French geeking

[danaeris]

So, sometimes in french we use something called the oe ligature, which looks like this:
œ

I'm comparing two printouts of what should be the same document, and one of them as eye spelt:
oeil

and the other has it spelt:
œil

Are they both right? Are there any cases in French where the ligature is necessary in order to be correct?

On a related note, it amazes me how I still have a relatively advanced (high school) reading comprehension in French, but don't feel that I can string a sentence together for my life, and likewise have difficulty following people who speak French because of accents and speed. Ah, Français, tu me manques...

Comments

[etherlad.livejournal.com]

Near as I can tell, they're both correct, although there should be a standard spelling within a single document.

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

I'm almost positive that the œ ligature is optional in French.

However, wikipedia confirms that æ is a distinct letter from ae in old Germanic/Nordic languages and shouldn't be substituted - so they're not optional in all cases.

(Even though English is Germanic, the ligature diphthongs I know of derive from Latin and seem to be interchangeable. Though British English uses them more often than American English, because there are a few spellings that have been lost in American. For instance, encyclopædia - which spelling is used in Canada? But then there's the whole question of current rules vs. rules before computers and typewriters made ligatures partly obsolete.)

I had a wicked cool typography geekiness moment this weekend. I was looking at an old engraving at an antique bookstore, and I realized where eszett (ß) comes from. These days it's not used in English (and it's recently fallen out of use in German, too), but the print I saw was English and had a ligature between an old-fashioned "long s" (the 's' in colonial-era printing that looks like an f with no crossbar) and a regular s, to make a double s that looked a lot like ß.

Ligatures are awesome!

[angel-thane.livejournal.com]

The Canadian spelling is 'encyclopaedia'

[ex-sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

The ligatures Œ and Æ are used in in French. Œil is more typographically correct than oeil.