Latin alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Latin alphabet

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Latin alphabet

Type: Alphabet

Languages:

Latin and Romance languages; most languages of Europe; Romanizations exist for practically all known languages.

Time period: ~700 B.C. to the present

Parent writing systems:

Proto-Canaanite alphabet Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Old Italic alphabet Latin alphabet

Child writing systems:

Numerous: see Alphabets derived from the Latin

Sister writing systems:

Cyrillic Coptic Armenian Runic/Futhark

Unicode range:See Latin characters in Unicode

ISO 15924 code: Latn

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Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-•based pronunciation key.

History of the Alphabet

Middle Bronze Age 19–15th c. BC

● Canaanite-Phoenician 14th c. BC ❍ Paleo-Hebrew 10th c. BC ❍ Aramaic 9th c. BC

■ Br•hm• & Indic 6th c. BC ■ Tibetan 7th c. ■ Khmer/Javanese 9th c.

■ Hebrew 3rd c. BC ■ Syriac 2nd c. BC

■ Nabatean 2nd c. BC ■ Arabic 4th c.

■ Pahlavi 2nd c. BC ■ Avestan 4th c.

❍ Greek 9th c. BC ■ Etruscan 8th c. BC

■ Latin 7th c. BC ■ Runes 2nd c. ■ Ogham 4th c.

■ Gothic 4th c. ■ Armenian 405 ■ Glagolitic 862

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. Apart from Latin itself, the alphabet was adapted to the direct descendants of Latin (the Romance languages), Germanic, Celtic and some Slavic languages from the Middle Ages, and finally to most languages of Europe. With the age of colonialism and Christian proselytism, the alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Amerindian, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, Vietnamese, Malay language, and Indonesian. More recently, Western linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when they transcribe or devise written standards for non-European languages; see for example the African reference alphabet.

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■ Cyrillic 10th c. ❍ Samaritan 6th c. BC ❍ Iberian 6th c. BC

● Epigraphic South Arabian 9th c. BC ❍ Ge'ez 5–6th c. BC

Meroitic 3rd c. BC

Hangul 1443

Zhuyin 1913

Complete genealogy

In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any straightforward derivation of the alphabet used by the Romans. These variants may drop letters (e.g. the Italian alphabet) or add letters (e.g. the Danish alphabet) to or from the classical Roman script, and many letter shapes have changed over the centuries — such as the lower-case letters. The Latin alphabet evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet, called the Cumaean alphabet.

Contents

[hide]

● 1 Evolution ❍ 1.1 Medieval and later developments ❍ 1.2 Spread of the Latin alphabet

● 2 Extensions ❍ 2.1 New forms ❍ 2.2 Ligatures ❍ 2.3 Diacritics ❍ 2.4 Digraphs and trigraphs ❍ 2.5 Collation

● 3 Letters of the English alphabet ● 4 Latin alphabet and international standards ● 5 See also ● 6 Further reading

[edit] Evolution

Main article: History of the Latin alphabet

Original Latin alphabet of the 7th

c. BC

It is generally held that the Latins adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BC from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy. Roman legend credited the introduction to one Evander, son of the Sibyl, supposedly 60 years

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A B C D E F Z

H I K L M N O

P Q R S T V X

before the Trojan war, but there is no historically sound basis to this tale. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Latins finally adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters.

Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the Latin alphabet replaced the Z—unneeded to write early Latin—with the new letter G in the same position. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters was short-lived, but after the Roman conquest of Greece in the first century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters Y and Z—or, in the case of Z, readopted the letter—and added them to the alphabet's end. Thus it was that during the classical Latin period the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:

Letter A B C D E F G H I K L M N

Latin name • b• c• d• • ef g• h• • k• el em en

Latin pronunciation (IPA) /a•/ /be•/ /ke•/ /de•/ /e•/ /ef/ /ge•/ /ha•/ /i•/ /ka•/ /el/ /em/ /en/

Letter O P Q R S T V X Y Z

Latin name • p• q• er es t• • ex • Graeca z•ta

Latin pronunciation (IPA) /o•/ /pe•/ /k•u•/ /er/ /es/ /te•/ /u•/ /eks/ /i• 'graika/ /'ze•ta/

The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet.

