Spelling of heaven
  • Kathy
    Posts: 5,500
    Why is it Ave Regina Coelorum, but Regina Caeli? O or A?
  • JamJam
    Posts: 636
    both.

    Medieval Latin is well known for having inconsistent spellings of things. Scribes would write down what they heard, and there was no standardized dictionary, no Webster's to turn to for verification. "cael" is the most common spelling of that prefix, but in my Latin dictionary "coel" has an entry that says ..."see 'cael'"
  • Joseph Mansfield
    Posts: 113
    Ah, yes, the ae and oe ligatures. A pet peeve of mine is that while there is usually a way to get the ae ligature into a text (insert special character), there is no good way to get the oe ligature because it is not in the special characters table. If we are dealing with "coeli" we can just write "caeli" instead. But what about the short responsory in the LH for the triduum? It includes the word "oboediens", which just does not look right if we make it "obaediens". The irony is that the character tables include tables called "Latin", yet do not include all the characters needed to write Latin.
  • JamJam
    Posts: 636
    you don't have to use the combined forms of the letters. Isn't that more of a British thing than an actual Latin thing? All the manuscripts I've seen have the letters separate.
  • Joseph Mansfield
    Posts: 113
    Jam: Don't know about British, but I don't recall any Latin liturgical books, old or new, that do not use the ligature. The Latin LoH which I use in the current edition uses the ligature. The only non-ecclesiastical Latin which I have at hand is one of the Loeb classics series, and it does not use the ligatures.

    I like the ligature because it indicates when the two vowels form a diphthong, likewise its absence shows at a glance when the vowels stand apart. A useful thing to know in singing. On the other hand, there are very few oe sequences in Latin, and very few words where the ae is two separate vowels, so little is lost if the ligatures are not used.

    Final word is that I use the ligatures because I think they are nifty. De gustatibus ...
  • JamJam
    Posts: 636
    aha. Most of the Latin I've been exposed to is either classical or medieval; I wasn't thinking of liturgical Latin right off. That could explain it.

    I was looking through my character map and sure enough I found "ae" ligatures but not "oe" ... although I found some upside-down "oe" ones. Dunno what those are for.
  • Joseph Mansfield
    Posts: 113
    There is a way to approximate the oe ligature, or so I have heard. One types oe and then sets the intercharacter spacing for the two letters to zero. Lotta trouble.

    I had never noticed the upside-down oe. Will look for it next time I have OpenOffice.org running. It is very likely something some nefarious coder put in to trick me (a programmer) into wasting six days trying to find a way to turn it right side up.

    I am not taking the bait.

    With my old DOS software and a dot matrix impact printer, I in fact created the oe ligature one dot at a time, then set up OfficeWriter to shift the printer into graphic mode, print the array of dots, then shift back to text. Worked just fine. One of the many areas in which DOS and DOS programs were more powerful than Windows. Don't get me started on text macros and communications protocols.
  • Ioannes Andreades
    Posts: 310
    Ancient evidence is is unequivocal. The diphthong is ae, not oe. Without the benefit of the multi-volume Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, printers until comparatively recently were often just guessing.

    I was working on a translation of the Dies Irae recently. There was the line "Iuste iudex ultionis". I saw it translated, "Just judge of vengeance," in an old missal. Of course, in Medieval Latin, iuste could just as easily be fem. sing. genit. as masc. sing. voc. I translated it, "Judge of just vengeance," which struck me as somewhat more poetically expressed. I don't know whether that line comes from anywhere, so I don't know whether I'm right.

    P.S. Cena should never be spelled coena. There was never a diphthong in that word and has nothing to do with Greek koinos.
  • Steve CollinsSteve Collins
    Posts: 1,021
    I'm not sure what set of characters you looking through. My MSWindows includes a ton of special characters under "normal" font, including all the diphthongs, with AND without accents! I can also achieve them with Control/Shift/7 followed by either a, A, or o.
  • JamJam
    Posts: 636
    found it: œ and Œ

    have you tried changing fonts in your character map, Mr. Mansfield?

    In my case I just scrolled past it on accident twice. I'm using the default Ubuntu Linux character map.
  • Joseph Mansfield
    Posts: 113
    Have found AE, ae with and without accents; OE, oe only without accents. Have tried Arial, Times New Roman, "normal"; do not have Ubuntu. Have tried MS Word, OpenOffice; the latter has no "normal" font. Tinkering for nearly two hours, can't put any more time into it right now.
  • JDE
    Posts: 588
    As a public service, I'm attaching a handy list of the ALT + (number pad) combos for Umlauts and other special characters. I need these because I often use German or other non-English texts in engraving.

    Since I can't remember all of them off the top of my head as I used to do, I made a table.
    Umlauts.pdf
    13K
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,182
    Another help in typing accented characters is to configure the computer to recognize the keyboard in "US international" layout. Then you can combine a special key (in my case Right-Alt) with other keys to produce various special characters (such as accented á, é, í, ó, ú, and the ligature æ.

    A set of stickers for the keyboard helps: they're available for a few bucks through Amazon:

    photo 1
    photo 2
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