Re: [latina] How to start a translation

[Paul Norton <paul paulnorton org>]

On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 21:58 -0400, Garcia, Rafael wrote:

> Technically dipthong is a phonetic concept. æ and œ are called ligatures. Whether or not you write them as ligatures, they ae and oe are still dipthongs in latin, unless you explicitly write a diaeresis or macron over one of the letters. Also au and and ei are dipthongs too but they are not ever written as ligatures.
> In my opinion ligatures are a matter of font choice not language. If such a font as  "medieval latin ligatured" existed, then it would automatically display all ae and oe as ligatures.  While I don't mind if someone converts my ae and oe contributions to ligatures for me, for the most part ligatures are eyecandy, or someone's attempt to save space in print. Thus I think for those who like ligatures, the thing to do is create a new font. For example, on Vicipaedia, under gadgets in preferences you can choose "Ligaturas monstrare (æ, œ)" and the ligatures are shown.

Hi Rafael,

To me these translated files end up as a certain UTF-8 binary
representation in a file, and the binary representation for AE is not
the same as the binary representation for Æ. I'm curious how vicipædia
does it then because the vicipædia webpage is stored in a certain
representation and somehow it or the browser (or more likely both)
figures out how to display either AE or Æ.

I know there's a lot of literature out there on this subject that I was
hoping to avoid. Looks like I'll need to delve into it regardless.