Conference thebay::joyoflex

    I've seen "ct" in an early edition of Gibbon's _Decline_and_Fall_
    of_the_Roman_Empire (twelve volumes from the 1800's).  This may
    not qualify, as it seems to be a printing ligature, along the lines
    of "fi" and "ffi".
    
    German "�" as in "da�" is actually "S+Z" historically, even if it's
    treated as "S+S" now, and might have been pronounced as the digraph
    "th" in "either" (edh).
    
    		-John Bishop

    	I am not sure if it qualifies exactly for what you want, but "th"
    was written in old English as a single letter, closely resembling a
    "Y". You may have seen this in "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" signs. I believe it
    is still in regular use in Icelandic. "@" possibly qualifies too.
    
    	Bother! I can't do that German B on my keyboard. I have tried
    several of the more obvious "compose" combinations. You see it quite
    often in a variant of "strasse" in Bavarian street names.

    .2
    
    There were two forms of "th."  The one that is in words like "with" or
    "forth" is a hard fricative; the other, in words such as "other" and
    "the," is a voiced sound.  Thse two sounds were represented in Old and
    Middle English by a single character, not a ligature, that was derived
    from the runic alphabet and is known as "thorn."  It closely resembles
    an overstriking of the letters b and p.  As movable type became common,
    the thorn was gradually substituted for, and eventually replaced, by
    Y and y.
    
    The German double S is made by Compose-s-s.  Do not use the shift key!
    
    Ae, Oe, ae, oe, ss, ct, fi, ffi, fl, and ffl are the ones I know.  The
    vowel pairs are linguistic, the others are merely typographical, I'd
    say.
    
    -dick

    You see fonts with ct and st ligatures.
    

    Ahem.  The ampersand is "et":  &
    
    							Ann B.

>    Ahem.  The ampersand is "et":  &
    
    That's not a ligature, that's a logogram. 
    It was a ligature back when Y was th, but that was before movable type.
    (And why isn't your personal name "Don't panic -- y&."?)
    
    There's also the fj ligature but I only know of a couple words that use it.
    
      John

    .6
    
    Wrong, I think.  The ampersand is indeed a ligature, albeit a much-
    distorted one.  It ligates the letters E and t ("et," the word for
    "and" in Latin), thus:
    
    	****		****		 ***		  **
    	*      *	*      *	*      *	 *  *
    	**** *****	**********	 *********	  **
    	*      *	*      *	*      *	 *  * *
    	*      *	*      *	*      *	*    *
    	****   *	********	 ******		 **** **
    
    Some typefaces use an ampersand more closely resembling the third of
    these characters than the fourth.  The word "ampersand" is a Latinate
    contraction of "and per se and," meaning "& by itself [equals] and."
    
    -dick

                                *
                                *
    ** *    ***   * ***  * **   * **
    * * *  *   *  **     **  *  **  *
    * * *  *   *  *      *   *  *   *
    * * *  *   *  *      **  *  *   *
    * * *   ***   *      * **   *   *
                         *
    ---------------------------------
    
    *
    *      *     *  ***  * *    *   *
    * *   *    * *       *    *   ** *
    * *   *    * *       *    *   *  *
    * *    **  * *       *    *   *
    * *     *    *       * *      *  *
            *
    ----------------------------------
    *
    *  *             *
    *      *    **  ***  * *  * *   *
    *  *  * *  * *   *   * *  *    * *
    *  *  * *  * *   *   * *  *    ***
    *  *   **  * *   *   * *  *    *
    *  *    *   **   **   **  *     **
          **

    Huh?  Are you suggesting that it's possible to morph any character
    string into any other by sufficient distortion?  Nicely done, and
    probably true, given sufficient imagination, but I think it's not
    apposite.  Typography is part of my business, Latin is part of my
    pleasure, and I did not invent the content of .7 ex vacuo.
    
    -dick

    I wasn't complaining about .7.  In fact, your work in .7 provided an
    excellent reminder that morphing is just a new name for an ancient
    practice, in addition to suggesting just how ancient.  I merely
    picked up on it, that's all.
    
    -- Norman Diamond

    Oh.  Okay, then, I'll tell my friend not to bother calling on your
    friend.  :-)

    I have a ligature that really bugs me. I can't create it on my keyboard
    so you'll have to use our imagination(s). It's PX . Used by pharmacies
    I believe it's used as an abbreviation for prescription. What bugs me
    about this ligature is that people see it and say or read it as RX.
    I can understand why people would say RX by *looking* at it because of
    the way the two letters are ligaturated (ligatured?), but I wonder why
    these folks can't make the connection that prescription doesn't begin
    with "R". 
    
    Any thoughts?
    
    
    Steve
    
     

    	Maybe you mix with the wrong sort of company. In ham radio RX and
    TX are common abbreviations for receiver and transmitter.
    A radio ham's first reaction on seeing something that looked a little
    like a combined RX would be "hey, that's a neat way of writing RX".

    Re .12
    
    The symbol used by quacks for "prescription" is not PX, it is actually
    RX.  Somewhere, probably in this file, I explained that prescriptions
    are written in Latin, with plenty of abbreviations - it's part of the
    way the medical profession communicates despite differences in language
    among practitioners in different localities.  (The word "Stat" that you
    hear in all those medical dramas is short for "statim," meaning
    immediately, for example.)
    
    Rx is an abbreviation for "Recipe" which is the second-person singular
    present imperative of the Latin verb recipio/recipere, meaning to
    receive or take.

>    I wonder why
>    these folks can't make the connection that prescription doesn't begin
>    with "R". 
    
    ... or end with "X".
    
    Ray

    FWIW, the same exact Rx symbol is used in Roman Catholic missals and
    missalettes, to indicate the portion of an antiphon that the
    congregation is supposed to say.  Rx == Responsio.

    Ok, Thanks for the feedback. So it looks like RX is in fact a
    ligature. 
    
    
    sb