Looking again at the visual evidence, I believe this is not a strong case for variants. But it may be a candidate for visual similarity.

From a visual standpoint I don’t see it as a clear-cut case. Doing a comparison of the code points "æ" "œ" using wordmark.it, the great majority of fonts show them very distinguishable (e.g. Arial: æ œ, Times: æ œ, Courier: æ œ, Calibri: æ œ).

From an orthography viewpoint, I don’t see good support, but of course, this is only one data point.

-Dennis

On 2/11/19, 9:16 AM, "Latingp on behalf of Michael Bauland" <latingp-bounces@icann.org on behalf of Michael.Bauland@knipp.de> wrote:

    Hi Bill,

    thanks for the summary.

    I agree with you if purely looking at the visual confusability issue.

    However, with ae vs. æ and oe vs. œ the issue is not about visual

    sameness, at least that's what the IP argued on our phone call. They

    said that in most languages ae and æ have the same meaning and could be

    exchanged. I can only talk for German, and there it might be ok to write

    ae instead of the ligature but certainly not the other way round. But to

    be honest, I personally never used such a word in German.

    Therefore the reason to make ae and its ligature variants would be

    purely semantic. And then we have a problem: how to decide which variant

    relation is stronger? If all are visual, it's (more or less) easy to

    decide which visual similarity is stronger, but there's no metric to

    compare visual and semantic similarities with each other.

    Cheers,

    Michael

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