The Latin names of some of the letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek: the names of the stop consonant letters were formed by adding /e•/ to the sound (except for C, K, and Q which needed different vowels to distinguish them) and the names of the continuants consisted either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/. The letter Y when introduced was probably called hy /hy•/ as in Greek (the name upsilon being not yet in use) but was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing /i/ and /y/ . Z was

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given its Greek name, zeta. For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet.

Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Roman alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that.

[edit] Medieval and later developments

It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter J (representing non-syllabic I) and the letters U and W (to distinguish them from V) were added.

The lower case (minuscule) letters developed in the Middle Ages from New Roman Cursive, first as the uncial script, and later as minuscule script. The old capital Roman letters were retained for formal inscriptions and for emphasis in written documents. The languages that use the Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and for proper nouns and proper adjectives. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalised; whereas Modern English of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalised, in the same way that Modern German is today, e.g. "All the Sisters of the old Town had seen the Birds".

[edit] Spread of the Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet spread from the Italian Peninsula, along with the Latin language, to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Roman Empire, including Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half of the Empire, and as the western Romance languages, including Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese and Italian, evolved out of Latin they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. With the spread of Western Christianity the Latin alphabet gradually spread to the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing their earlier Runic alphabets), as well as to the speakers of Baltic languages, such as Lithuanian and Latvian, and several (non-Indo-European) Finno-Ugric languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. During the Middle Ages the Latin alphabet also came into use among the peoples speaking West Slavic languages, including the ancestors of modern Poles, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes, and Slovaks, as these peoples adopted Roman Catholicism; the speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted both Orthodox Christianity and the Cyrillic alphabet.

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As late as 1492, the Latin alphabet was limited primarily to the languages spoken in western, northern and central Europe. The Orthodox Christian Slavs of eastern and southern Europe mostly used the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Greek alphabet was still in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic alphabet was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples. Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script.

Latin alphabet world distribution. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.

Over the past 500 years, the Latin alphabet has spread around the world. It spread to the Americas, Australia, and parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific with European colonization, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch languages. In the late eighteenth century, the Romanians adopted the Latin alphabet; although Romanian is a Romance language, the Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and until the nineteenth century the Church used the Cyrillic alphabet. Vietnam, under French rule, adapted the Latin alphabet for use with the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. The Latin alphabet is also used for many Austronesian languages, including Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines, and the official Malaysian and Indonesian languages, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Sequoyah used the Latin alphabet as the basis for his syllabary for the Cherokee language, and L. L. Zamenhof as the basis for the alphabet of Esperanto.

In 1928, as part of Kemal Atatürk's reforms, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing the Arabic alphabet. Most of Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s, but in the 1940s all those alphabets were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly-independent Turkic-speaking republics, namely

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Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Moldovan Romanian, respectively. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1970s, the People's Republic of China developed an official transliteration of Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet, called Pinyin, although use of the Pinyin has been very rare outside educational and tourism purposes.

West Slavic and most South Slavic languages use the Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic, a reflection of the dominant religion practiced among those peoples. Among these, Polish uses a variety of diacritics and digraphs to represent special phonetic values, as well as the letter •, for a sound which was originally the so-called dark L, but has become similar to an English w in modern varieties of the language. Czech uses diacritics as in Dvo•ák — the term há•ek (caron) originates from Czech. Croatian and the Latin version of Serbian use carons in •, š, ž, an acute in • and a bar in •. The languages of Eastern Orthodox Slavs generally use the Cyrillic alphabet instead, which is more closely based on the Greek alphabet. The Serbian language uses the two alphabets.

[edit] Extensions

Main articles: List of Latin letters and Alphabets derived from the Latin

In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore sometimes created. They were made by adding diacritics to existing letters, by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, by creating completely new forms, or by assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining a collating sequence, which is often language-dependent.

