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Cece
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 12:03 am
Post subject: Old Letters |
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Thorn, edh, yogh, and ash I know. But:
What is the name of ligated o and e, the letter that the
Right-Pondians still use in oesophagus, foetus, and many others?
Please look up "dwarf" in the OED and look at the forms the word took
through the centuries. It has ended with f, yogh, and ? -- a teardrop
suspended from a tiny triangle. What is that? Note: The OED I have
is the microprint version; I am just not magnifying that letter
sufficiently?
Thanks.
Cece
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Ben Zimmer
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 12:04 am
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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Cece wrote:
| Quote: |
Thorn, edh, yogh, and ash I know. But:
What is the name of ligated o and e, the letter that the
Right-Pondians still use in oesophagus, foetus, and many others?
|
I've only ever seen that called the "o-e ligature".
| Quote: | Please look up "dwarf" in the OED and look at the forms the word took
through the centuries. It has ended with f, yogh, and ? -- a teardrop
suspended from a tiny triangle. What is that?
|
See this page for Old and Middle English characters:
http://dictionary.oed.com/help/advanced/oe.html
I believe you're referring to the "insular <g>", a precursor to the
yogh. There's some information on it here:
http://www.midrealm.org/heraldry/escutcheon/ILOAR/0402LOAR.html |
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Raymond S. Wise
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 6:01 am
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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"Ben Zimmer" <bgzimmer@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote in message
news:419E7914.6CC9B1@midway.uchicago.edu...
| Quote: | Cece wrote:
Thorn, edh, yogh, and ash I know. But:
What is the name of ligated o and e, the letter that the
Right-Pondians still use in oesophagus, foetus, and many others?
I've only ever seen that called the "o-e ligature".
|
Which could also be written "oe ligature." But I, like you, have heard no
other term used for it in English. In French, however, it's referred to as
"l'e dans l'o," that is, "the e in the o."
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com
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Mark Brader
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 6:05 am
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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Cece Armstrong:
| Quote: | Thorn, edh, yogh, and ash I know. But:
What is the name of ligated o and e, the letter that the
Right-Pondians still use in oesophagus, foetus, and many others?
|
Ben Zimmer:
| Quote: | I've only ever seen that called the "o-e ligature".
|
Raymond Wise:
| Quote: | Which could also be written "oe ligature." But I, like you, have heard no
other term used for it in English. ...
|
Me neither -- but the Unicode people have found another name. Unicode
character 0153 (hexadecimal) is identified in their code charts as
LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE
= LATIN SMALL LETTER O E
= ethel (from Old English ešel)
Here "SMALL" means lower case (0152 is the corresponding "CAPITAL" form)
and "LATIN" includes any letters or forms found in Latin-derived alphabets.
There is also 0276, LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL OE, which apparently is
needed for the IPA. In case you don't see it correctly, the "š" in the
last form of the OE-ligature's name is an eth.
For 00E6, by the way, the precedence of the alternative names is different:
LATIN SMALL LETTER AE
= LATIN SMALL LIGATURE AE
= ash (from Old English ęsc)
And the "ę" in the last one is itself that character. Here 00C6 is the
capital version, and there isn't a small capital.
--
Mark Brader "It is always dangerous to send authors to jail.
Toronto This removes their chief excuse for not writing."
msb@vex.net -- Arthur C. Clarke
My text in this article is in the public domain. |
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Carmen L. Abruzzi
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 6:06 am
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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Cece wrote:
| Quote: | Thorn, edh, yogh, and ash I know. But:
What is the name of ligated o and e, the letter that the
Right-Pondians still use in oesophagus, foetus, and many others?
|
It doesn't have a short, catchy name. The other names come
from Old English, but the oe ligature wasn't used in OE, so
it didn't get such a name. In fact "ash" is generally taken
to refer to the Old English letter, when used in Latin this
letter is referred to as the ae ligature. You could call
the oe ligature "oy" since that's the noise it made in
classical Latin.
| Quote: |
Please look up "dwarf" in the OED and look at the forms the word took
through the centuries. It has ended with f, yogh, and ? -- a teardrop
suspended from a tiny triangle. What is that?
|
A variant of yogh.
Note: The OED I have
| Quote: | is the microprint version; I am just not magnifying that letter
sufficiently?
Thanks.
Cece |
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Ben Zimmer
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:01 am
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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Mark Brader wrote:
| Quote: |
Cece Armstrong:
Thorn, edh, yogh, and ash I know. But:
What is the name of ligated o and e, the letter that the
Right-Pondians still use in oesophagus, foetus, and many others?
Ben Zimmer:
I've only ever seen that called the "o-e ligature".
Raymond Wise:
Which could also be written "oe ligature." But I, like you, have heard no
other term used for it in English. ...
