Polish: the ł_ł ligature revisited

Andreas Stötzner

This matter has been puzzling me for quite some time.

I don’t know if this has been discussed previously nor do I know how many font makers care about the ligature łł for Polish. In my opinion it is an important one.
I wonder what might be the appropriate solution for the stroke. As Adam Twardoch has demonstrated, in script style typefaces a single stroke above the l’s, possibly with a wavy touch, would be the preferable choice. But I’m not sure if this solution would also be the best one for e.g. mainstream sans or serif text fonts.
By now I can imagine these five potential models:



Which one would be the best?

Next question: is there also a special requirement for the capital version?

André G. Isaak

I'm not a Polish speaker, but your 1st and 5th options look a lot like Jagietto. It would be helpful to see what your 't' looks like.

Andreas Stötzner

AbrahamLee

I’m no expert on the matter, but I think #5 is the most similar to two individual glyphs. However, to avoid the mistake of confusing it with /t, maybe the slash could just be a little steeper across the two, similar to the slant of the single glyph? My two cents.

Russell McGorman

Perhaps number 5 with the "wavy effect". 

Khaled Hosny

How do your łł look like with no ligature at all? It looks like the most legible option (in other fonts) in my ignorant eyes and there is no clash to be fixed by a ligature.

Russell McGorman

I think there could a clash... The two glyphs side by side can be distracting, even if they don't collide. I can see how it might be desirable to mitigate the effect. I don't believe they need to actually touch, but their weight, length and/or angles could be adjusted, however subtly, so that when they're paired they don't stick out like sore thumbs.

Vasil Stanev

Copy a Polish text by hand, write it out to see how it should look. Same goes for the ogonek. Go on, give it a try.
A Pole will have the ultimate answer, but in my opinion the whole thing is done to avoid confusion with the t, so only 3 or 4 is right ( is there a difference anyway? Ascender height should dictate how long you make the l's)
The sound itself is an L, but made with the cheeks, and is called ew. What I am more concerned about is the naming it in the most robust way, so it can show correctly in all or most ecosystems. Should it be lslash_lslash?

James Puckett

Andreas Stötzner said:

I don’t know if this has been discussed previously nor do I know how many font makers care about the ligature łł for Polish. In my opinion it is an important one.

What makes łł an important ligature? This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it. Are Polish graphic designers complaining about fonts not having this ligature? Or is it just a common feature of Polish handwriting that would be nice to have in fonts?

Theunis de Jong

James makes a good point. Does it really look that bad with two regular łł's side by side?

Russell McGorman

Does "does it really look that bad" not mean it could look better?

Christian Thalmann

How about simply offsetting the two slashes in łł vertically a little bit to avoid collision?

Dan Reynolds

I am with James and Theunis here. I am not at all convinced that Polish readers need us to swoop in and create a ligature (that would have no basis in historical practice) that they have not been asking for. Because we think it would “look better.” There are plenty of young type designers active in Poland today. Maybe ask them for their opinions by e-mail, etc.

Eimantas Paškonis

For #1-4 I wouldn't even have guessed that it's łł. As for #5, increase the angle (make it more diagonal) and it's gucci.

Bhikkhu Pesala

The first is wrong because it is similar to latin small letter middle welsh ll 
The second to fourth are not recognisable as anything.
The fifth is the best IMO, and preferable to łł

Vasil Stanev

Ask ze Poles. Everything else is speculation.

Jan Pietkiewicz

As a proud representative of ze Poles, I would consider only #5 to be remotely acceptable. However, in a normal reading context it would certainly drive my attention away from the text. Since there is no widely-recognized precedent of such ligatures in text settings, they would strike most Polish readers as confusing and unnecessary.

I would also like to add that łł letter pair is extremely rare* in Polish, and that words containing it sound slightly weird or funny to most ears. I believe there is no need to amplify this impression by introducing an unusual glyph.

Outside of the realm of script fonts, I can only imagine the use of such ligature in a context where a designer would prefer to highlight the double ł for some reason, e.g. in a wordmark.

