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97-486: The Pearl Manuscript (British Library MS Cotton Nero A X/2), also known as the Gawain manuscript , is an illuminated manuscript produced somewhere in northern England in the late 14th century or the beginning of the 15th century. It is one of the best-known Middle English manuscripts, the only one containing alliterative verse solely, and the oldest surviving English manuscript to have full-page illustrations. It contains

194-585: A Creative Commons public domain license . In 1753 the Cotton library was transferred to the new British Museum , under the Act of Parliament which established it. At the same time the Sloane Collection and Harley Collection were acquired and added, so that these three became the museum's three "foundation collections". The Royal manuscripts were donated by George II in 1757. In 1973 all these collections passed to

291-476: A full stop , comma , or hyphen are also used, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled ⟨ff⟩ . These arose because with the usual type sort for lowercase ⟨f⟩ , the end of its hood is on a kern , which would be damaged by collision with raised parts of the next letter. Ligatures crossing the morpheme boundary of a composite word are sometimes considered incorrect, especially in official German orthography as outlined in

388-515: A Greek zeta with a horizontal stroke , ⟨Ƶ⟩ , as an abbreviation for Zeus . Saturn's astronomical symbol ( ♄ ) has been traced back to the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri , where it can be seen to be a Greek kappa - rho with a horizontal stroke , as an abbreviation for Κρονος ( Cronus ), the Greek name for the planet. It later came to look like a lower-case Greek eta , with

485-478: A V, for aqua vitae ); 🝫 (MB, for balneum Mariae [Mary's bath], a double boiler ); 🝬 (VB, for balneum vaporis , a steam bath); and 🝛 ( aaa with overline , for amalgam ). Digraphs , such as ⟨ ll ⟩ in Spanish or Welsh , are not ligatures in the general case as the two letters are displayed as separate glyphs: although written together, when they are joined in handwriting or italic fonts

582-495: A capital version of the Eszett never came into common use, even though its creation has been discussed since the end of the 19th century. Therefore, the common replacement in uppercase typesetting was originally SZ ( Maße "measure" → MAS‌ZE , different from Mas‌se "mass" → MAS‌SE ) and later SS ( Maße → MAS‌SE ). Until 2017, the SS replacement

679-646: A correctly spelled word, like IJs or ijs ( ice ). Ligatures are not limited to Latin script: Written Chinese has a long history of creating new characters by merging parts or wholes of other Chinese characters . However, a few of these combinations do not represent morphemes but retain the original multi-character (multiple morpheme) reading and are therefore not considered true characters themselves. In Chinese, these ligatures are called héwén ( 合文 ) or héshū ( 合書 ); see polysyllabic Chinese characters for more. One popular ligature used on chūntiē decorations used for Chinese Lunar New Year

776-473: A designation of bust name/shelf letter/volume number from left end. Thus, the two most famous of the manuscripts from the Cotton library are "Cotton Vitellius A.xv" and " Cotton Nero A.x ". In Cotton's own day, that meant "Under the bust of Vitellius , top shelf (A), and count fifteen over" for the volume containing the Nowell Codex (including Beowulf ) and "Go to the bust of Nero, top shelf, tenth book" for

873-440: A diacritic. Similarly, the word that was abbreviated to ⟨þ⟩ with a small ⟨t⟩ written as a diacritic. During the latter Middle English and Early Modern English periods, the thorn in its common script, or cursive , form came to resemble a ⟨y⟩ shape. With the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to

970-462: A different manuscript. The first published quotations from Cotton Nero A X/2 appeared in a footnote in the third volume of Thomas Warton 's History of English Poetry in 1781, comprising twelve lines from Pearl and four from Cleanness . A further short quotation from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was included in a footnote to Richard Price 's new edition of Warton's History in 1824, and

1067-770: A fire risk; and then to Ashburnham House , a little west of the Palace of Westminster. From 1707 the library also housed the Old Royal Library (now "Royal" manuscripts at the British Library). Ashburnham House also became the residence of the keeper of the king's libraries, Richard Bentley (1662–1742), a renowned theologian and classical scholar. On 23 October 1731, fire broke out in Ashburnham House, in which 13 manuscripts were lost, while over 200 others faced severe destruction and water damage. Bentley escaped while clutching

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1164-442: A late 14th-century vernacular poetry manuscript. The hand has been described as "distinctive, rather delicate [and] angular". The scribe's irregularity in following the ruled lines and his heavy use of abbreviations and ligatures has led to the suggestion that he was more used to notarial than literary work. Some letters which had faded or blurred have been redone by a later scribe, and this process of fading has continued; during

