As promised, I've scanned in a couple of samples of the text I was reading for my entry "ʒere". I think we'll all agree that there are both ezh and yogh characters. The flat top on the ezh is very clear, as you can see below.
After reading the excellent discussion Muke pointed me to at http://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/ezhyogh.html, I spent some more time looking at my source. I think I've resolved the issue now -- it is essentially a typographical problem. There's several different font faces, which as far as I can tell are identical, except that the sizes differ. For reasons that still elude me, the ezh is only (and always?) used in the larger face, and the yogh is only (and always?) used in the smaller face.
The images were also selected for their proximity to some other interesting glyphs, that I mentioned earlier. Here's the first image:
This is the quote that I used for "ʒere", I selected it pretty much randomly as the first occurence of an ezh that I came across. It has three thorns, an ezh, three superscript lowercase letter Es, and one of those crossed double Ls. I now believe that the ezh should have been typeset as a yogh, and was not because the larger point size apparently had no yogh. I'm very curious about the use of the superscript letters. In "þe", it's no great surprise, as the letter at least completes the word. But in the other two cases, it seems to be a replacement for "th". Muke wrote in the beer parlour:
This list closely matches what I'm seeing. I've got examples of:
That adds s and l, (not present in Unicode?) which Muke didn't mention, and leaves a u & v unexplained. For e, o, is, and possibly l, I suspect some obscure Latin term. Any suggestions?
This image includes a line of the "smaller" font face, for comparison to the larger size that makes up the majority of the sample.
In the this sample, I've got example of "ȝere". It's clearly a round topped yogh, and not an ezh. There's another occurence in "ȝerre" a little later. Plenty of thorns, and more occurences of the unexplained tilde crossed L. Note that it is crossed on the double L at the ends of Ball, Aprill, and cristall, but not in the middle of William. I've not found it used except at the end of words ending with a double L. The single l crossed with a tilde is used consistently in this example for li. The curly nature of the cross is quite clear, and it's not like two crossed L's from the Unicode character set.
Finally, I have one crossed (ħ) and one crossed (ƀ), both occuring in typical contexts. The ħ at the end of a word, usually following a t, and the ƀ in oƀ. Could the tħ be related to the thorn some how?
Also, regarding the swash S variant: Thanks a bunch Muke! That's exactly the insight that I had missed despite spending a good while looking at it. The is a small difference in the glyph for the ſ and f. In the typface I was looking at, it was pretty subtle. And seeing the sans serif version finally made the connection with the very tall swashed italic S I've seen frequently.
I'm clearly not using the right tools to find and use the full range of unicode characters. How were you able to locate the superscripted letters, and how would I locate the tall swashed italic S that I'm looking for. I've been to the unicode.org website, but the character charts are in 3 dozen different files. :-( Is everybody else in the same boat I'm in with a bunch of crappy Microsoft fonts that support most but not all of the Unicode standard? I've downloaded the Code2001 font, but it seems to have a very limited character set.
Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I realize that this isn't really "dictionary" related, but I haven't found anyone else who cares or seems to know anything about these issues... -- CoryCohen 03:49, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)