By the way, if you wish to test your łłs against your ts, you can use the actual surname Kołłątaj.

* I consulted a Polish corpus and found only the following words containing the double ł that are not proper nouns: 1. the (increasingly archaic-sounding) verbs mełł and pełł (and various declinations and derivations thereof), 2. the noun mułła (mullah), 3. a handful of seldom-used compound words formed with the prefix pół- (half-): półłan, półłuk, półłysy, półłyżwa. The proposed ligature is therefore hardly "important", as the words in which it would appear are so infrequently used.

Bhikkhu Pesala

Asking a Pole is unlikely to be of any help unless they also know about font design, ligatures, and archaic orthography. Even a learned Polish linguist may never have seen the words printed using a font with ligatures, so they might expect to see only two l slashes because that is all they know. 

It is far better trust a font designer's instincts for what looks right and is easily legible. If in doubt, do nowt, i.e. don't add the ligature or make it a discretionary ligature

Andreas Stötzner

Thank you very much for this well-informed statement, @Jan Pietkiewicz. I see that I may have ventured for too much of a good thing, apparently. Following A. Twardochs elaboration on the matter I was under the impression that a łł ligature does have some merits for Polish typography, not only with script fonts. But it seems to be not the case.

Thank you all for your opinions, dear colleagues. – And now a thread about the most useless ligatures in general?

Jan Pietkiewicz

An łł ligature makes sense in a script font, because in Polish handwriting (including both historical calligraphy and letterforms taught to schoolchildren), the ł is written with a vertical or a wavy stroke above the l (rather than a diagonal one in the middle). There the two strokes in łł would naturally meld together, like so:

In order for your examples #2-4 to be correct (i.e. consistent), you would also need to have a regular ł with a top stroke, but that's simply not a done thing in roman type.

I would say that the version #5 is acceptable as an adventurous novelty, best relegated to discretionary ligatures set. Some readers will find it odd or affected, but it is more or less legible.

An argument could be made for a much subtler łł ligature, as suggested by @Russell_McGorman. If the pair looks exceptionally busy in a given typeface, I don't suppose it would be a crime to ever so slightly shorten the stroke in the first ł, for example.

The main thing to remember is that the actual application for such a glyph is very limited. Still, you have the chance make some designer working on materials concerning  Władysław Jagiełło or Hugo Kołłątaj very happy.

André G. Isaak

On reflection, I did once make a lslash_lslash ligature, but it simply involved a slight raising of the first slash and a slight lowering of the second slash to avoid too much activity in the same place between the letters.

André G. Isaak

The first is wrong because it is similar to latin small letter middle welsh ll 

I don't think confusion with middle welsh would be a major issue for most Polish texts.

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

btw, if I could just throw in my two cents here.

An ł_ł ligature makes sense only in a script font as a fix of clash between two ł.

In sans or serif fonts only as decorative ligature, and in #5 form.

If we're already talking about ł_ł ligature in script fonts,
do not forget about other "ł" problems, like a ł_k, d_ł :

and most probably G_ł, Z_ł, E_ł, C_ł ..

Vasil Stanev

I am so glad one more phenomenon is clarified

• is there a list of combinations of this glyph that never occur?
• Can it stand at the beginning of a word, so the first part is capitalized and the second be lower case? Was it different historically?
• what is it's history in case we are making medieval and other period fonts

Jan Pietkiewicz

Vasil Stanev said:

• is there a list of combinations of this glyph that never occur?

I'm not sure what do you mean by "this glyph": the regular, single ł or the esoteric and perplexing ł_ł.

