typography course, Eötvös Loránd University

The 26 letters of the Roman alphabet are not enough to distinguish all the sounds that occur in European languages (and others that use this set of symbols for writing). One way of adding new symbols to accommodate for the necessary distinctions is using diacritic marks. Dozens have developed in the past two millennia, this lecture surveys to most commonly used ones. It also looks at letter combinations that merged into single symbols, so-called ligatures.

reading handout slides