Me neither -- but the Unicode people have found another name. Unicode
character 0153 (hexadecimal) is identified in their code charts as
LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE
= LATIN SMALL LETTER O E
= ethel (from Old English ešel)
Here "SMALL" means lower case (0152 is the corresponding "CAPITAL" form)
and "LATIN" includes any letters or forms found in Latin-derived alphabets.
There is also 0276, LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL OE, which apparently is
needed for the IPA. In case you don't see it correctly, the "š" in the
last form of the OE-ligature's name is an eth.
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ObNitpick: I think that should be "šel" ("oethel") rather than "ešel"
("ethel"), so that the word begins with an example of the ligature (like
"ęsc" for "ę"). There's some discussion of the ligature here:
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000584.php
http://www.druide.com/points_de_langue_15.html
The word "šel", by the way, meant "ancestral land" in Old English.
(Not to be confused with the etymologically related "ęšel", meaning
"noble", as in "Ęthelred", "Ęthelbert", etc.) |
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Mark Brader
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:02 am
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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Mark Brader:
| Quote: | Unicode character 0153 (hexadecimal) is identified in their code
charts as
LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE
= LATIN SMALL LETTER O E
= ethel (from Old English ešel)
In case you don't see it correctly, the "š" in the last form of the
OE-ligature's name is an eth.
|
Ben Zimmer:
| Quote: | ObNitpick: I think that should be "[oe]šel" ("oethel") rather than
"ešel" ("ethel"), so that the word begins with an example of the
ligature (like "ęsc" for "ę"). ...
|
Ben claimed to be posting in ISO 8859-1, which does not include the
OE-ligature, and that's what I read news in too, so I've replaced the
ligature by [oe] in the quoted text.
As to the spelling, I was just quoting the Unicode code charts.
| Quote: | The word "[oe]šel", by the way, meant "ancestral land" in Old English.
|
This word is in the OED1 (listed as obsolete except in historical usage)
under the spelling "ethel", and "also" with initial E-acute (é), AE-
ligature (ę), OE-ligature-acute, and what looks to me like a Greek lower
case epsilon, but not with plain OE-ligature. The first cite, dated
c.888 and from a work by K. Ęlfred, spells it "ežel", starting with
a plain e but using a thorn rather than an eth. Other cites use still
other spellings but none of them has a plain OE-ligature.
| Quote: | (Not to be confused with the etymologically related "ęšel", meaning
"noble", as in "Ęthelred", "Ęthelbert", etc.)
|
This is in the OED1 with primary entry under "athel" and cross-references
under "ethel" as well as "ęthel" (aethel).
No word is listed under any of these spellings that as a name for the
OE-ligature character. I also checked the 1960s/80s OED Supplement,
and it added nothing. And while I was at it I looked in the RHU1,
where, not to my surprise, the only listing was for Ethel as a name.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "Alas, there is NO SUCH THING as 'NO SUCH THING as
msb@vex.net | privileged access.'" -- Alan Silverstein
My text in this article is in the public domain. |
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Mark Barratt
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 6:00 am
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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Mark Brader wrote:
| Quote: | Ben claimed to be posting in ISO 8859-1, which does not include
the OE-ligature, and that's what I read news in too, so I've
replaced the ligature by [oe] in the quoted text.
|
Yes, it seems that Ben's newsreader (Mozilla 4.8 apparently)
follows the example of OE and claims to be encoding with ISO
8859-1 when it's actually using Windows codepage 1252, which does
include '' (the oe ligature) in the (technically illegal)
positions 8C and 9C (upper- and lower-case). I'd imagine that it
would therefore display correctly on any Windows platform, but
probably wouldn't on UNIX-based systems. For anyone whose
connection is restricted to 7-bit data (Still theoretically
possible, if unlikely) these would become control characters and
might mess up the display.
I suspect that XanaNews may behave in the same way. I'm going to
be interested to see what this post looks like.
--
Mark Barratt
Budapest |
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dcw
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 12:06 pm
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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In article <1ca2e706.0411191420.683869db@posting.google.com>,
Cece <ceceliaarmstrong@yahoo.com> wrote:
| Quote: | Thorn, edh, yogh, and ash I know.
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There's also wyn (which looks confusingly like thorn).
David |
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Cece
Guest
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| Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 12:00 am
Post subject: Re: Old Letters |
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Thank you all.
More magnification does show that what I thought was a triangle is a
horizontal line with a line connecting it and the squiggle that looked
like a teardrop. When I looked up "yogh," OED said to see under "Y"
and "G" -- and both forms are discussed thoroughly under "Y."
This site http://dictionary.oed.com/help/advanced/oe.html is
interesting. Now I have to investigate wynn -- which looks more like
a hand-written thorn than a printed thorn does.
Cece |
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