

Why A Symbol For 'The' Probably Won't Take Off - thejteam
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/14/200739101/why-a-symbol-for-the-probably-wont-take-off

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teilo
In the history of the Latin alphabet, ligatures have come and gone.

As someone who commonly has his head buried in medieval manuscripts, I can
tell you that printers have been trying to squeeze more economy out of a sheet
of paper to a much greater degree then, as now. Every common word-ending, for
instance, had a unique ligature, as did many small words. The ampersand,
incidentally, was one of them. Some of these manuscripts are almost syllabic.
It makes sense when every letter has to be set individually.

As type become progressively easier to set, ligatures ceased to be so much
about economy and speed, but rather about aesthetics. Some relics, such as the
ampersand still remain.

And now, with Unicode, effectively, locking alphabets down to a much greater
degree than at any time in the history of the human race, I can't see this
happening.

