From: Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai (asmodai@in-nomine.org)
Date: Thu Jan 19 2006 - 04:35:21 CST
-On [20060119 08:23], Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net) wrote:
>The word "ligature" (from the Latin ligatus, "bound together") literally
>means the glyphs are visually connected. Examples of this include the
>connected appearance of the combinations fi, fl, and ff in fine
>typography.
I know, I come from a DTP/prepress background.
Thanks for the clarification though.
>When you say IJ is a ligature, do you mean simply that the two
>characters I and J constitute a single letter in the Dutch alphabet, or
>do you really mean they are joined together with no visual space in
>between? That is what "ligature" means.
A few remarks are in place here:
1) ij used to be ii, but the second i got a longer swirl in order to not add
confusion with another character.
2) when starting reading and writing in the lowest classes Dutch children
are taught that lijn (line) is written as: l ij n - where ij occupies one
space and thus is one character. See
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/nl/2/27/Leesplank-gijs.jpg for an
example in use since the 20th century (older than 1950 at least).
3) the problem comes when Dutch is lenient enough to allow writing ij with a
spacing between the i and j as in
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xmlcharent/glyphs/100dpi/U0133.png whereas
it normally is written and printed as
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/nl/thumb/b/b1/Ligatuur_ij.jpg/50px-Ligatuur_ij.jpg
4) the sound is unique and isn't merely the logical conclusion of putting i
and j in sequence: http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/vowels.html -> ij has a
sound of the epsilon (front mid-open e) followed by front close i.
Does this help?
-- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai Free Tibet! http://www.savetibet.org/ | Je maintiendrai! http://www.in-nomine.org/ | catcher@in-nomine.org Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me...
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