1261-475: A legitimate letter with its own position in the alphabet. Because of its relative youth compared to other letters of the alphabet, only a few European languages (English, Dutch, German, Polish, Welsh, Maltese, and Walloon) use the letter in native words. The character ⟨ Æ ⟩ (lower case ⟨æ⟩ ; in ancient times named æsc ) when used in Danish , Norwegian , Icelandic , or Old English

1358-468: A letter (e.g., in early Modern English); in English it is pronounced "and", not "et", except in the case of &c , pronounced " et cetera ". In most typefaces, it does not immediately resemble the two letters used to form it, although certain typefaces use designs in the form of a ligature (examples include the original versions of Futura and Univers , Trebuchet MS , and Civilité , known in modern times as

1455-474: A ligature (for "pesos", although there are other theories as well) but is now a logogram. At least once, the United States dollar used a symbol resembling an overlapping U-S ligature, with the right vertical bar of the U intersecting through the middle of the S (  US  ) to resemble the modern dollar sign. The Spanish peseta was sometimes symbolized by a ligature ⟨₧⟩ (from Pts), and

1552-403: A particularly large set to allow designers to create dramatic display text with a feel of antiquity. A parallel use of ligatures is seen in the creation of script fonts that join letterforms to simulate handwriting effectively. This trend is caused in part by the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, many of which use ligatures somewhat extensively. This has caused

1649-535: A reversed ⟨t⟩ with ⟨h⟩ (neither the reversed t nor any of the consonant ligatures are in Unicode). Rarer ligatures also exist, including ⟨ꜳ⟩ ; ⟨ꜵ⟩ ; ⟨ꜷ⟩ ; ⟨ꜹ⟩ ; ⟨ꜻ⟩ (barred ⟨av⟩ ); ⟨ꜽ⟩ ; ⟨ꝏ⟩ , which is used in medieval Nordic languages for / oː / (a long close-mid back rounded vowel ), as well as in some orthographies of

1746-407: A single gathering of four leaves. Folio 39, the first page of Pearl , is stained enough to suggest that the manuscript was once unbound and that this was its outer sheet. Most pages are ruled to allow for 36 lines of text. All four of the main poems in the manuscript were written by a single scribe using a Gothic textura rotunda script rather than the cursiva script that would be more usual in

1843-493: A very proper Place in the said Sir Johns ancient Mansion House at Westminster which is very convenient for that Purpose And whereas the said Sir John Cotton in pursuance of the Desire and Intentions of his said Father and Grandfather is content and willing that the said Mansion House and Library should continue in his Family and Name and not be sold or otherwise disposed or imbezled and that the said Library should be kept and preserved by

1940-407: Is a combination of the four characters for zhāocái jìnbǎo ( 招財進寶 ), meaning "ushering in wealth and fortune" and used as a popular New Year's greeting. In 1924, Du Dingyou ( 杜定友 ; 1898–1967) created the ligature 圕 from two of the three characters 圖書館 ( túshūguǎn ), meaning "library". Although it does have an assigned pronunciation of tuān and appears in many dictionaries, it

2037-582: Is called kroužek . The tilde diacritic, used in Spanish as part of the letter ⟨ ñ ⟩ , representing the palatal nasal consonant, and in Portuguese for nasalization of a vowel, originated in ligatures where ⟨n⟩ followed the base letter: Espanna → España . Similarly, the circumflex in French spelling stems from the ligature of a silent ⟨s⟩ . The letter hwair (ƕ), used only in transliteration of

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2134-484: Is made by joining two or more characters in an atypical fashion by merging their parts, or by writing one above or inside the other. In printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, so the characters do not have to be joined. For example, in some cases the ⟨fi⟩ ligature prints the letters ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ with a greater separation than when they are typeset as separate letters. When printing with movable type

2231-456: Is no general consensus about its history. Its name Es-zett (meaning S-Z) suggests a connection of "long s and z" (ſʒ) but the Latin script also knows a ligature of "long s over round s" (ſs). The latter is used as the design principle for the character in most of today's typefaces. Since German was mostly set in blackletter typefaces until the 1940s, and those typefaces were rarely set in uppercase,

2328-422: Is not a typographic ligature. It is a distinct letter — a vowel — and when collated, may be given a different place in the alphabetical order than Ae . In modern English orthography , ⟨Æ⟩ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: " encyclopædia " versus "encyclopaedia" or "encyclopedia". In this use, ⟨Æ⟩ comes from Medieval Latin , where it

2425-482: Is of major importance in bibliography. Copies of some of the lost works had been made, and many of those damaged could be restored in the nineteenth century. However, these early conservation efforts were not always successful: bungled attempts to clean the Magna Carta exemplification rendered it largely illegible to the naked eye. More recently, advances in multispectral photography have enabled imaging specialists at

