Re: Digraphic letters (was: Dutch "ij")

Ray Brown scripsit:

>  And some letters with variant lower case forms. e.g. {a} and
> {g}, have at least three different characters.
Might as well inject a little standard terminology here.   The difference
between the two lower-case "a"s or "g"s is a distinction in *glyph*,
which means something like "abstract form", abstract because it is
independent of font.  Thus Latin "A", Greek "Alpha", and Cyrillic "A"
share the same glyph; Latin "a" has two glyphs.  Exceptionally, in the
IPA context, the two "a" glyphs are treated as different characters.
A font is a collection of glyphs with the actual images associated
with them; modern fonts also contain a variety of devices to map
characters to glyphs.

> In Turkish I guess it must, since undotted-i occurs as a separate
> letter -
I think that Turkish views undotted-i and dotted-i as basically unrelated.
I know this is true of Swedish a-umlaut and a (but not so in German,
still less in French).

> The letters of our the English version of the Roman alphabet are indeed
> all monographs.   But what are we to make of, say,  (a-e ligature)?
It is a single letter in Danish and a ligature in English and Latin.
A ligature is a glyph which represents two or more consecutive characters.
The basic Latin ligatures are fi, fl, ff, ffi, ffl, but many more exist
in archaic fonts.  Not all languages allow them: thus German must not
ligature across a morpheme boundary, and in Turkish the fi and ffi
ligatures are forbidden altogether (it wouldn't be clear if the i
was dotted or not).  Portuguese also doesn't use them by tradition.

--
John Cowan                                jcowan@reutershealth.com
At times of peril or dubitation,          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Perform swift circular ambulation,        http://www.reutershealth.com
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