[edit] New forms

Eth Ð ð and the Runic letters thorn Þ þ, and wynn • • were added to the Old English alphabet. Eth and thorn were later replaced with th, and wynn with the new letter w. Although these three letters are no longer part of the English alphabet, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet.

Some West, Central and Southern African languages use a few additional letters which have a similar sound value to their equivalents in the IPA. For example, Ga uses the letters • •, • • and • • and Adangme uses • • and • •. Hausa uses • • and • • for implosives and • • for an ejective. Africanists have standardized these into the African reference alphabet.

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[edit] Ligatures

Main article: Ligature

A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are Æ from AE, Œ from OE, ß (the German eszett) from •s, the Dutch IJ from I and J (Note that • is capitalised as •, never Ij), and the abbreviation & from Latin et "and". The •s pair is simply an archaic double s. The first glyph is the archaic medial form, and the second the final form.

[edit] Diacritics

Main article: Diacritic

A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent mark, is a small symbol which can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut mark used in the German symbols Ä, Ö, Ü. Its main usage is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also be used to modify the pronunciation of a whole word or syllable, or to distinguish between homographs. The value of diacritics is language-dependent.

[edit] Digraphs and trigraphs

Main articles: Digraph and Trigraph

A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined. Examples in English are CH, SH, TH. A trigraph is made up of three letters, like SCH in German. In some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right.

[edit] Collation

Main article: Collation

In some cases, such as with the Swedish symbols Å, Ä and Ö, modified letters are regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and often assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based. In other cases, such as with Ä, Ö, Ü in German, this is not done, letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different modified letters may be treated differently within a single language. For example, in Spanish the character Ñ is considered a letter in its own, and is sorted between N and O in dictionaries, but the accented vowels Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú are not separated from the unaccented

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vowels A, E, I, O, U.

[edit] Letters of the English alphabet

Main articles: English alphabet and English language: written accents

As used in modern English, the Latin alphabet consists of the following characters

Majuscule Forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Minuscule Forms (also called lowercase or small letters)

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

In addition the ligatures, Æ (ash) from AE (e.g. "encyclopædia"), Œ (oethel) from OE (e.g. cœlom) can be used for some words derived from Latin and Greek, and the diaeresis, is sometimes used for example on the letter ö (e.g. "coöperate") to indicate the pronunciation of "oo" as two separate vowels, rather than a single one. Outside professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures, ligatures and diaereses are little used in modern English apart from on loan words.

[edit] Latin alphabet and international standards

By the 1960s it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 x 2 letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode Latin), have continued to define the 26 x 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

The ISO basic Latin alphabet

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters

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Typographical ligature

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•-i ligature type, size 12pt Garamond.

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

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Contents

[hide]

● 1 History ● 2 Latin alphabet

❍ 2.1 Stylistic ligatures ❍ 2.2 German ß ❍ 2.3 Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures ❍ 2.4 Symbols originating as ligatures ❍ 2.5 Digraphs ❍ 2.6 Languages that use special ligatures

● 3 Non-Latin alphabets ● 4 Computer typesetting ● 5 Notes and references ● 6 See also ● 7 External links

[edit] 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 desktop publishing revolution around 1985. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of

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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.

With the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, and the resulting improved digital typesetting techniques such as OpenType, ligatures are slowly coming back in use.

[edit] Latin alphabet

[edit] Stylistic ligatures

Many ligatures combine • or a long s, with an adjacent letter. The most prominent example is • (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 ligature that use the long s includes fi, fj,[1] fl, ff, ffi, and ffl. Ligatures for fa, fe, fo, fr, fs, ft, fu, fy, and for f followed by a period, comma, or hyphen, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled ff and fft are also 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 Schifffahrt "boat trip", Sauerstoffflasche "oxygen tank". 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]

[edit] German ß

Main article: 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" • has otherwise disappeared from German orthograpy, ß is still considered a ligature, and is replaced by SS in capitalized spelling and in alphabetic ordering.