2522-416: Is of special importance for having preserved the only copy of several works, including Beowulf , The Battle of Maldon , and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . In 1731 the collection was badly damaged by a fire in which 13 manuscripts were completely destroyed, and some 200 seriously damaged. The most important Anglo-Saxon manuscripts had already been copied; the original text of The Battle of Maldon

2619-748: Is still represented with a ligature: ɮ , and the extensions to the IPA contain three more: ʩ , ʪ and ʫ . The Initial Teaching Alphabet , a short-lived alphabet intended for young children, used a number of ligatures to represent long vowels: ⟨ꜷ⟩ , ⟨æ⟩ , ⟨œ⟩ , ⟨ᵫ⟩ , ⟨ꭡ⟩ , and ligatures for ⟨ee⟩ , ⟨ou⟩ and ⟨oi⟩ that are not encoded in Unicode. Ligatures for consonants also existed, including ligatures of ⟨ʃh⟩ , ⟨ʈh⟩ , ⟨wh⟩ , ⟨ʗh⟩ , ⟨ng⟩ and

2716-868: Is still seen today on icon artwork in Greek Orthodox churches, and sometimes in graffiti or other forms of informal or decorative writing. Gha ⟨ƣ⟩ , a rarely used letter based on Q and G, was misconstrued by the ISO to be an OI ligature because of its appearance, and is thus known (to the ISO and, in turn, Unicode ) as "Oi". Historically, it was used in many Latin-based orthographies of Turkic (e.g., Azerbaijani ) and other central Asian languages. The International Phonetic Alphabet formerly used ligatures to represent affricate consonants , of which six are encoded in Unicode: ʣ, ʤ, ʥ, ʦ, ʧ and ʨ . One fricative consonant

2813-522: Is the ampersand ⟨&⟩ . This was originally a ligature of ⟨E⟩ and ⟨t⟩ , forming the Latin word "et", meaning " and ". It has exactly the same use in French and in English . The ampersand comes in many different forms. Because of its ubiquity, it is generally no longer considered a ligature, but a logogram . Like many other ligatures, it has at times been considered

2910-690: Is therefore not used in Turkish typography, and neither are other ligatures like that for ⟨fl⟩ , which would be rare anyway because of Turkish phonotactics. Remnants of the ligatures ⟨ſʒ⟩ / ⟨ſz⟩ ("sharp s", eszett ) and ⟨tʒ⟩ / ⟨tz⟩ ("sharp t", tezett ) from Fraktur , a family of German blackletter typefaces, originally mandatory in Fraktur but now employed only stylistically, can be seen to this day on street signs for city squares whose name contains Platz or ends in -platz . Instead,

3007-697: The Duden . An English example of this would be ⟨ff⟩ in shelf‌ful ; a German example would be Schiff‌fahrt ("boat trip"). Some computer programs (such as TeX ) provide a setting to disable ligatures for German, while some users have also written macros to identify which ligatures to disable. Turkish distinguishes dotted and dotless "I" . In a ligature with f (in words such as [fırın] Error: {{Lang}}: invalid parameter: |translation= ( help ) and [fikir] Error: {{Lang}}: invalid parameter: |translation= ( help ) ), this contrast would be obscured. The ⟨fi⟩ ligature

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3104-721: The ⟨i⟩ in many typefaces collides with the hood of the ⟨f⟩ when placed beside each other in a word, and are combined into a single glyph with the tittle absorbed into the ⟨f⟩ . Other ligatures with the letter f include ⟨fj⟩ , ⟨f‌l⟩ (fl), ⟨f‌f⟩ (ff), ⟨f‌f‌i⟩ (ffi), and ⟨f‌f‌l⟩ (ffl). Ligatures for ⟨fa⟩ , ⟨fe⟩ , ⟨fo⟩ , ⟨fr⟩ , ⟨fs⟩ , ⟨ft⟩ , ⟨fb⟩ , ⟨fh⟩ , ⟨fu⟩ , ⟨fy⟩ , and for ⟨f⟩ followed by

3201-522: The Brahmic abugidas and the Germanic bind rune , figure prominently throughout ancient manuscripts. These new glyphs emerge alongside the proliferation of writing with a stylus, whether on paper or clay , and often for a practical reason: faster handwriting . Merchants especially needed a way to speed up the process of written communication and found that conjoining letters and abbreviating words for lay use

3298-475: The British Library led by Christina Duffy to scan and upload images of previously illegible early English manuscripts damaged in the fire. Images will form part of Fragmentarium (Digital Research Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments), an international collaboration of libraries and research institutions to catalogue and collate vulnerable manuscript fragments, making them available for research under

