It is common to see ligatures such as Æ or Œ in reference to classical works such as Œdipus or Æsop but these do not seem to have names. Strangely enough in the Old English alphabet there were similar letters such as æsc or ash, and œthel or ethel. Is there a connection between the classical ligatures and the Old English ones? If so, why do we use Old English names and not Latin ones? And if not how rare is such a coincidence? Bonus question: It seems from the comments and answers so far that the only times we use ligatures are in reference to classical works but the only names we have for ligatures are Old English or Runic names. Why might this be?
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1Hello, Jon. You say 'It is common to see ligatures such as Æ or Œ in reference to classical works'; you need to give examples. And have you checked the Wikipedia articles on the graphemes Æ and Œ? – Edwin Ashworth Aug 25 '15 at 21:31
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Thank you for asking for examples. I have looked at the Wikipedia articles and they are the source of my question. – SophArch Aug 25 '15 at 21:41
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The Wikipedia article explains that æ was 'a digraph in Latin representing either a native diphthong, as in æquus, or a Greek αι (ai) in Latinized spellings, as in æschylus'; one would expect the first name to be Latin, and thus off-topic here. Aesc and ethel are used nowadays, or 'ae digraph' etc. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 25 '15 at 21:58
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I understand that aesc and ethel are used today but I was wondering if Latin had names for them, why don't we go by the Latin names, and how Old English got a hold of ligatures. – SophArch Aug 25 '15 at 22:09
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2I'm ready to be disproven, but I doubt that the Romans had names for their ligatures. If English has a name for our fi ligature, ubiquitous in print yet seldom noticed, I don't know it either. – Anonym Aug 25 '15 at 22:25
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2@Anonym: I don't believe the Romans used ligatures (at least not in printing/block letters; I know very little about Roman cursive). From what I remember, ligatures developed in the mediæval period. The Romans just used digraphs, and I don't think they had a special names for either the "ae" and "oe" digraphs or the "au" digraph. – herisson Aug 25 '15 at 23:58
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4I'd say it's because ligatures in general are not considered letters of the alphabet. Æ and œ were considered letters of the alphabet in the variants of OE that used them, whereas in Latin, they were only ever graphic variants of the (original) diphthongs ae and oe. Kind of like how in French, é and ç aren't considered letters of the alphabet, but in Polish ń and ż are. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 26 '15 at 06:26
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Not much to go on but here are a couple of clues:
The Latin dictionary (Smith) gives the earliest date for Diphthonga as 450ish. Marc. Carp.; Prisca. Two Roman Grammarians. And Ligature even later.
None of the early uncial manuscripts that I have so far looked at show ligatures, apart from the Divine monograms. The same applies to a web-site for inscriptions. There are contractions (sigla) in miniscule. The only other names for particular ligatures are also derived from Runic, the Irish ogham. Once again the names were needed when runic was transcribed into Latin.
EA : ébad
OI : óir
UI : uillenn
P, later IO : pín (later iphín)
X or Ch (as in loch), later AE : emancholl
source Wikipedia (Ogham Runes) (edit by @sumelic XAPIN.)
This doesn't explain why ή survived in French.
Just to tidy up dates C680. Here's a detail from the Cuthbert/ Stoneyhurst Gospel still showing no ligature for AE; and 3 Divine monograms. do, ds, ihs. Picture Copyright British Library, permitted study.
Hugh
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Ds Dm with a bar or tilde over for Dominus/ Deus Deum. XP for Christos, or Christus. These are the two on a page in Amiatinus. – Hugh Aug 26 '15 at 04:39
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1@Hugh thank you. I think the key in your answer was that the runes and their sounds were transliterated into Latin. That also makes sense for Πwhich I discovered is transliterated from the Greek ligature OI. РSophArch Aug 26 '15 at 04:56
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@Jon, It all seems to happen just as Irish scholarship is salvaging Roman learning from the barbarian invasions. Circumstantial. – Hugh Aug 26 '15 at 05:01
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@Jon: I think you might have misunderstood. The Ogham runes are later than the Roman alphabet (Wikipedia says the earliest examples of them are from the 4th century). The "transliteration" is probably being done in an Irish-language context, I would guess, and it would not have influenced the Romans in any way. The names of these runes also don't seem to have come from the Romans. It's true that OE was used in Latin to transliterate Greek OI, but that doesn't mean that OE originated in this way. – herisson Aug 26 '15 at 05:17
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@sumelic: I did understand that the runes are later. I assumed that monks, missionaries and other alphabet carrying people traveled and integrated the Latin alphabet with the runic ones of Futhorc and others. Wikipedia has a page for the "Old English Latin Alphabet" which shows the Old English alphabet of 29 letters, 5 of which are not Latin. The names themselves do not sound Roman at all and I did not think that they were. I do not, however, understand what you mean about the Greek OI not being the origin of OE. – SophArch Aug 26 '15 at 05:23
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@Jon: What I mean is just that since the digraph OE also occurred in a handful of native Latin words, like "foedus" and "foetere," it seems like it might have already existed before Greek loanwords. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/oe?s=t Also, I would expect "OI" rather than "OE" if the digraph were directly based on the Greek one. I'm confused about your question now: if you understand that the rune names are probably not related to the Latin names, why is the transliteration of rune names "the key" to your original question? – herisson Aug 26 '15 at 05:29
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@sumelic: Thank you for explaining OE. Just to take the maybe existing contrary position, OI could have changed to OE just from accent or general speech-writing phonetic disparities. – SophArch Aug 26 '15 at 05:46
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@sumelic: I believe transliteration is key because of transliteration in general and history. If I wanted to transliterate the Jewish holiday that occurs at roughly the same time as Christmas and wanted to be proper I would write "Ḥ"annukah to replicate the rough guttural sound it has in Hebrew. Because English does not have a letter to replicate that sound, I use a made up one. I can easily see monks missionaries and the like trying to represent sounds their alphabet could not handle. The names of the new letters would come from the language that they were trying to replicate. – SophArch Aug 26 '15 at 05:51
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@sumelic: All conjecture but it makes sense. I am not sure it is possible to find better but if you feel it is please try. – SophArch Aug 26 '15 at 05:51
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@sumelic: to address your point about OE, the ligature was only first used in Middle English, by then the German roots were firmly established. That could explain the lack of wanting a Latin name for the ligatures and possibly explain ligatures in general – SophArch Aug 26 '15 at 05:56
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Fourth Century Greek manuscript here http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?dir=next&folioNo=3&lid=en&quireNo=3&side=v&zoomSlider=0 (no ligatures yet) – Hugh Aug 26 '15 at 06:35
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1Note: ligatures were in themselves very common in Latin writing, just not in the Square Capitals style (the one we think of as ‘Roman’ capitals, chiseled in stone). They were exceedingly common all the way back to BC times in cursive writing, though they were of course purely graphical alternates for convenience in writing and by no means limited to surviving cases like æ/œ. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 26 '15 at 20:02
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@JanusBahsJacquet Yes, surely. But although I can find texts that go back to say Gospels, I can find no parchments, papyri with ligatures earlier than 600. I'm sure I remember something Greek with a final -OS, and, as I said IHS/IHC XP but where? – Hugh Aug 27 '15 at 00:24