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[edit] 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 Vs or Us joined together, developed into a legitimate letter with its own position in the alphabet. Because of its relative youth compared to other letters of the alphabet, only 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, 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.[citation needed]

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 fu•ß, 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.[citation needed]

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).

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A ligature of t and z was a single letter in the Colonial orthography of the Yucatec Maya language.[4]

[edit] Symbols originating as ligatures

Et ligature in Insular Minuscule script.

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]

[edit] Digraphs

Digraphs, such as • 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.

[edit] Languages that use special ligatures

● Danish and Norwegian ● French ● German ● Icelandic

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[edit] Non-Latin alphabets

See also Complex Text Layout.

The Devanagari ddhrya-ligature (•• + •• + •• + • = •••••••) of JanaSanskritSans.

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: •, •, •, •. Iotified Cyrillic letters are ligatures of the early Cyrillic decimal I and another vowel: •• (not in Unicode, ancestor of •), •, •, •, • (descended from another ligature, •• or •, an early version of •). Two letters of the Macedonian and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets, lje and nje (•, •), were developed in the nineteenth century as ligatures of Cyrillic El and En (•, •) with the soft sign (•).

● 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 m•m, isolated •, tripled (mmm, rendering as initial, medial and final): ••• . Notable are the shapes taken by l•m + •alif •, and •alif + l•m •. Unicode has a special Allah ligature at U+FDF2: •.

● 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.

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[edit] Computer typesetting

TeX is an example of a computer typesetting system that makes use of ligatures automatically. The Computer Modern Roman typeface provided with TeX includes the five common ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. When TeX finds these combinations in a text it substitutes the appropriate ligature, unless overridden by the typesetter. Opinion is divided over whether 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.[citation needed]

Typical ligatures in Latin script

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

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ss ß U+00DF

AE, ae Æ, æ U+00E6, U+00C6

OE, oe Œ, œ U+0152, U+0153

Ng, ng •, • U+014A, U+14B

f• • U+02A9

ue • U+1D6B

ff • U+FB00

fi • U+FB01

fl • U+FB02

ffi • U+FB03

ffl • U+FB04

•t • U+FB05

st • U+FB06

[edit] Notes and references

1. ^ The combination fj is represented in English only in "fjord", 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. ^ (1993) The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Ed.. The University of Chicago Press, 6.61. 4. ^ Arte de el idioma maya reducido a succintas reglas, y semilexicon yucateco, Father Pedro

Beltrán, Mexico City, 1746 5. ^ Cajori, Florian (1993). A History of Mathematical Notations. New York: Dover (reprint). ISBN

0-486-67766-4. - contains section on the history of the dollar sign, with much documentary evidence supporting the theory $ began as a ligature for "pesos".

[edit] See also

● Category:Latin alphabet ligatures ● Sigla ● Complex Text Layout ● List of words that may be spelled with a ligature

[edit] External links

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List of words that may be spelled with a ligature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

List of words that may be spelled with a ligature

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This list of words that may be spelled with a ligature in English encompasses words which have letters that may, in modern usage, either be rendered as two distinct letters or as a single, combined letter. This includes Ae (ae) being rendered as an ash, Æ (æ), and Oe (oe) being rendered as an œthel, Œ (œ). Note that when a c is before a ligature, it makes the sound /s/ rather than /k/ like it may seem (because c makes the sound /k/ before an a or o in English).

The use of the œ and æ is obsolescent in modern English, and has been used predominantly in British English. It is usually used to evoke archaism, or in literal quotations of historic sources.

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Contents

[hide]

● 1 Æ ● 2 Œ ● 3 Notes ● 4 See also

[edit] Æ

Note that some words contain an ae which may not be written æ because the etymology is not from the

Greek -αι- or Latin -ae- diphthongs. These include:

● In instances of aer (starting or within a word) when it makes the sound IPA [••]/[e•] (air). Comes from the Latin •ër, Greek αηρ.