3395-475: The French franc was often symbolized by the ligature ⟨₣⟩ (from Fr). In astronomy , the planetary symbol for Mercury ( ☿ ) may be a ligature of Mercury 's caduceus and a cross (which was added in the 16th century to Christianize the pagan symbol), though other sources disagree; the symbol for Venus ♀ may be a ligature of the Greek letters ⟨ϕ⟩ (phi) and ⟨κ⟩ (kappa). The symbol for Jupiter ( ♃ ) descends from

3492-569: The Geneva Bible ; and by the seventeenth century Sir Robert Cotton came to hold, and subsequently bound, over a hundred volumes of official papers. There is a theory that the curious incident of the 1643 Battle of Wem was the output of concerns of both sides to secure the Library of Old Sir Rowland at Soulton Hall . By 1622, his house and library stood immediately north of the Houses of Parliament and

3589-553: The Gothic language , resembles a ⟨hw⟩ ligature. It was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph ⟨hv⟩ formerly used to express the phoneme in question, e.g. by Migne in the 1860s ( Patrologia Latina vol. 18). The Byzantines had a unique o-u ligature ⟨Ȣ⟩ that, while originally based on the Greek alphabet 's ο-υ, carried over into Latin alphabets as well. This ligature

3686-534: The Green Knight at Camelot ; and three on 129–130 (immediately after Sir Gawain ), showing Bertilak's wife tempting Sir Gawain , Gawain at the Green Chapel, and Gawain's return to Camelot. With one exception they all take up a complete side of a folio, a feature not found in any earlier English manuscript. They all depict scenes described in the four poems though not always with perfect accuracy, suggesting that

3783-405: The Latin alphabet that originated in the seventh century, the phoneme it represents was formerly written in various ways. In Old English , the runic letter wynn ⟨Ƿ⟩ ) was used, but Norman influence forced wynn out of use. By the 14th century, the "new" letter ⟨W⟩ , originated as two ⟨ V ⟩ glyphs or ⟨ U ⟩ glyphs joined, developed into

3880-685: The Massachusett language to represent uː (a long close back rounded vowel ); ᵺ; ỻ, which was used in Medieval Welsh to represent ɬ (the voiceless lateral fricative ); ꜩ; ᴂ; ᴔ; and ꭣ have Unicode codepoints (in code block Latin Extended-E for characters used in German dialectology ( Teuthonista ), the Anthropos alphabet, Sakha and Americanist usage). The most common ligature in modern usage

3977-558: The Massachusett-language Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God , published in 1663) was the use of the double-o ligature ⟨ꝏ⟩ to represent the / u / of f oo d as opposed to the / ʊ / of h oo k (although Eliot himself used ⟨oo⟩ and ⟨ꝏ⟩ interchangeably). In the orthography in use since 2000 in the Wampanoag communities participating in

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4074-622: The Netherlands , typically use a ligature resembling a ⟨U⟩ with a broken left-hand stroke. Adding to the confusion, Dutch handwriting can render ⟨y⟩ (which is not found in native Dutch words, but occurs in words borrowed from other languages) as a ⟨ij⟩ -glyph without the dots in its lowercase form and the ⟨IJ⟩ in its uppercase form looking virtually identical (only slightly bigger). When written as two separate letters, both should be capitalized – or both not – to form

4171-486: The hashtag indicator. The at sign ⟨@⟩ is potentially a ligature, but there are many different theories about the origin. One theory says that the French word à (meaning at ), was simplified by scribes who, instead of lifting the pen to write the grave accent, drew an arc around the "a". Another states that it is short for the Latin word for "toward", " ad ", with the ⟨d⟩ being represented by

4268-431: The question mark ) and the bang (printer's slang for exclamation mark ) into one symbol, used to denote a sentence which is both a question and is exclaimed. For example, the sentence "Are you really coming over to my house on Friday‽" shows that the speaker is surprised while asking their question. Alchemy used a set of mostly standardized symbols , many of which were ligatures: 🜇 (AR, for aqua regia ); 🜈 (S inside

4365-488: The umlauted vowels ⟨ ä ⟩ , ⟨ ö ⟩ , and ⟨ ü ⟩ historically arose from ⟨ae⟩ , ⟨oe⟩ , ⟨ue⟩ ligatures (strictly, from these vowels with a small letter ⟨e⟩ written as a diacritic , for example ⟨aͤ⟩ , ⟨oͤ⟩ , ⟨uͤ⟩ ). It is common practice to replace them with ⟨ae⟩ , ⟨oe⟩ , ⟨ue⟩ digraphs when

4462-492: The "sz" ligature has merged into a single character, the German ß – see below. Sometimes, ligatures for ⟨st⟩ (st), ⟨ſt⟩ (ſt), ⟨ch⟩ , ⟨ck⟩ , ⟨ct⟩ , ⟨Qu⟩ and ⟨Th⟩ are used (e.g. in the typeface Linux Libertine ). Besides conventional ligatures, in the metal type era some newspapers commissioned custom condensed single sorts for

