Re: logos, symbols, and ligatures

Michael Everson wrote:

> Actually those rules work really well and reliably in Fraktur.

But ligatures in fraktur writing perform a different function from ligatures in the 
Italian humanist bookhand that is the basis of roman/antiqua type. The forms of ligatures 
in fraktur are also different -- unsurprisingly, since differently created strokes can be 
expected to interact and connect in different ways -- and notably the form of the fraktur 
f does not have the same collision potential as the roman f.

This is all fine, and I don't see any problem at all with different forms of scripts 
having different rules for ligation. Indeed, that makes eminent sense to me because it 
recognises that ligation is an aspect of writing style *not of grammar*. What seems silly 
to me is devising rules for ligation based on a particular style of writing and then 
insisting that those rules also apply for all other styles of writing of a given language. 
I don't think it makes any sense to say that there is or should be a single set of rules 
for ligation in German that is independent of script style. This is not to say that 
individual languages do not give rise to particular orthographic phenomena that require 
specific rules *within writing styles*. The presence of triple-f sequences in some German 
compound words is an example, as is the presence of semantically differentiated dotted and 
undotted i in Turkish. The latter has prompted some people to formulate the rule that fi 
ligatures should not be used in Turkish, because it is common in most types for the top of 
the f to swallow the dot of the i in this ligature. But the rule is mis-formulated, 
because if the form of a ligature in a particular style of writing or typeface design does 
not swallow the dot then there is no reason why one should not have an fi ligature in 
Turkish. Similarly, I don't think it makes sense to insist on general rules for German 
ligation independent of writing style or typeface.

Of course, what this all implies is that handling of rules for German ligation should 
happen at a level somewhere well above text encoding -- just as Turkish ligation is --. 
where it can take into account the particular embodiment of the text, i.e. a font.

John Hudson

-- 

Tiro Typeworks        www.tiro.com
Gulf Islands, BC      [email protected]

A bilabial velaric ingressive stop is essentially a kiss.
-- Pullum & Ladusaw, _Phonetic symbol guide_