February 27, 2015--Ligatures

One of my very favorite people loves ligatures.

When she first revealed this to me I was worried since I associate ligatures with violence, actually strangulation where a ligature is put around a victim's throat and by tightening it it slowing causes death by strangulation. I know, I watch too much TV.

But, of course, the ligatures she so loves are not of that type. Hers are typographic where two or more graphemes are fused together or joined into a single glyph. With a grapheme being the smallest unit in a writing system--alphabetic letters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and in graphemic written languages such as Chinese or ancient Egyptian characters or hieroglyphs. And a glyph is a symbol that conveys information nonverbally.

It would be good to give a few examples, including her favorite, the ampersand.

Here is an assortment of the ones I like--

I worked at the Ford Foundation for some years and thus the ff ligature stands out for me; and I studied Old English in graduate school so OE is another that I enjoy. And ae also is a good one. Typographically. And of course the ligature version of fs.

In spite of what one might intuitively think--that in the name of efficiency they are examples of modern streamlining or shorthand--ligatures are found in some of our earliest manuscripts and even quite often in the world's earliest known script--Sumerian cuneiform where there are many examples of character combinations. But, over time, most of these ligatures devolved into graphemes or independent characters in their own right. So those that remain have ancient, untransformed origins and deep echoes of the past from when written language was being invented. Which, I suspect, is why my imaginative friend likes them so much, again, especially the ampersand.

The ampersand's history is an interesting one. When reciting the Latin alphabet the last letter was the ampersand but it was preceded by per se (by itself), meaning that it was pronounceable as a full word, not unlike I which is both a letter and a word.

So, the alphabet, morphed over time into English, would conclude . . . X, Y, Z, per se et (et meaning and) which over time saw the e and the t fuse, becoming the modern day ampersand--

Also amusing is the etymology of the word ampersand itself--it is an English phonetic mashup of "and+per+se+and.

Voila--ampersand!