4559-485: The 20th century. Sans serif typefaces, increasingly used for body text, generally avoid ligatures, though notable exceptions include Gill Sans and Futura . Inexpensive phototypesetting machines in the 1970s (which did not require journeyman knowledge or training to operate) also generally avoid them. A few, however, became characters in their own right, see below the sections about German ß , various Latin accented letters , & et al. The trend against digraph use

4656-490: The Cotton family's other manuscripts, donated to the British Museum when that institution was founded in 1753. It is now held by the British Library . The manuscript consists of 90 vellum folios now measuring 12 centimetres (4.7 in) by 17 centimetres (6.7 in), though it seems to have been cropped from a larger size. The quiring comprises a single bifolium followed by seven gatherings of twelve leaves each and

4753-468: The Cotton library to Great Britain upon his death in 1702. At this time, Great Britain did not have a national library, and the transfer of the Cotton library to the nation became the basis of what is now the British Library . The early history of the collection is laid out in the introductory recitals to the British Museum Act 1700 ( 13 & 14 Will. 3 . c. 7) that established statutory trusts for

4850-716: The Cotton library: Sir Robert Cotton late of Connington in the County of Huntingdon Baronett did at his own great Charge and Expense and by the Assistance of the most learned Antiquaries of his Time collect and purchase the most useful Manuscripts Written Books Papers Parchments [Records] and other Memorialls in most Languages of great Use and Service for the Knowledge and Preservation of our Constitution both in Church and State which Manuscripts and other Writings were procured as well from Parts beyond

4947-452: The French digraph œu , which is composed of the ligature œ and the simplex letter u . In Dutch , ⟨ ij ⟩ can be considered a digraph, a ligature, or a letter in itself, depending on the standard used. Its uppercase and lowercase forms are often available as a single glyph with a distinctive ligature in several professional typefaces (e.g. Zapfino ). Sans serif uppercase ⟨IJ⟩ glyphs, popular in

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5044-536: The Monasteries , many priceless and ancient manuscripts that had belonged to the monastic libraries began to be disseminated among various owners, many of whom were unaware of the cultural value of the manuscripts. Cotton's skill lay in finding, purchasing and preserving these ancient documents. The leading scholars of the era, including Francis Bacon , Walter Raleigh , and James Ussher , came to use Sir Robert's library. Richard James acted as his librarian. The library

5141-508: The Name of the Cottonian Library for Publick Use & Advantage.... The acquisition of the collection was better secured and managed by the British Museum Act 1706 ( 6 Ann. c. 30), under which the trustees removed the collections from the ruinous Cotton House, whose site is now covered by the Houses of Parliament . It went first to Essex House , The Strand , which, however, was regarded as

5238-500: The Seas as from severall Private Collectors of such Antiquities within this Realm [and] are generally esteemed the best Collection of its Kind now any where extant And whereas the said Library has been preserved with the utmost Care and Diligence by the late Sir Thomas Cotton Son of the said Sir Robert and by Sir John Cotton of Westminster now living Grandson of the said Sir Robert and has been very much augmented and enlarged by them and lodged in

5335-544: The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP), the ligature was replaced with the numeral ⟨8⟩ , partly because of its ease in typesetting and display as well as its similarity to the o-u ligature ⟨Ȣ⟩ used in Abenaki . For example, compare the colonial-era spelling seepꝏash with the modern WLRP spelling seep8ash . As the letter ⟨ W ⟩ is an addition to

5432-565: The arc. Another says it is short for an abbreviation of the term each at , with the ⟨e⟩ encasing the ⟨a⟩ . Around the 18th century, it started being used in commerce to indicate price per unit, as "15 units @ $ 1". After the popularization of Email , this fairly unpopular character became widely known, used to tag specific users. Lately, it has been used to de-gender nouns in Spanish with no agreed pronunciation. The dollar sign ⟨$ ⟩ possibly originated as

5529-609: The base form of the letters is not changed and the individual glyphs remain separate. Like some ligatures discussed above, these digraphs may or may not be considered individual letters in their respective languages. Until the 1994 spelling reform, the digraphs ⟨ ch ⟩ and ⟨ll⟩ were considered separate letters in Spanish for collation purposes. Catalan makes a difference between "Spanish ll" or palatalized l, written ll as in llei (law), and "French ll" or geminated l, written l·l as in col·lega (colleague). The difference can be illustrated with

