: On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 04:21:49AM +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Fri, 29 Nov 2013 21:08:49 -0500, Roy Smith wrote: > > The whole idea of ligatures like fi is purely typographic. > > In English, that's correct. I'm not sure if we can generalise that to > all languages that have ligatures. It also partly depends on how you > define ligatures. For example, would you consider that ampersand & to > be a ligature? These days, I would consider & to be a distinct > character, but originally it began as a ligature for "et" (Latin for > "and"). > > But let's skip such corner cases, as they provide much heat but no > illumination, [...]
In the interest of warmth (I know it's winter in some parts of the world) ... As I understand it, "&" has always been used to replace the word "et" specifically, rather than the letter-pair e,t (no-one has ever written "k&tle" other than ironically), which makes it a logogram rather than a ligature (like "@"). (I happen to think the presence of ligatures in Unicode is insane, but my dictator-of-the-world certificate appears to have gotten lost in the post, so fixing that will have to wait). -[]z. -- Zero Piraeus: inter caetera http://etiol.net/pubkey.asc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list