According to my quick-and-dirty analysis of data from an open Polish dictionary, the ł appears in bigrams (two-character combinations) together with about any other letter from the Polish alphabet. The possible exceptions include: ć_ł, f_ł, l_ł, ń_ł, ś_ł, ź_ł, but they may still turn up in proper nouns (for instance, f_ł features in Aerofłot, the Polish transcription of Аэрофло́т). Here are the pairs sorted by frequency:

ał	326851<br>ła	205018<br>ły	122808<br>ło	116014<br>ił	67510<br>łb	66929<br>łe	57379<br>łu	37184<br>ył	34519<br>pł	23724<br>oł	23443<br>sł	23236<br>eł	20867<br>kł	20616<br>ół	20301<br>gł	19828<br>dł	17899<br>zł	14800<br>łk	13915<br>ęł	12589<br>tł	10788<br>uł	10304<br>bł	10240<br>wł	8925<br>łą	7614<br>łó	7303<br>hł	7166<br>ął	6703<br>łę	6253<br>łt	5904<br>łc	5208<br>łz	4562<br>mł	4459<br>łn	3873<br>łg	3403<br>rł	3205<br>łs	3095<br>łd	2561<br>łp	2182<br>łw	1702<br>żł	1419<br>łm	1298<br>łż	890<br>łr	661<br>łź	520<br>łl	423<br>cł	414<br>łł	403<br>jł	271<br>łf	259<br>łś	253<br>łi	205<br>łć	187<br>łj	102<br>łh	81<br>łń	66<br>nł	21

If what you're after are the combinations of ł_ł with other letters, the list gets much shorter:

ełł	251<br>łła	113<br>ółł	112<br>łły	112<br>łło	76<br>łłb	33<br>ołł	22<br>łłe	22<br>łłą	14<br>ułł	10<br>łłs	9<br>łłu	9<br>iłł	8<br>łłó	2<br>łłę	2

But do keep in mind that my data doesn't account for proper nouns, such as the colorful names of historical Grand Dukes of Lithuania: Jagiełło, Skirgiełło and Świdrygiełło.

Vasil Stanev said:

• Can it stand at the beginning of a word, so the first part is capitalized and the second be lower case? Was it different historically?

If you're referring to ł_ł, then no - there are no words beginning with it and, to my best knowledge, there never were any. As I mentioned before, this particular letter/sound combination is exceptionally rare and hard (or at least weird) to pronounce in Polish, and a word beginning with it could possibly appear only as a jocular neologism in avant-garde poetry.

Jan Pietkiewicz

Vasil Stanev said:

• what is it's history in case we are making medieval and other period fonts

The letter ł itself was introduced to Polish orthography in the early 16th century. Behold its print debut:

It is very difficult, however, to find early examples of ł_ł pair in manuscripts and old books due to its scarcity, as well as fluctuations in spelling. I wasn't able, for example, to find any pre-1700s books or manuscripts pertaining to the members of the noble family Radziwiłł in which the name would be written with a double ł (rather than as Radziwił, Radziwil, Radziwill or in latinized form Radzivilius). The earliest "Radziwiłł" with the ł_ł ligature that I managed to locate comes from 1748 and unfortunately isn't the epitome of excellent formal calligraphy:

The following examples were taken mostly from 19th century sources:

During my research (such as it was) I came upon this curious Ł_Ł ligature, featured in a 1795 copperplate portrait:

In other news, I processed the list of all articles in Polish Wikipedia in search of proper nouns with ł_ł. The resulting list is relatively short (about 180 entries) and consists almost exclusively of names and surnames of foreign (Lithuanian, Russian, Central Asian etc.) origin. Together with a dozen or so actual Polish words (and their inflected forms, which push the count to several hundreds due to a high degree of inflection in Polish language), these constitute the entire corpus of (Polish) words in which the ł_ł ligature would come in handy. I think this conclusively demonstrates that type designers would be best advised to put some other glyphs at the top of their to-do lists.

Andreas Stötzner

Jan, dziękuję for all this excellent input.
But the copperplate capital find is a marvel. I will be dreaming of this.

Rafael "rafaeiro" Ferreira

So that's why doing / t with tall bar is very wrong. Cool

Adam Jagosz

I don't know about t's with tall bars, but I've definitely seen t's with diagonal bars

Rafael "rafaeiro" Ferreira

I wanted to say stems, you see???

John Hudson

The resulting list is relatively short (about 180 entries) .... I think this conclusively demonstrates that type designers would be best advised to put some other glyphs at the top of their to-do lists.

And here I was thinking 180 was quite a lot.