Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 11:30:22 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>, James Howard <howardjp@well.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: banner(6) Message-ID: <20010419113022.B84305@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <200104182132.OAA11121@usr08.primenet.com>; from tlambert@primenet.com on Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 09:32:58PM %2B0000 References: <20010418213206.A58588@lpt.ens.fr> <200104182132.OAA11121@usr08.primenet.com>
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Terry Lambert said on Apr 18, 2001 at 21:32:58: > > > > > What other character pairs are there? I flipped through a couple books > > > > > and only found "fi". > > > > > > > > Out of my head: fi ffi fl ffl fj > > > > > > gg gk gx gc ae oe oa ai ei oi ui yi hu a:i o: au eu iu ou ey iy > > > a:y o:y ie uo yo: > > > > Er, we were talking about ligatures (joining certain letter > > combinations together in print). Not diphthongs... > > Those are not ligatures; neither is the "Florin" dipthong that > you guys keep using as an example of a "ligatured character" > (there is no such thing as a ligatured cahracter, only a > ligatured rendering of two or more characters). We were talking of ligatured renderings of two or more characters, if you prefer to put it that way. In print, the only examples I've seen in English are fi, ffi, fl, ffl, ff and occasionally some rarer ones. These are what everyone calls ligatures. Certainly not au, eu, yi, etc. > Ligatures are what you see in non-block Hebrew, Arabic, Tamil, > Devengari, cursive English, and so on. Well, let's see what I can see in the examples I'm familiar with... In properly cursive English, entire words are written with all letters joined together. That's the way I was taught to write, and that's how old hand-written documents appear in the west, but these days in the west it seems kids aren't taught to join up their letters any more. Note that the printed "fi" ligature isn't part of cursive writing: you don't swallow the dot of the "i" into the curved part of the "f". In handwritten Devanagari (eg, Sanskrit/Hindi) one draws a line along the top of each word, continuously. In printed Devanagari, this line is normally broken (one segment coming from each printed letter) but some joined/compound characters still appear, arising from vowel symbols, certain special letter combinations, etc. Some are optional: for instance, the "d" and "dh" in my last name are separate letters in Devanagari, but one can write them either as one unit (with one below the other) or separately. Printed Tamil has very few combined letters, mainly certain vowels in combination with certain letters. Many of these conventional combinations which existed earlier have been abandoned in recent years, as being impractical for typewriters/computers. I'd put the "fi" in typesetting in English in the same category as the combined letters above, so I suppose that's what you do mean by "ligature". But none of the examples you give above fit, at least in any printed matter I've ever seen. Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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