilde'' diacritic as used in Castillian and Portuguese, now representing a "ny" sound and nasalization of the afflected vowel or consonant respectively, originated as an 'n'-ligature.
The letter hwair (), only used in transliteration of the Gothic language, resembles a ''hw'' ligature. It was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph ''hv'' formerly used to express the phoneme in question, e.g. by Migne in the 1860s (Patrologia Latina vol. 18).
Though a stylistic ligature in German (appearing to this day on street signs for city squares ending in "-platz"), a ligature of t and z was a single letter in the Colonial orthography of the Yucatec Maya language.^[4]

Symbols originating as ligatures

The most common ligature is the ampersand '&'. This was originally a ligature of 'E' and 't', the Latin word for "and". It has exactly the same use (except for pronunciation) in French, and is used in the English language. The ampersand comes in many different forms. Because of its ubiquity it is generally no longer considered a ligature, but a logogram. Like many other ligatures, it has at times been considered a letter (e.g. in early Modern English). In English it is pronounced "and", not "et". Similarly, the Dollar sign, $, probably originated as a ligature but is now a logogram.^[5]

Digraphs

Digraphs, such as ''ij'' in Dutch and ''ll'' in Castillian or Welsh, are not ligatures as the two letters still are separate glyphs: although written together, when they are joined in handwriting or italic 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'' and ''ll'' were considered separate letters in Castillian for collation purposes.

Languages that use special ligatures

★ Danish and Norwegian

★ French

★ German

★ Icelandic

★ Swedish

Non-Latin alphabets

:''See also Complex Text Layout.''

Ligatures are not limited to Latin script.

★ A number of ligatures have been employed in the Greek alphabet, in particular a combination of omicron (Ο) and upsilon (Υ) which later gave rise to one of the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet — see Ou (letter).

★ Cyrillic ligatures: Љ, Њ, Ы, . Iotified Cyrillic letters are ligatures of the early Cyrillic decimal I and another vowel: ІА (not in Unicode, ancestor of ''Я''), , , , Ю (descended from another ligature, ''Оу'' or '', an early version of ''У''). Two letters of the Macedonian and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets, lje and nje (''љ'', ''њ''), were developed in the nineteenth century as ligatures of Cyrillic El and En (''л'', ''н'') with the soft sign (''ь'').

★ Some forms of the Glagolitic script, used from Middle Ages to the 19th century to write some Slavic languages, have a box-like shape that lends itself to more frequent use of ligatures.

★ The Arabic alphabet, historically a cursive derived from the Nabataean alphabet, most letters take a variant shape depending on which they are followed (word-initial), preceded (word-final) or both (medial) by other letters. For example, Arabic mīm, isolated م, tripled (''mmm'', rendering as initial, medial and final): ممم . Notable are the shapes taken by lām + ʼalif ﻻ, and ʼalif + lām ﻼ. Unicode has a special ''Allah'' ligature at U+FDF2: ﷲ.

★ The Brahmic abugidas make frequent use of ligatures in consonant clusters. The number of ligatures employed may be language-dependent, thus in Devanagari, many more ligatures are conventionally used when writing Sanskrit than when writing Hindi.

Computer typesetting

TeX is an example of a computer typesetting system that makes use of ligatures automatically. The Computer Modern Roman typeface provided with TeX includes the five common ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. When TeX finds these combinations in a text it substitutes the appropriate ligature, unless overridden by the typesetter. Opinion is divided over whether it is the job of writers or typesetters to decide where to use ligatures.
The OpenType font format includes features for associating multiple glyphs with a single glyph, used for ligature substitution. Typesetting software may or may not implement this feature, even if it is explicitly present in the font's metadata. This type of substitution is used mainly for Arabic texts.

This table shows discrete letter pairs on the left, the corresponding Unicode ligature in the middle column, and the Unicode code points on the right. Provided you are using an operating system and browser that can handle Unicode, and have the correct Unicode fonts installed, some or all of these will display correctly. See also the provided graphic.
:

Ligatures in Unicode

Non-Ligature	Ligature	Unicode
Et	&	U+0026
ss	ß	U+00DF
AE, ae	Æ, æ	U+00E6, U+00C6
OE, oe	Œ, œ	U+0152, U+0153
Ng, ng	Ŋ, ŋ	U+014A, U+014B
fŋ		U+02A9
ue	ᵫ	U+1D6B
ff		U+FB00
fi	fi	U+FB01
fl	fl	U+FB02
ffi		U+FB03
ffl		U+FB04
ſt		U+FB05
st		U+FB06

Notes and references

1. The combination ''fj'' is represented in English only in "fjord" and "fjeld", but is encountered in Esperanto, Norwegian, and other languages where ''j'' represents a vocalic or semi-vocalic sound
2. Duden 1, Mannheim 1996, p. 69.
3. The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Ed, , , , The University of Chicago Press, ,
4. Arte de el idioma maya reducido a succintas reglas, y semilexicon yucateco, Father Pedro Beltrán, Mexico City, 1746
5. A History of Mathematical Notations, Cajori, Florian, , , Dover (reprint), 1993, ISBN 0-486-67766-4 - contains section on the history of the dollar sign, with much documentary evidence supporting the theory $ began as a ligature for "pesos".

See also

★

★ Sigla

★ Complex Text Layout

★ List of words that may be spelled with a ligature

External links

★ Blogdorf on ligatures

★ Hoefler & Frere-Jones ''Requiem'' font

★ Emigre: Mrs Eaves ligatures