Talk:OE ligature

Was "&oelig;" used in native Latin words like "æ" was? And was it pronounced /oe/ or /oi/ in classical Latin? (Feel free to answer more precisely than the question ^_^.) -- Toby 03:07 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)

For Latin speaking competitions, I was taught to pronounce this to rhyme with the English word "boy" -- Derek Ross

Talk about pronuncation can go to Æ, I guess; it's the same concept. Know any native Latin words with "oe" (or possibly earlier "oi")? -- Toby 23:03 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)

Foederatus means allied and gives us English words like federal, confederation, etc. Also foetidus means "stinking" and gives us the English word foetid, sometimes spelled fetid. -- Derek Ross 01:37 Mar 21, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but doesn't French still use 'œ' in words? Of course it will probably often be rendered on computers as 'oe'. -- Kimiko 21:46 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)
 * Indeed it is. Words as "cœur" (heart), "sœur" (sister), etc. have it. In dictionaries it is treated alphabetically as "oe". D.D. 19:00 18 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Article placement
Why is this on OE instead of Œ? --User:Arj


 * Let's move it there. --User:Docu


 * I've moved it back. You aren't allowed to do that, as ISO-8859-1 doesn't cover OE, and english wikipedia title are in ISO-8859-1. It may have seemed to work, but only because your browser is non-standard.  Morwen 10:39, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I even tried two browsers and it worked. I suppose, if it's not on meta:MediaWiki User's Guide: Creating special characters, we shouldn't be using it and if it's indeed safer, let's leave it at OE. --User:Docu


 * Indeed. That page even specifically says you shouldn't use it. Using the HTML entity seems ok, but only in actual body text of articles.  Morwen 10:59, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Well, if you use it in the body of the text eventually someone will place brackets around it and create an article. This wouldn't necessarly be the first article with such characters in the title. Anyways, let's leave it at OE for now. --User:Docu

Several other articles have recently been moved to just their single-character names, including ð and þ, which are both mentioned on MWUG. (And, tbh, I didn't think to look here or on the MWUG first.) So I've moved it. Mea culpa. I'm not convinced it needs moving back, though, does it? &mdash; OwenBlacker 23:49, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)


 * ð and þ are part of ISO-8859-1, œ is not. -- Naive cynic 00:27, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Œ shows up correctly for me in the article title in Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 1.7.3, Opera 7.54, Internet Explorer 6 SP1, and K-Meleon 0.82. Most of those browsers are standard, so don't say it shows up "because my browser is non-standard". When does it not show up correctly? --Evice 21:19, Dec 24, 2004 (UTC)


 * It shows as you expect it:
 * in some language versions of IE (those that use CP-1252 as default 8-bit encoding), under default user settings,
 * in some language versions of browsers that attempt to be bug-to-bug compatible with IE, like Opera or Mozilla, under default user settings.
 * In every other case, it doesn't. It also breaks some tools, such as Wikipedia Quicksearch (built in Mozilla Firefox 1.0) or pywikiapi. -- Naive cynic 06:07, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * microsofts embrace and extent philosophy is bascially behind this
 * iso-8859-1 has a number of little used control chars in the 0x8? and 0x9? code spaces which are not meaningfull for html or most other applications.
 * when microsoft adopted a variant of this charset for the windows ansi code page they decided to fill this region with printable charactors the result is properly known as windows-1252
 * ms browsers (at least on systems where 1252 was the system charset) happilly rendered 1252 charactors in documents declared as 8859-1 and some of thier internet software actually sends 1252 chars claiming they are iso-8859-1 chars. Other browsers on windows systems often seem to do the same.
 * the bottom line is whilst you can get away with using 1252 chars as if they were iso-8859-1 chars in many cases it is certainly not behaviour we should be relying on.


 * Should this article be at Œ, OE ligature, Eðel, or Ethel (letter)? --KelisFan2K5 23:04, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Œ will only work in browsers which treat iso-8859-1 as if it were windows-1252. It seems that a lot of them do (at least by default) presumablly because so many web authors assume they are one and the same. It also causes an error when running the page through the w3c validator and is going to be hell to type so i think that ones out.


 * as for the final two options you give you will have to explain why you think they are more relavent names (one of them is only mentioned oned in the article and the other is not mentioned at all) Plugwash 23:59, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Œ is in Mac-Roman and Windows-1252, but sadly not ISO 8859-1 (they ran out of room :. Eðel may work, but most keyboards don't have a ð key. Also Ð and ð are not in MacRoman, so it'll show "E&loz;el" (&loz; is the glyph used for a non-existent character in the Chicago font) on old Macs. --KelisFan2K5 12:18, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

French
This article should tell us about the French usage. Is it a letter or a ligature? When can "oe" be written as "œ" and when is that not allowed? &mdash; Hippietrail 14:05, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Companion Ligature
Does anyone know how I get the œ ligature with a macron over it? - James


 * You need to use the "combining macron" &amp;#773;: œ&#773; - it may not render equally well in all fonts and on all systems of course. &mdash; Hippietrail 05:37, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * combining macron is &amp;772; not &amp;773; the combination still looks pretty shitty on my system though (œ&#772;). you could also possiblly overline the sybol e.g. ( œ ) Plugwash 14:44, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * If its important to look good, you could create a font that uses the modern special features of OpenType and similar formats so that œ+&amp;772; is specially remapped (you'd start with something like Bitstream Vera that you can edit, then create an extra precomposed character, then create a mapping table, I think, that does things automagically. I don't know how tho). Alternatively, for some reason TeX/LaTeX have always been able to do combining characters niftly, so you might typeset your document with that. (Neither option can be used on the web except as PDF, unfortunately, until more font manufactures do the right thing with combining characters). Felix the Cassowary 03:26, 11 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Unicode oe with macron: œ̄ (E659) DivermanAU (talk) 05:37, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Fetus
"while fœtus became fetus only in American English" I've read several places that "foetus" is a false etymology added by foolish Brits, like iland ---> island. Rather more specifically that the "oe" is only used in direct borrowings from Greek, and that fetus is borrowed from Latin, which dropped the "oe." Anybody know about this?


 * That's what I've heard, it was origianlly fetus then someone thought it was Greek and made it fœtus.Cameron Nedland 21:31, 27 June 2006 (UTC)