A comparison of ligatures on gravestones in Scotland, Northern Germany and the French Basque region

Although ligatures have a long history and can be found on a range of artefacts, they are particularly characteristic of gravestone inscriptions of the 17th and 18th centuries in several parts of Western Europe. The grouping of two or more letters as a ligature can be attributed to minimising mason’s costs and workload, or stone brittleness, but it is suggested that their function was primarily a space-saving device. This research, based solely on statistical analysis, suggests that there may be other, possibly more common, reasons as to why they were employed in gravestone inscriptions. Ligatures have an uneven distribution throughout Western Europe. They are especially frequent in gravestone inscriptions from north and south-west Scotland, Northern Germany and the French Basque region. These areas were selected for analysis. Ligatures were recorded from 36 sites in northern and south-western Scotland, 35 sites in Northern Germany and 24 sites in the French Basque region. Frequencies at each site were calculated. The most common ligature in Scotland and north Germany was HE and in the French Basque region it was DE. All ligature frequencies were compared with the frequencies of bigrams in English, German and French to determine whether or not this influenced their frequency in gravestone inscriptions. It was found that there was no evidence of correlation between gravestone ligatures and bigrams in any of the three languages. The possible reasons for the use of ligatures are discussed.