Latin Alphabet Ligatures - Non-Latin Alphabets

Non-Latin Alphabets

Ligatures are not limited to Latin script:

• The Brahmic abugidas make frequent use of ligatures in consonant clusters. The number of ligatures employed may be 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.ttf, 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.
• A number of ligatures have been employed in the Greek alphabet, in particular a combination of omicron (Ο) and upsilon (Υ) which later gave rise to a letter of the Cyrillic script — see Ou (letter).
• Cyrillic ligatures: Љ, Њ, Ы, Ѿ. Iotified Cyrillic letters are ligatures of the early Cyrillic decimal I and another vowel: Ꙗ (ancestor of Я), Ѥ, Ѩ, Ѭ, Ю (descended from another ligature, Оу, an early version of У). Two letters of the 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). A ligature of ya (Я) and e also exists: Ԙԙ, as do some more ligatures: Ꚅꚅ and Ꚉꚉ.
• Some forms of the Glagolitic 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.
• In the Hebrew alphabet, the letters aleph and lamed 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 l- (written aleph plus lamed, in the Hebrew script) is the definite article in Arabic.
• In the Arabic alphabet, 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 + ʾalif medial or final: ﻼ. Unicode has a special Allah ligature at U+FDF2: ﷲ.
• Urdu (one of the main languages of South Asia), which uses a calligraphic version of the Arabic-based Nasta`liq script, requires a great number of ligatures in digital typography. InPage, a widely used desktop publishing tool for Urdu, uses Nasta`liq fonts with over 20,000 ligatures.
• In ASL, 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.
• The Japanese language uses two ligatures, one for hiragana, ゟ, which is a vertical writing ligature of the characters よ and り, and one for katakana, ヿ, which is a vertical writing ligature of the characters コ and ト. Both ligatures have fallen out of use in modern Japanese.
• Lao 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).
• In many runic texts ligatures are common. Such ligatures are known as bind-runes and were optional.