Et per se and...An introduction to new ligatures

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph.

Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called “contextual forms” where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line.

At the origin of typographical ligatures is the simple running together of letters in manuscripts. Already the earliest known script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that over the script’s history gradually evolve from a ligature into an independent character in its own right. Ligatures figure prominently in many historical scripts, notably the Brahmic abugidas, or the bind rune in Migration Period Germanic inscriptions.

Medieval scribes, writing in Latin, increased writing speed by combining characters and by introduction of scribal abbreviation. For example, in blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls (b, o, and p) and those with left-facing bowls (c, e, o, d, g and q) were written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. In many script forms characters such as h, m, and n had their vertical strokes superimposed. Scribes also used scribal abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character at a stroke. Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations.

In hand writing, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in a way they wouldn’t usually be, either by merging their parts, writing one above another or one inside another; while in printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, and the characters don’t have to be joined — for example, in some cases fi ligature prints letters f and i more separated than when they are typeset as separate letters.

When printing with movable type was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, such as the letter þ (thorn) which was first substitutued in English with y (e.g. ye olde shoppe), but later written as th. However they began to fall out of use with the advent of the wide use of sans serif machine-set body text in the 1950s and the development of inexpensive phototypesetting machines in the 1970s, which did not require journeyman knowledge or training to operate.

With the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, and the resulting improved digital typesetting techniques such as OpenType, ligatures are slowly coming back in use.

History of the Ligature

An ampersand (&) is a logogram representing the conjunction word “and”. The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and”. The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase “and per se and”, meaning “and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and”. The Scots and Scottish English name for & is epershand, derived from “et per se and”, with the same meaning. Traditionally, in English-speaking schools when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself (“A,” “I,” and, at one point, “O”) was preceded by the Latin expression “per se” (Latin for “by itself”).

Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the “&” sign, pronounced “and”. Thus, the recitation of the alphabet would end in: “X, Y, Z and per se and.” This last phrase was routinely slurred to “ampersand” and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837. Through folk etymology, it has been claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications, and that people began calling the new shape “Ampere’s and”.

The ampersand can be traced back to the first century A.D. and the Old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form a ligature. In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common. However, during the following development of the Latin script that led up to the Carolingian minuscule (9th century), while the use of ligatures in general diminished, the et-ligature continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin.

The modern italic type ampersand is a kind of et-ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during the Renaissance. After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman ampersands. Since the ampersand’s roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of the Latin alphabet make use of it.

The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð list of letters from 1011. Similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as used by children (in the USA).

An example may be seen in M. B. Moore’s 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to this when she makes Jacob Storey say, “He thought it had only been put to finish off th’ alphabet like; though ampusand would ha’ done as well, for what he could see.”

The ampersand should not be confused with the Tironian “et”, which is a symbol similar to the numeral 7. Both symbols have their roots in the classical antiquity, and both signs were used up through the Middle Ages as a representation for the Latin word “et” (“and”). However, while the ampersand was in origin a common ligature in the everyday script, the Tironian “et” was part of a highly specialised stenographic shorthand.

Et per se and

New Ligatures

The letterforms of the Roman alphabet were all originally pictograms representing entire words (A is for Ox etc). These were adapted to phonetic use and in many cases these symbols do a great job of representing all the possible sounds in a language. This is most notable in modern day Italian or German, where the twenty-six characters of the alphabet are almost perfect in their ability to represent the spoken language.

Phonetically speaking, English is unsuccessful due to the way spelling has evolved. The twenty-six symbols do not consistently represent a unique sound, instead they can represent several sounds. Due to its lack of precision and indeed confusion, learning the English system can be difficult.

There have been many attempts to develop a new system of characters to adequately represent sounds. Attempts have also been made to modify the Roman alphabet in order to represent the many sound units upon which all words in English are built. However ‘the forms of our letters are so well established that any attempt to modify them results in deterioration, not enhancement, of comprehension.

Smaller words(lemmas) such as (the, be, to, of, and, a, in, have, and I) account for 25% of all the one billion words used in the Oxford English Corpus.

When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a commonly used phrase as one single piece of metal. Using the ampersand (&) as an example: The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for ‘and’. The ampersand comes in many different forms and because of its ubiquity; it is generally no longer considered a ligature, but a logogram.