Talk:և

There seems to be some debate about whether և is accepted as a separate letter or is still considered a ligature:

• w:Armenian alphabet#Ligatures
• w:Talk:Armenian alphabet#Ligatures
• w:Talk:Armenian alphabet#Incorrect statement about և ligature

— hippietrail 00:36, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Is there a way to make OS X not auto-collapse into this character?

No matter what, ե+ւ always collapses into եւ, and it makes it hard to read stuff whenever it's just randomly there because I don't recognize it easily. Chuck67322 (talk) 23:42, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't understand what you're saying. Do you always see the ligature and not ե+ւ? --Vahag (talk) 23:57, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

I also use a Mac, and բարեւ displays as four characters with Firefox (Default: Times New Roman font), but five for Safari (Default: Times NewRoman font). If I paste the word into TextEdit (Times New Roman font), I get four characters, but with Word for Mac (also Times New Roman font), I get five. Different applications seem to have different rules for rendering the characters, which seems to be mostly independent of the font. In TextEdit,I tried dozens of different fonts, and only DejaVu Sans, FreeMono, FreeSans and FreeSerif displayed five characters. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:35, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I see, thanks. @Chuck67322 The use of the ligature և is extremely common both in modern and Old Armenian. You should learn to recognize it easily, just like any other glyph of the Armenian alphabet. --Vahag (talk) 09:07, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Alright, thanks for the help.

Edit: Actually, I thought եւ was only to be used when you use it as a conjunction rather than for everything, like in բարեւ. Shouldn't բարեւ be 5 letters rather than 4?Chuck67322 (talk) 21:26, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

եւ and և are merely typographic variants of each other, like English ff and ff. There is no difference in usage whatsoever. You can write in whichever way you prefer. Ideally, MediaWiki software should automatically redirect և to եւ, or the other way around. Right now I have chosen եւ (two separate glyphs) as the Wiktionary standard, for style consistency. --Vahag (talk) 21:56, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, but Mac OS X is forcing me to only use the ligature, not ե ւ. In fact, I can't even see the differences in what you typed. It's all "եւ." It also auto-collapses մե, մի, մն, մխ, and վն and on their respective pages, they say their use is extremely rare. I don't get why it's even does it if it's rare. Do you think it has something to do with the font? It uses Mshtakan for me by default. I think I might be able to change the default Armenian font but I don't know if it's necessary. Chuck67322 (talk) 22:06, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't have Mshtakan, so I can't tell. Maybe Mac thinks ligatures are "classy", used in high-quality typography, I don't know. If you decide to change the default font, pick Arian AMU. --Vahag (talk) 22:42, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

What browser are you using? I think it has more to do with the program than the system itself. As I noted above, Safari and Firefox handle the ligature completely differently on my system (I'm not sure what other browsers such as Google Chrome would do). It may even differ between different versions of the same application. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:12, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

It's universal for me, whether it's on Safari or Firefox or Google Chrome or Textedit or Pages. I personally use Safari. However, I fixed the problem by moving out the Mshtakan font and replacing it with Arian AMU. Arian AMU didn't work, but now it's using Arial Unicode MS, which doesn't make the ligatures. The only thing is that it's a bit small, but whatever. Thanks for the help, guys. Chuck67322 (talk) 01:31, 6 January 2014 (UTC)