5626-496: The century that has passed since 1923 that year's EETS facsimile edition has become in many places more easily readable than the manuscript itself. There are 48 decorated initials in the manuscript, all written in blue with red penwork, which range in size from fifteen to two lines. It has often been argued that they were used to make clear the internal structure of each of the four poems. The manuscript has twelve illustrations: four on ff. 41–42 (immediately before Pearl ), showing

5723-452: The collection's two original exemplifications of the 1215 Magna Carta , Cotton Charter XIII.31A , was shrivelled in the fire, and its seal badly melted. Arthur Onslow , Speaker of the House of Commons , as one of the statutory trustees of the library, directed and personally supervised a remarkable programme of restoration within the resources of his time. The published report of this work

5820-458: The common " ye ", as in ' Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that ⟨y⟩ existed in the printer's types that William Caxton and his contemporaries imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not. The ring diacritic used in vowels such as ⟨ å ⟩ likewise originated as an ⟨o⟩ -ligature. Before

5917-415: The cross added at the top in the 16th century to Christianize it. The dwarf planet Pluto is symbolized by a PL ligature, ♇ . A different PL ligature, ⅊ , represents the property line in surveying. In engineering diagrams, a CL ligature, ℄ , represents the center line of an object. The interrobang ⟨‽⟩ is an unconventional punctuation meant to combine the interrogation point (or

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6014-552: The development of new digital typesetting techniques such as OpenType , and the incorporation of ligature support into the text display systems of macOS , Windows , and applications like Microsoft Office . An increasing modern trend is to use a "Th" ligature which reduces spacing between these letters to make it easier to read, a trait infrequent in metal type. Today, modern font programming divides ligatures into three groups, which can be activated separately: standard, contextual and historical. Standard ligatures are needed to allow

6111-438: The diacritics are unavailable, for example in electronic conversation. Phone books treat umlauted vowels as equivalent to the relevant digraph (so that a name Müller will appear at the same place as if it were spelled Mueller; German surnames have a strongly fixed orthography, either a name is spelled with ⟨ü⟩ or with ⟨ue⟩ ); however, the alphabetic order used in other books treats them as equivalent to

6208-416: The dreamer sleeping, the dreamer approaching the stream, the dreamer seeing the maiden, and the dreamer trying to cross; two on ff. 60–60 (immediately before Cleanness ), showing Noah's Ark and Daniel at Belshazzar's feast ; two on ff. 86–86 (immediately before Patience ), showing Jonah and the whale and Jonah preaching to the people of Nineveh ; one on ff. 94 (immediately before Sir Gawain ), showing

6305-404: 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 notational abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character in one stroke. Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations. In handwriting , a ligature

6402-513: The first computer typesetting programs to take advantage of computer-driven typesetting (and later laser printers) was Donald Knuth 's TeX program. Now the standard method of mathematical typesetting, its default fonts are explicitly based on nineteenth-century styles. Many new fonts feature extensive ligature sets; these include FF Scala , Seria and others by Martin Majoor and Hoefler Text by Jonathan Hoefler . Mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko contains

6499-435: The following May, but the library remained shut up until after Sir Robert's death; it was restored to his son and heir, Sir Thomas Cotton , in 1633. Sir Robert's library included his collection of books, manuscripts, coins and medallions. After his death the collection was maintained and added to by his son, Sir Thomas Cotton (d. 1662), and grandson, Sir John Cotton (d. 1702). Sir Robert's grandson, Sir John Cotton, donated

6596-411: The font to display without errors such as character collision. Designers sometimes find contextual and historic ligatures desirable for creating effects or to evoke an old-fashioned print look. Many ligatures combine ⟨f⟩ with the following letter. A particularly prominent example is ⟨fi⟩ (or ⟨f‌i⟩ , rendered with two normal letters). The tittle of

6693-492: The illustrations in Cotton Nero A X/2 were drawn and painted there in the first two decades of the 15th century. It is not known who owned the manuscript for the first two hundred years of its history. The name "Hugo de" appears on the margin of one leaf, and perhaps (though this is disputed) "J Macy" on another, either of which might be interpreted as a mark of either ownership or authorship. Edward Wilson has speculated that it

6790-555: The illustrator had not read them but was instead following suggestions from the manuscript's owner. They were created in two stages: first in black-and-white as ink drawings, then as paintings with the colour being applied with considerably less skill, perhaps by a different artist. Their overall quality was roundly abused by some 20th century critics, described as "crude and inartistic" by E. V. Gordon , and "the nadir of English illustrative art...infantile daubs" by R. S. and L. H. Loomis ; more recently Kathleen L. Scott considered them

6887-758: The implementation by the closure of the library in 1629. In 1696, the first printed catalogue of the Cotton library's holdings was published by Thomas Smith , the librarian of Sir John Cotton, Sir Robert Cotton's grandson. The library's official catalogue was published in 1802 by Joseph Planta , which remained the standard guide to the library's contents until modern times. 51°31′46″N 0°7′37″W  /  51.52944°N 0.12694°W  / 51.52944; -0.12694 Ligature (writing) The earliest known script Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieratic both include many cases of character combinations that gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Other notable ligatures, such as

