Abstract
IF all writers, or, better still, all printers followed the rule of Mr. Horace Hart, and never permitted the use of æ and œ, but always spelled them out ae and oe, many happy results would ensue. Authors would cease to confuse editors and printers with undecipherable attempts to represent a diphthong; 5 per cent, of the misprints that have to be corrected in technical biological papers would disappear; zoological names, if no others, might at last be written correctly, and the student no longer confused with coelalus when caelatus was meant, and so forth. There need be no confusion with those rare words in which the vowels are distinct, since the custom of printing “aërated,” “oölogy,” and the like already prevails. If the only evil in sight is that Mr. Montagu Browne will feel impelled to the exceedingly unnecessary task of rewriting his museum labels, by all means let us entreat the printers to reform.
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BATHER, F. The Use of Digraphs. Nature 58, 412 (1898). https://doi.org/10.1038/058412a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/058412a0
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