Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
I would like it if that were the distinction but other references confirm that a ligature is any two characters combined into one without regard to the purpose. They are all graphemes as well as are all the letters and figures and other graphic entities like punctuation. Whether they are part of the alphabet depends on the language as are letters with accent marks. Some are and some are not. Try looking in a dictionary.
Dale
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Maybe I was being too subtle with the reference to OwenBlacker...
The ligatures that we're talking about in this thread (ff, fi, fj, etc) are glyph substitutions that are made purely for stylistic reasons. Bringhurst calls these 'typographic ligatures'.
OTOH, the ae in 'encyclopędia' [doh, now the character shows in ISO-8859-1 but not in utf-8] is completely different to the ae in 'metaethics' and Bringhurst terms this a 'lexical ligature'. In the first case you may choose to use the ligated form, you may choose to use separate characters, or you may simply drop the 'a' altogether, depending on the lexical style you wish to adopt. In the second case the only correct usage is to set the two characters separately.