Hi Michael, I generally agree with you. But, as far as I know (as definitely a non-linguist), the semantic cases for ae vs its ligature and for oe vs its ligature are of basically the same weight. Which is why I fell back to visual similarity when comparing them. If there is a semantic case for why one is more critical than the other, I have no problem taking that comparison instead which choosing between them. Bill Jouris Inside Products bill.jouris@insidethestack.com 831-659-8360 925-855-9512 (direct) From: Michael Bauland <Michael.Bauland@knipp.de> To: latingp@icann.org Sent: Monday, February 11, 2019 6:16 AM Subject: Re: [Latingp] AE, OE, and Ligatures 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 -- ____________________________________________________________________ | | | knipp | Knipp Medien und Kommunikation GmbH ------- Technologiepark Martin-Schmeisser-Weg 9 44227 Dortmund Germany Dipl.-Informatiker Fon: +49 231 9703-0 Fax: +49 231 9703-200 Dr. Michael Bauland SIP: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Software Development E-mail: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Register Court: Amtsgericht Dortmund, HRB 13728 Chief Executive Officers: Dietmar Knipp, Elmar Knipp _______________________________________________ Latingp mailing list Latingp@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/latingp