L/V 10 Tip of the Day #61 Ligatures and thorns

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10 Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired the forum posts: something by Rosie recently that I can't find.

Background: ligatures are "archaic" single letters reflecting Greek or Latin diphthongs e.g. æ, œ, ßn See List of English words that may be spelled with a ligature - Wikipedia. In British English these are more often reflected by two letters rather than a ligature while American English tended to drop one vowel. The results in a search: Note that the British and ligature spellings (last two columns) give the same results; the American spelling (second column) gives different results. The first column searches for all three spellings and gives the most complete results. Note that one needs only one of the ligature or the two vowels not both.

The current digraph th was a thorn until the 14th century. See Thorn (letter) - Wikipedia. While the thorn itself can be searched for normally, the scribal/printers abbreviations for the, this, that cannot be despite being used in the Tyndale Bible. Note that the original Authorized Version used these abbreviations according to the Wikipedia article.

 

Please vote for British vs. American spellings in search | Faithlife which requests "Please either add an option or expand the match all forms option to search for both the American and the British spellings of a word. It is unrealistic to expect your users to know and remember to request the variants, causing them to miss relevant results.".