6984-552: The italic of Garamond ). Similarly, the number sign ⟨#⟩ originated as a stylized abbreviation of the Roman term libra pondo , written as ℔. Over time, the number sign was simplified to how it is seen today, with two horizontal strokes across two slash-like strokes. Now a logogram, the symbol is used mainly to denote (in the US) numbers, and weight in pounds. It has also been used popularly on push-button telephones and as

7081-598: The manuscript containing all the works of the Pearl Poet . The manuscripts are still catalogued by these call numbers in the British Library. According to scholar, Colin Tite, the system according to the busts was probably not in full effect until 1638; however there are notes that suggest that Sir Robert planned to arrange the library in this system before his death in 1631, but was probably, as Tite hypothesises, interrupted during

7178-472: The manuscript. It has been foliated twice, first in ink and later in pencil; the second foliation is used here. There are also a number of illustrations scattered throughout. The text of the Pearl Manuscript is commonly dated on palaeographical grounds to the last quarter of the 14th century, or at the latest to the beginning of the 15th century, the illustrations being added at either the same time as

7275-458: The names of common long names that might appear in news headings, such as " Eisenhower ", " Chamberlain ", and others. In these cases the characters did not appear combined, just more tightly spaced than if printed conventionally. The German letter ⟨ß⟩ ( Eszett , also called the scharfes S , meaning sharp s ) is an official letter of the alphabet in Germany and Austria. There

7372-503: The new upper case character for "ß" rather than replacing it with "SS" or "SZ" for geographical names. A new standardized German keyboard layout (DIN 2137-T2) has included the capital ß since 2012. The new character entered the official orthographic rules in June 2017. A prominent feature of the colonial orthography created by John Eliot (later used in the first Bible printed in the Americas,

7469-514: The newly established British Library. The British Library continues to organise its Cottonian books according to the famous busts. Sir Robert Cotton had organised his library according to the case, shelf and position of a book within a room twenty-six feet long and six feet wide. Each bookcase in his library was surmounted by a bust of a historical personage, including Augustus Caesar , Cleopatra , Julius Caesar , Nero , Otho , and Vespasian . In total, he had fourteen busts, and his scheme involved

7566-563: The number of traditional hand compositors and hot metal typesetting machine operators dropped because of the mass production of the IBM Selectric brand of electric typewriter in 1961. A designer active in the period commented: "some of the world's greatest typefaces were quickly becoming some of the world's worst fonts." Ligatures have grown in popularity in the 21st century because of an increasing interest in creating typesetting systems that evoke arcane designs and classical scripts. One of

7663-402: The only surviving copies of four of the masterpieces of medieval English literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Pearl , Cleanness , and Patience . It has been described as "one of the greatest manuscript treasures for medieval literature", and "the most famous of all romance manuscripts". The titles given here are those used by modern editors, all the poems being untitled in

7760-451: The original manuscript or manuscripts. At least one line, and possibly several more, have been lost from the original poems, while others seem to have been rearranged or added. It may have been an inept copy of a prestige illuminated manuscript commissioned by some wealthy patron. It has also been suggested that the Pearl manuscript or its exemplar may have collected each of its four texts from

7857-487: The poem was published in its entirety, edited by Frederic Madden , in 1839. Pearl , Patience and Cleanness were not edited until 1864, by Richard Morris . Editions of the full contents: Translations of the full contents: Cotton library The Cotton or Cottonian library is a collection of manuscripts that came into the hands of the antiquarian and bibliophile Sir Robert Bruce Cotton MP (1571–1631). The collection of books and materials Sir Robert held

7954-521: The priceless Codex Alexandrinus under one arm, a scene witnessed and later described in a letter to Charlotte, Lady Sundon , by Robert Freind , headmaster of Westminster School . The manuscript of The Battle of Maldon was destroyed, and that of Beowulf was heavily damaged. Also severely damaged was the Byzantine Cotton Genesis , the illustrations of which nevertheless remain an important record of Late Antique iconography . One of

8051-636: The replacement of the older "aa" with "å" became a de facto practice, an "a" with another "a" on top (aͣ) could sometimes be used, for example in Johannes Bureus 's, Runa: ABC-Boken (1611). The ⟨uo⟩ ligature ů in particular saw use in Early Modern High German , but it merged in later Germanic languages with ⟨u⟩ (e.g. MHG fuosz , ENHG fuͦß , Modern German Fuß "foot"). It survives in Czech , where it

