From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Jan 26 2007 - 12:25:56 CST
On 1/26/2007 12:48 AM, Ruszlan Gaszanov wrote:
> John H. Jenkins wrote:
>
>> In any event, I reiterate: Ligature formation in Latin is a matter of stylistic preference.
subject to the orthographic restrictions in certain languages, and
requirements in certain styles (Blackletter).
>> Stylistic preferences do not belong in plain text.
>>
>
> The same ligatures (or glyph variations for that matter) could be considered
> stylistic variations in some texts, but may have distinct semantics in others. As a
> trivial example, Latin letters v, u and w can be given - in Classic Latin, u is a
> glyph variation of v and w is a vv ligature - thus vv = uu = w. In most modern
> languages using Latin script, however, those are three distinct letters.
>
> I'm not suggesting that we should use <v ZWJ v> for w or <v VS2> for u, but there
> are many cases where this approach could, in fact, be useful. When ligature is a
> purely stylistic feature, ZWJ shouldn't be used, but a font may or may not ligate
> characters. But if the author does use ZWJ or VS, it is probably because ligation or
> specific glyph variation is important for semantics, rather then a merely stylistic
> feature.
>
This kind of argument is rather pointless without a set reasonable
examples. (Classical Latin is not sufficient, for the reason you
yourself provide).
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jan 26 2007 - 12:28:53 CST