On Saturday, July 12, 2003 9:59 PM, Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 2003.07.10, 20:34, John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > IIRC, Portuguese traditional typography also avoids the fi-ligature, > > even though the language has no dotless-i. > > Just browsed some old book with that in mind and I cannot really > corroborate. I've even seen some other more exotic ligatures, such as > "st" and "ct". > > Maybe there was such a reccomendation in some portugguese type-setting > manual, but its result doesn't show... In French typography, we also find the special ligatures for the French (and Roman Latin) word "et" (means "and"), using old alternate forms for the lowercase letter "e", looking mostly like a Greek epsilon (or the Latin Small Open E, still used in Tamazigh as a letter distinct from the standard Latin Small E). The resulting ligature glyph is very near from the ASCII ampersand character, and I just wonder if the ampersand is not a variation of this French or Latin ligature, which belongs to the same typographic traditions as the <s, t>, <c, t> and <long-s, t> ligatures (and probably the <long-s, s> ligature too in German's <sharp-s>). In French text, using the "&" character to replace a "et" word would seem ugly (or lazy), even today where it looks like a technical symbol imported from English or used in trademarks (such as the new France Telecom Orange logo, where it clearly uses the common association of this character with Internet), and called "esperlu�te", "�perlu�te", or commonly "et commercial". On the opposite, the use of the "et" ligature (which is really representing the French word "et" with its two letters) is quite common even in recent books and publications, and it looks pretty good typographically, notably for its titlecase version at at the beginning of sentences. There are many examples in various languages, where what was a typographic ligature ot two letters, became used as a separate letter or character in another language... Now that computers can generate these ligatures more easily, I think there is a renewal of their use and creation, probably meaning in the future more ligatures converted to plain letters in written languages. -- Philippe. Spams non tol�r�s: tout message non sollicit� sera rapport� � vos fournisseurs de services Internet.