● When ae makes the diphthong sound IPA [e•](lay), or [α•](eye). ● When ae is found in a foreign phrase or loan word and it is unacceptable to use the ligature in

that language. For example, when in a German loan word or phrase, if the a with a diaerasis (ä) is written as ae, it is incorrect to write it with the ligature.

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List of words that may be spelled with a ligature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Common form Ligature form Other forms Etymology

aeciospore æciospore —

combination of New Latin aecium and New Latin

spora→spore (acium+spore)

aecidium æcidium (aecium)New Latin aecidium, from Greek αικια (aikia)

aecium æcium (aecidium)New Latin aecidium, from Greek αικια (aikia)

aedicule ædicule edicule (AmE) Latin aediculum

Aegis Ægis Egis (AmE)Latin from Greek

Αιγ•ς (Aigis)

Aeolian Æolian Eolian (AmE)Latin Aeolis from Greek mythology

Αιολ•ς (Aiolis)

Aeolis Æolis —Latin Aeolis, from

Greek Αιολ•ς (Aiolis)

aeon æon eon (AmE)Late Latin aeon,

from Greek αιον (aion).

aerose Ærose —Latin aerosus, from

Greek αης (aes)

aerugite ærugite (aerugo)Latin aerugo, from

Greek αης (aes)

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aerugo ærugo (aerugite)Latin aerugo, from

Greek αης (aes)

aeschynite æschynite eschynite (AmE) Greek α•σχ•νω (aischuno)

aesculin æsculin esculin (AmE)

aesculetin æsculetin esculetin (AmE)

Aether Æther ether (Ame)Latin aether, from

Greek αιθ•ρ (aither)

Aethrioscope Æthrioscpoe Ethrioscope

aestival æstival estival (AmE)

aestivation æstivation estivation (AmE)Latin aestivare, from aestivus, from aestas

aesthetic æsthetic esthetic (AmE)

aetiology ætiology etiology (AmE)

algae algæ algas[1] (very rare)

anaemia anæmia anemia (AmE)

anaesthesia anæsthesia anesthesia (BrE)

archaeology archæology archeology (AmE)

Athenaeum Athenæum Atheneum (AmE)

azotaemia azotæmia azotemia (AmE)

bacteraemia bacteræmia bacteremia (AmE)

Caesar Cæsar Cesar (AmE – rare)

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caesium cæsium cesium (AmE)

chaetophorous chætophorous chetophorous

curriculum vitae curriculum vitæ —Latin meaning ‘course of life’, vitæ

daedal dædal dedal

demon dæmon daemon (BrE)

encyclopedia encyclopædia encyclopaedia (BrE)

Ethiopia Æthiopia Aethiopia

Eudaemonic eudæmonic eudemonic

faeces fæces feces (AmE)

faerie færie fairy

formulae formulæ formulas[2]

fraenum frænumA ligament restraining the motion of a part of the body.

Gaea Gæa Gaia

haemoglobin hæmoglobin hemoglobin (AmE)

haemolysis hæmolysis hemolysis (AmE)

haemophilia hæmophilia hemophilia (AmE)

haemorrhage hæmorrhage hemorrhage (AmE)

haemorrhoid hæmorrhoid hemorrhoid (AmE)

hyena hyæna hyaena

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hypaethral hypæthral hypethral

ischaemia ischæmia ischemia (AmE)

judaeo judæo judeo

judaeophobe judæophobe judeophobe (AmE)

leukaemia leukæmia leukemia (AmE)

medieval mediæval mediaeval (BrE – rare)

nebulae nebulæ nebulas[3]

plural – New Latin

→ Latin ("mist"); akin to Old High German nebul

("fog") → Greek nephel•, nephos ("cloud")

nymphae nymphæ nymphs[4]

nymphaea nymphæa —

orthopedic orthopædic orthopaedic

paean pæan pean (AmE)

paeon pæon —

pedagogue pædagogue or pædagog

pedagog (AmE), (paedagogue and paedagog exist but are both somewhat archaic)

paediatrics pædiatrics pediatrics (AmE)

paediatrician pædiatrician pediatrician (AmE)

paediatrist pædiatrist pediatrist (AmE)

