Ligature (writing)
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨fi⟩ (where the tittle on the ⟨i⟩ merges with the hood of the ⟨f⟩); the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨st⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ (spelling et, Latin for 'and') were combined.[1]
The has the following ligatures: և (ե+ւ), ﬔ (մ+ե), ﬕ (մ+ի), ﬓ (մ+ն), ﬗ (մ+խ), ﬖ (վ+ն)
Armenian alphabet
Most abugidas make frequent use of ligatures in consonant clusters. The number of ligatures employed is language-dependent; thus many more ligatures are conventionally used in Devanagari when writing Sanskrit than when writing Hindi. Having 37 consonants in total, the total number of ligatures that can be formed in Devanagari using only two letters is 1369, though few fonts are able to render all of them. In particular, Mangal, which is included with Microsoft Windows' Indic support, does not correctly handle ligatures with consonants attached to the right of the characters द, ट, ठ, ड, and ढ, leaving the virama attached to them and displaying the following consonant in its standard form.
Brahmic
A number of ligatures have been employed in the , in particular a combination of omicron (Ο) and upsilon (Υ), which later gave rise to a letter of the Cyrillic script—see Ou (letter). Among the ancient Greek acrophonic numerals, ligatures were common (in fact, the ligature of a short-legged capital pi was a key feature of the acrophonic numeral system).
Greek alphabet
Cyrillic ligatures: , Њ, Ы, Ѿ. Iotated Cyrillic letters are ligatures of the early Cyrillic decimal I and another vowel: Ꙗ, Ѥ, Ѩ, Ѭ, Ю (sometimes also spelled ЮУ). Two letters of the Bosnian, Macedonian and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets, lje and nje (љ, њ), were developed in the nineteenth century as ligatures of Cyrillic El and En (л, н) with the soft sign (ь). Yae, a ligature of ya (Я) and e also exists: Ԙԙ, as do Dzze (Ꚉꚉ ← Д + З) and Zhwe (Ꚅꚅ ← З + Ж).
Љ
Some forms of the script, used from Middle Ages to the 19th century to write some Slavic languages, have a box-like shape that lends itself to more frequent use of ligatures.
Glagolitic
In the , the letters aleph (א) and lamed (ל) can form a ligature, ﭏ. The ligature appears in some pre-modern texts (mainly religious), or in Judeo-Arabic texts, where that combination is very frequent, since [ʔ] [a]l- (written aleph plus lamed, in the Hebrew script) is the definite article in Arabic. For example, the word Allah (אַללַּהּ) can be written with this ligature: ﭏלה.
Hebrew alphabet
In the , historically a cursive derived from the Nabataean alphabet, most letters' shapes depend on whether they are followed (word-initial), preceded (word-final) or both (medial) by other letters. For example, Arabic mīm, isolated م, tripled (mmm, rendering as initial, medial and final): ممم. Notable are the shapes taken by lām + ʼalif isolated: ﻻ, and lām + ʼalif medial or final: ﻼ. Besides the obligatory lām + ʼalif ligature, Arabic script grammar requires numerous stylistic ligatures.
Arabic alphabet
a semitic alphabet derived from the Aramaic alphabet, has three different scripts that all use ligatures. Like Arabic, some letters change their form depending on their position in relation to other letters, and this can also change how ligatures look. A popular ligature all three scripts use is Lamadh ܠ/ܠ + Alap ܐ/ܐ isolated and final: (Serto) ܠܐ, (Madnhaya) ܠܐ. Another popular one is Taw ܬ/ܬ + Alap ܐ/ܐ, resulting in (Serto) ܬܐ, (Madhnhaya) ـܬܐ. All three scripts use ligatures, but not in an equal spread or always with the same letters. Serto, being a flexible script, especially has many ligatures. For a wider, but not complete, list of Syriac ligatures, see Contextual forms of letters.
Syriac
(one of the main languages of South Asia), which uses a calligraphic version of the Arabic-based Nastaʿlīq script, requires a great number of ligatures in digital typography. InPage, a widely used desktop publishing tool for Urdu, uses Nastaliq fonts with over 20,000 ligatures.
Urdu
In a ligature of the American manual alphabet is used to sign "I love you", from the English initialism ILY. It consists of the little finger of the letter I plus the thumb and forefinger of the letter L. The letter Y (little finger and thumb) overlaps with the other two letters.
American Sign Language
uses three ligatures, all comprising the letter ຫ (h). As a tonal language, most consonant sounds in Lao are represented by two consonants, which will govern the tone of the syllable. Five consonant sounds are only represented by a single consonant letter (ງ (ŋ), ນ (m), ມ (n), ລ (l), ວ (w)), meaning that one cannot render all the tones for words beginning with these sounds. A silent ຫ indicates that the syllable should be read with the tone rules for ຫ, rather than those of the following consonant. Three consonants can form ligatures with the letter ຫ. ຫ+ນ=ໜ (n), ຫ+ມ=ໝ (m) and ຫ+ລ=ຫຼ (l). ງ (ŋ) and ວ (w) just form clusters: ຫງ (ŋ) and ຫວ (w). ລ (l) can also be used written in a cluster rather than as a ligature: ຫລ (l).
Lao
– Neighbour-dependent grapheme positioning
Complex text layout
– Pair of characters used to write one phoneme (the unfused pairing of graphemes)
Digraph (orthography)
– Process in typography (optimization of spacing between adjacent letters).
Kerning
– Physical spacing of characters in text
Letter spacing
– Spelling rule in English
List of English words that may be spelled with a ligature
– Motif made by overlapping two or more letters
Monogram
– Abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes
Scribal abbreviation
– Aspect of the Unicode Standard
Unicode equivalence
– Ligatures used in Greek writing