8148-469: The simple letters ⟨a⟩ , ⟨o⟩ and ⟨u⟩ . The convention in Scandinavian languages and Finnish is different: there the umlaut vowels are treated as independent letters with positions at the end of the alphabet. In Middle English, the word the (written þe ) was frequently abbreviated as a ⟨þ⟩ ( thorn ) with a small ⟨e⟩ written as

8245-514: The text or a little later. It has also been argued that it was produced for the Stanley family by a scribe whose dialect locates him to south-east Cheshire or north-east Staffordshire . In recent years several scholars have reidentified the scribe's dialect as Yorkshire , and Joel Fredell has pointed out stylistic and thematic similarities with illuminated manuscripts produced in York which suggest that

8342-587: The work of a professional, Sarah M. Horrall described them as "very competently executed", and Joel Fredell has judged them to be skilled work comparable to the miniatures of the Bolton Hours , if inferior to London work and the products of the International Gothic style. The Pearl manuscript's scribe was not the author of the poems it contains, and indeed the number and nature of its scribal errors and textual anomalies show it to stand at some distance from

8439-410: Was a valuable resource and meeting-place not only for antiquarians and scholars but also for politicians and jurists of various persuasions, including Sir Edward Coke , John Pym , John Selden , Sir John Eliot , and Thomas Wentworth . Such important evidence was highly valuable at a time when the politics of the realm were historically disputed between king and Parliament. Sir Robert knew his library

8536-551: Was an optional ligature in some specific words that had been transliterated and borrowed from Ancient Greek, for example, "Æneas". It is still found as a variant in English and French words descended or borrowed from Medieval Latin, but the trend has recently been towards printing the ⟨A⟩ and ⟨E⟩ separately. Similarly, ⟨ Œ ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ , while normally printed as ligatures in French, are replaced by component letters if technical restrictions require it. In German orthography ,

8633-505: Was completely burned. At the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, official state records and important papers were poorly kept, and often retained privately, neglected or destroyed by public officers. The Cotton family were prominent in Shropshire , and their seat at Alkington , and they were connected to the polymath and sixteenth century statesman Sir Rowland Hill who published

8730-404: Was evidently acquired by Sir Robert Cotton , being then listed as " Gesta Arthuri regis et aliorum versu Anglico [Deeds of King Arthur and other matters in English verse]". His librarian bound it along with two quite unrelated Latin texts, from which it was not separated until a rebinding in 1964. A catalogue of Cotton's collection printed in 1696 mentioned this volume, and it was, along with all

8827-464: Was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), while most new digital typefaces did not include ligatures. As most of the early PC development was designed for the English language (which already treated ligatures as optional at best) dependence on ligatures did not carry over to digital. Ligature use fell as

8924-586: Was held by the Stanley family; Elizabeth Salter that it formed part of the library of one Yorkshire monastery or another, and passed from them to the 16th-century collector John Nettleton. The recorded history of the manuscript begins some time before 1614 with a description of it in the private library catalogue of the Yorkshire book-collector Henry Savile of Banke as "An owld booke in English verse beginninge Perle plesant to Princes pay in 4º . Limned ". Before 1621 it

9021-416: Was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, as they were based on handwriting. Ligatures made printing with movable type easier because one sort would replace frequent combinations of letters and also allowed more complex and interesting character designs which would otherwise collide with one another. Because of their complexity, ligatures began to fall out of use in

9118-695: Was more convenient for record keeping and transaction than the bulky long forms. Around the 9th and 10th centuries, monasteries became a fountainhead for these type of script modifications. Medieval scribes who wrote in Latin increased their writing speed by combining characters and by introducing notational abbreviations . Others conjoined letters for aesthetic purposes. 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

9215-419: Was of vital public interest and, although he made it freely available to consult, it made him an object of hostility on the part of the government. On 3 November 1629 he was arrested for disseminating a pamphlet held to be seditious (it had actually been written fifteen years earlier by Sir Robert Dudley ) and the library was closed on this pretext. Cotton was released on 15 November and the prosecution abandoned

9312-574: Was one of the three "foundation collections" of the British Museum in 1753. It is now one of the major collections of the Department of Manuscripts of the British Library . Cotton was of a Shropshire family who originated near Wem and were based in Alkington and employed by the Geneva Bible publisher, statesman and polymath Sir Rowland Hill in the mid 16th century. After the Dissolution of

9409-526: Was the only valid spelling according to the official orthography in Germany and Austria. In Switzerland, the ß is omitted altogether in favour of ss. The capital version (ẞ) of the Eszett character was occasionally used since 1905/06, has been part of Unicode since 2008, and has appeared in more and more typefaces. Since the end of 2010, the Ständiger Ausschuss für geographische Namen (StAGN) has suggested

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