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paedophile pædophile pedophile (AmE)

palaeobotany palæobotany paleobotany (AmE)

palaeocene palæocene paleocene (AmE)

palaeoclimatology palæoclimatology paleoclimatology (AmE)

palaeography palæography palaeography (AmE)

palaeolithic palæolithic paleolithic (AmE)

palaeography palæography paleography (AmE)

palaeontology palæontology paleontology (AmE)

palaeozoic palæozoic paleozoic (AmE)

Panacaea Panacæa Panacea (AmE)

Pangaea Pangæa Pangea (AmE)

personae personæ personas[5]

praemium præmium premium

primeval primæval primaeval (BrE)

Quaestor Quæstor —

Rhaetia Rhætia —

septicaemia septicæmia septicemia (AmE)

scarabaeid scarabæid —

scarabaeoid scarabæoid —

synaesthesia synæsthesia synesthesia (AmE)

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toxaemia toxæmia toxemia (AmE)

uraemia uræmia uremia (AmE)

viraemia viræmia viremia (AmE)

[edit] Œ

Common form Ligature form Other forms Etymology

amenorrhoea amenorrhœa amenorrhea (AmE)From Greek α (a) +

••ν•ρροια (m•norroia)

amoeba amœba ameba (AmE—rare)New Latin amoeba,

from Greek ••οιβ• (amoib•)

apnea apnœa apnoea (BrE)New Latin apnoea,

from Greek απνοια (apnoia)

coeliac cœliac celiac (AmE)Latin coeliacus, from

Greek κοιλιακος (koiliakos)

diarrhea diarrhœa diarrhoea (BrE)

Middle English diaria, from Late Latin diarrhoea, from Greek

δι•ρροια (diarroia)

ecology œcology oecology

economy œconomy oeconomy

ecumenism œcumenism oecumenism

edema œdema oedema

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esophagus œsophagus oesophagus (BrE)

estrogen œstrogen oestrogen (BrE)

estrus œstrus oestrus

federal fœderalfoederal – archaic; thus virtually never found

Latin foedus

fetid fœtid foetid (BrE) Latin f•tidus

fetor fœtor foetor (BrE)Middle English fetoure, from Latin f•tor

fetus fœtus foetus (BrE)Middle English fetus, from Latin f•tus

gonorrhoea gonorrhœa gonorrhea (AmE)Greek γον•ρροια (gonorrhoia)

homeomorphism homœomorphism homoeomorphism (BrE)From Greek ••οιος

(homoios) + •ορφος (morphos)

homeopath homœopath homoeopath (BrE)From Greek ••οιος

(homoios) + π•θος (pathos)

homeostasis homœostasis homoeostasis (BrE)From Greek ••οιος

(homoios) + στ•σις (stasis)

homoeozoic homœozoic homeozoic (AmE—rare)From Greek ••οιος

(homoios) + ζωικ•ς (z•ikos)

hors d'oeuvre hors d'œuvre — French hors d'œuvre

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maneuver manœuvre manoeuvre (BrE)

French manœuvre, from Old French maneuvre, from Medieval Latin manuopera, from Latin man• oper•r•

Economics œconomics oeconomics

Oedipus Œdipus Oidipus (rare), ØdipusGreek Ο•δ•πους (Oidipous)

oeillade œillade

oenology œnology enology (AmE)From Greek ο•νος

(oinos) + λ•γος (logos)

oenomel œnomel

oenothera œnothera

oeuvre œuvre —

French œuvre, from Old French uevre, from Latin opera

onomatopoeia onomatopœia

penology pœnology

phoenix phœnix phenix (rare)

subpoena subpœna subpena (rare)

tragedy tragœdy tragoedy

[edit] Notes

1. ^ ^ ^ The variants that change '-æ' or '-œ' to '-s' are not variants in spelling, but the same meaning of the word with a different way of forming plurals.

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Also, ligatures may be used in personal names as well, ie. Maecenus as Mæcenus, or Timothy as Timothæ, etc.

