œ
Encyclopedia : : : : œ
- This article is about the typographic ligature, for other uses, see Oe
Ethel (Œ, œ; pronounced /eðəl/) is a letter used in medieval and early modern Latin, and in modern French, and also the vowel sound it represents. The letter is a ligature of o and e. In Old English the name was spelled eðel. Another name for this symbol is Œgule, or oegule.
Overview
The combination denotes a diphthong, IPA [oe], that had a value similar to English "OI". It was used in borrowings from Greek words having the diphthong "OI" ("ΟΙ, οι"). Both classical and modern practice is to write the letters separately, but the ligature was used in medieval and early modern writings, in part because "œ" was reduced to a simple long vowel (IPA: [e:]) in late Latin.
Πin different languages
In German, "Ö" (O with umlaut) is also a representation of a former "oe" combination; however, it does not represent a diphthong, but rather either one of the simple vowels /œ/ or /ø/. Nevertheless, classical borrowings into German commonly render Latin "oe" as "ö", as in Fötus or föderal. In Danish, Faroese, and Norwegian the equivalent letter is "Ø". It is not interchangeable with Ö in Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Estonian, Hungarian and Turkish, as Ö does not there represent O-Umlaut.
Borrowings into English from Latin words featuring "œ" are often spelled with the letter "e", especially in American English. For example, fœderal became federal in English, while fœtus became fetus only in American English. Other œs in English spell out as 2 separate letters "oe".
In French, "œ" is a true linguistic ligature, not just a typographic one (like the fi or fl ligatures), reflecting etymology. It is most prominent in the words cœur ("heart"), sœur ("sister") and œil ("eye"). The older spelling "oë" which used the diaeresis to signal the vowel separation (still in use in other French spellings such as ciguë) has been replaced by a plain "oe" in all but a few relics (Noël, Joël). The "œ" compound sound resembles eu. Thus, coefficient does not take an "œ", because the o and e sounds are pronounced distinctly. However, many documents are prepared either on older systems incapable of handling this character, by users who do not know how to enter it in their word processor or by users who can not be bothered using special entry methods to get it when oe will do. Handwriting sometimes does not make the distinction between "oe" and "œ".
The symbol "œ" is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the open-mid front rounded vowel. The small capital variant ɶ corresponds to a different sound, the open front rounded vowel, which is not confirmed to exist as a phoneme in any language.
In computing
For computers, when using the Unicode character set, the codes for "Œ" and "œ" are respectively 0152 and 0153 in hexadecimal. In HTML, the HTML character entity referencesŒ and œ can also be used. In Windows-1252 at positions 0x8C and 0x9C. In ISO-8859-15 they are at positions 0xBC and 0xBD. In Mac-Roman they are at positions 0xCE and 0xCF.ISO-8859-1 and IBM code page 850 do not have this character. These encodings are mainly used in two situations: text consoles and the Internet. Text consoles tend to use fixed width fonts which render a naturally wide ligature like œ in a rather ugly way anyway (e.g. sœur). Most modern Internet protocols provide means to specify the encoding and, even if ISO-8859-1 is specified, it is often treated as meaning Windows-1252.
See also
External links
- [Paleography: Special Characters in English Manuscripts], course notes
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