A 13:21 97-08-14 -0700, Timothy Partridge a �crit :
>Otto Stolz recently said:
>
>> German ligaturing rules depend on a linguistic analysis,
[Timothy]:
>The book "Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University
>Press Oxford" gives similar rules for German. It also mentions that
>ffi and ffl ligatures should never be used in German.
[Alain]:
...unlike French � (oe), mandatory, stricto sensu, for correct spelling of
a word like "�uvre", but prohibited for a word like "coexistence" or
"Groenland" (note that there is no diaresis in the latter French name of
this big island whose Danish original name is Gr�nland, contrarily to what
is found in "No�l").
In fact it is exceptional to find a diaeresis on the e of unligatured
<oe>'s in French (the only other example I know is the first name
Jo�l[Jo�lle]), and the French ligature, which is called by Grevisse a
"digramme soud�" (joined digraph), as pointed out a while ago by Michel
Suignard, from Microsoft (I adopted this term and I spread it, thanks to
him), serves as an anti-diaeresis, as I demonstraed in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG3
at the end of the 1980's. If it did not exist, a reform of the French
language would be necessary to put a diaresis on all unligatured <oe>'s
which are prononunced as two disctincly separate letters. The ligatured
<oe> is always a single pure vowel in French, although it is not always the
same sound (it can be roughly equal to German �, to French e, or to French �).
Alain LaBont�
Qu�bec
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