"Glued" was the word you were looking for, "attached" or "connected" is the word you actually are looking for. It's a familiar concept to anyone who's written in cursive, which would include most of western europe actually (though in latin-alphabet cursive scripts, letters don't change that much based on their position, just the connection).
We used to have the long-s (ſ) as a special variant but I think that went out of style a hundred years ago. In German it's mostly seen in old Fraktur texts, so these days it's still sometimes found in newspaper logos set in Fraktur -- incidentally, contrary to what most people seem to think, the nazis actually tried to get rid of Fraktur and Sütterlin (the handwriting style at the time), there was just a lot of old signage around during WW2, which is why it has entered popular culture as "that weird typeface the nazis used".
German still has an sz-ligature (ß), but like the Dutch ij-ligature that has actually ceased to be considered a ligature and become an actual character (which is why the ij-ligature in Dutch sometimes appears as ÿ or Ü and why you never see German sz-ligatures separated into the actual letters "s" and "z" -- in fact, the ligature is instead rendered as "ss" if it can not be printed as a ligature and actually resembles an ss-ligature in most fonts, maybe except for Berlin road signs, which also sport a tz ligature).
Oh, and, because I grew up with computers I never adopted proper cursive handwriting and to this day still write in a slurred print without connectors (which is probably why it took me ages to develop a distinct signature).
>> incidentally, contrary to what most people seem to think, the nazis actually tried to get rid of Fraktur
Wiki says they were for it before they were against it:
The Fraktur typefaces were particularly heavily used during the time of Nazism, when they were initially represented as true German script, the press scolded for its frequent use of "Roman characters" under "Jewish influence" and German émigrés urged to use only "German script".[6] However, in 1941 Fraktur was banned in a Schrifterlass (edict on script) signed by Martin Bormann as so-called Schwabacher Judenlettern ("Schwabacher Jewish letters").[7]
Yeah, it's pretty hard to figure what to ban as "too Jewish" when the criterions are so generic they can easily apply to everything the same.
Folk knowledge has it that the nazis got rid of Fraktur and Sütterlin because they figured it'd be easier to adapt to the modern script when you rule the world than to get the world to adopt to your weird local script. I'm sceptical as to whether there's any truth to that claim -- although Germans are known for ruthless efficiency, the nazis had a tendency to put their ideology first.
Unicode disagrees about IJ and ij… although there are glyphs for them, they are "compatibility decomposable characters" which basically means they are deprecated. The rendering software should handle proper collation, capitalization, etc. without using the digraph glyphs (e.g. Firefox gets this right).
(A similar situation applies for English di- and trigraphs such as "ffi" and friends.)
> German still has an sz-ligature (...) that has actually ceased to be considered a ligature and become an actual character
Can you explain why this happened? As a non-german speaker it always struck me as a stupid confusion between orthography and typography, but I assume there must be some historical reason for it?
In the modern (post-1997) orthography, ß and ss have different pronunciations and ß acts like a single letter (doubled consonants make the preceding vowel short, but ß does not)
I'm not sure when exactly it happened but the sz-ligature (ß) has been treated as a single character for decades if not centuries. However it's not always behaving like one.
For uppercase, instead of using the actual uppercase sz-ligature glyph (ẞ, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E) Germans will actually replace the "ligature" with SS. You could argue that this makes it an obvious ligature (although it would then be mislabeled as it's obviously an ss-ligature, not an sz-ligature) but Germans also write out umlauts as the base letter followed by e (ü -> ue, ä -> ae, ö -> oe) and these wouldn't normally be considered ligatures. The sz-ligature is also often called "sharp s", further showing it's not really thought of as a ligature.
According to Wikipedia the ß has been around since as early as the fourteenth century but its history seems a bit nebulous. I would think that it just used to be a common ligature before orthography became standardized in German and later became a character of its own when orthography became more standardized. Modern German orthography actually has a strict rule for picking between ß and ss: short vowels are followed by ss and long vowels are followed by ß (eliminating the ambiguity between Masse (mass) and Maße (metrics/dimensions)).
But another thing ß and the umlauts have in common is that they're not considered part of the alphabet. Children learn the same "Latin" alphabet as in English (except for the names of the letters, obviously) and if anything, Ä, Ö and Ü are added to the end on charts (but not typically in mnemonic songs or rhymes). Incidentally, ß is rarely added in those cases at all (likely because it has no accepted uppercase variant and only occurs in the middle or end of words, unlike A-Z and the umlauts).