[edit] See also

● Ligature (typography) ● Æ ● Œ

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• - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Long s

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The correct title of this article is •. It is listed under Long s due to technical restrictions.

An italicized long s used in the word Congress in the United States Bill of Rights.

The 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 •infulne•s ("sinfulness"). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s.

Contents

[hide]

● 1 History ● 2 Modern usage ● 3 See also ● 4 Notes ● 5 External links

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[edit] History

Title page of John Milton's Paradise Lost

The long 's' is derived from the old Roman cursive medial s, which was very similar to an elongated

check mark. Eventually it got a more vertical form.[1]

The long 's' is subject to confusion with the minuscule 'f', sometimes even having an 'f'-like nub at its middle, but on the left side only, in various kinds of Roman typeface and in blackletter. There was no nub in its italic typeform, which gave the stroke a descender curling to the left—not possible with the other typeforms mentioned without kerning.

The nub acquired its form in the blackletter style of writing. What looks like one stroke was actually a wedge pointing downward, whose widest part was at that height (x-height), and capped by a second stroke forming an ascender curling to the right. Those styles of writing and their derivatives in type design had a cross-bar at height of the nub for letters 'f' and 't', as well as 'k'. In Roman type, these disappeared except for the one on the medial 's'.

The long 's' was used in ligatures in various languages. Three examples were for 'si', 'ss', and 'st', besides the German 'double s' 'ß'.

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Long 's' fell out of use in Roman and italic typography well before the end of the 19th century; in English the change occurred in the decades before and after 1800. In most countries ligatures vanished as well. Typographers have presently revived ligatures in seriffed and sans-serif text fonts, as well as many kinds of display types. For example, some text fonts have an 'st' ligature made up of a terminal 's' with a small bulbous curl connecting the two letters at the top, unlike ligatures using a long 's', which joins directly to the 't' by an extension of the long s ascender.

Long 's' survives in German blackletter typefaces. The present-day German 'double s' 'ß' (ess-zett) is an atrophied ligature form representing either '•z' or '•s' (see ß for more). Greek also features a normal

sigma 'σ' and a special terminal form 'ς', which may have supported the idea of specialized 's' forms. In Renaissance Europe a significant fraction of the literate class were familiar with Greek.

[edit] Modern usage

Long s in Berlin 2002

The long 's' survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral

symbol ∫ used in calculus; Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz based the character on the Latin word summa (sum), which he wrote •umma. This use first appeared publicly in his paper De Geometria,

published in Acta Eruditorum of June, 1686,[2] but he had been using it in private manuscripts since at

least 1675.[3]

In linguistics a similar glyph (•) (called "esh") is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which it represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, the first sound in the English word shun.

The long 's' is represented in Unicode by the sign U+017F, and may be represented in HTML as

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ſ or ſ.

Confusion between the long '•' and 'f' has been the subject of much intentional humour, much of it involving phrases like "sucking pig", but Greenfleaves made an appearance in a Flanders and Swan

monologue about coming up with a Shakespearean hit[4] and the same joke forms the basis of Benny Hill's song "Fad-Eyed Fal" (i.e., Sad-Eyed Sal), as well as some dialogue in a scene from Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Vol.1 about the Declaration of Independence: Upon perusing Jefferson's new document Franklin reads "life, liberty and the 'purfoot of happinefs'" and tells Jefferson his s's look like f's.

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten ("The evening mail"), the logo of which is written using the

long '•' ( ), is often humorously referred to as "Aftenpoften". Similarly for the

Adresseavisen ( ), mocked as "Udresfeabifen".

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Langes s

● ß (Eszett) ● Esh (letter)

[edit] Notes

1. ^ DAVIES, Lyn. A Is for Ox, London: 2006. Folio Society. 2. ^ Mathematics and its History, John Stillwell, Springer 1989, p. 110 3. ^ Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz, J. M. Child, Open Court Publishing Co., 1920, pp.

73–74, 80. 4. ^ http://www.beachmedia.com/gorbuduc.html

[edit] External links

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