And don't get me started on sorting. There are actually two legitimate ways to sort words in German: either you treat umlauts as vowel+e and ß as ss, OR you list ä after a, ö after o and so on. I think the former has become the norm for most intents and purposes but the other one can still be found in various places (including, I think, print phone books).
So, yes it's confusing, but German "Eszett" is not just a ligature and German umlauts are not just vowels with diaereses (unlike e.g. ë in names like "Zoë" where the diaeresis just indicates that the "oe" should be read as two separate vowels). Nobody really knows where this entire mess started but at least we generally have come up with consistent rationalisations for how we use them.
Marginally interesting, the logotype for Stuttgarter Hoffbrau uses the Fraktur version of the capital S. When I moved to southern Germany, I'll admit it took longer than I'd like to figure out that those bottles didn't actually say "Guttgarter Hoffbrau".
I'm from Cologne. The local newspaper is called "Kölner Stadtanzeiger".
Foreigners and children are always terribly confused why the title reads "Rölner Gadt-Unzeiger". Fraktur capital letters are pretty insane.
EDIT: Also, Hofbraeu -- umlauts are "escaped" by putting an e after the base character. This only adds ambiguity (and only in some cases anyway) rather than altering the meaning altogether (Bräu -> brew, i.e. beer; "Brau" doesn't mean anything, although if used as a prefix it can mean "brewing", e.g. "Braukultur" -> "brewing culture", but "Bräukultur" would be something else and doesn't exist as a word).
RE Edit: Yeah, I'm just too lazy to care if there isn't a confusion point when I'm on a PC (I'll go find an o-umlaut for schoen if I'm feeling adventurous). Apple makes i18n support like that much more convenient, I wish Microsoft would as well. Memorizing ASCII codes for characters isn't particularly nice.
As a native Dutch speaker I would disagree with what you wrote about the 'ij'-ligature. It's definitely not considered a single letter and I don't recall ever seeing it written as 'ÿ' or 'Ü'.
I'm not sure whether it's a Belgian or Dutch thing and what the context is, but I've seen it written as something very similar to ÿ (both in handwriting and in print) and I've also seen variants of a broken Ü as uppercase ligature.
I'm not saying it's particularly widespread or widely accepted, but I've seen it in real-world use by native speakers. For all I know it was just a stylistic choice or very experimental, but the same could be said about German uppercase SZ (ẞ -- vs the lowercase ß) and that one even has its own Unicode codepoint (although most people pretend it doesn't exist).
It doesn't seem too surprising either. German umlauts for example evolved a lot throughout fairly recent history (by European standards) -- we used to have a tiny superscript "e" instead of the two dots.
EDIT: To clarify: I was apparently wrong about the uppercase version (doesn't seem to have dots) but the case for ÿ seems pretty solid.
Addendum: The letters 'i' and 'j' look distinct (though very close) to me in that image. At first I thought it was just weird 'kerning', but the caption seems to say it's a single glyph. That doesn't need to mean it's a single letter though; it can merely be a ligature.
Upon further reflection, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by being thought to write them as a single letter. I was only thought cursive in school and I'm not sure what difference it would make to write them as one or two letters in cursive.
Only if the word is noun. Also by the same reasoning uppercase letters are sentence-starting in english (not to speak of capitalized names and 'I' and all that stuff).
I tried writing English-style German. It might look like this:
Palm Ström, etwas schon an jahren,
wird an einer straßen beuge
und von einem kraft fahr zeuge
über fahren.
»Wie war« (spricht er, sich erhebend
und entschlossen weiter lebend)
»möglich, wie dies unglück, ja –:
daß es über haupt geschah?
Ist die staats kunst an zu klagen
in bezug auf kraft fahr wagen?
Gab die polizei vorschrift
hier dem fahrer freie trift?
Oder war viel mehr verboten,
hier lebendige zu toten
um zu wandeln, – kurz und schlicht:
durfte hier der kutscher nicht –?«
Ein gehüllt in feuchte tücher,
prüft er die gesetzes bücher
und ist also bald im klaren:
Wagen durften dort nicht fahren!
Und er kommt zu dem ergebnis:
»Nur ein traum war das erlebnis.
Weil«, so schließt er messer scharf,
»nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.«
"Glued" was the word you were looking for, "attached" or "connected" is the word you actually are looking for. It's a familiar concept to anyone who's written in cursive, which would include most of western europe actually (though in latin-alphabet cursive scripts, letters don't change that much based on their position, just the connection).