Here’s a text in a mystery alphabet sent in by one of my correspondents. Any ideas which alphabet it is and which language it’s being used to write here?
Category: Writing, fonts & typography
Beowulf to Virginia Woolf
The British Library website, which I came across today, has some interesting information about language and writing in the Language and the written word section. It tells the story of written English from the Beowulf, the earliest known narrative poem in English, to Virginia Woolf’s early 20th century novels, with samples of each.
The site also includes recordings of the accents and dialects of the UK, details of cook books through the ages, and a history of English language dictionaries, among other fascinating information.
Unusual characters
Believe it or not the Chinese characters shown below are all variants forms of the ‘same’ character.
The character in question is 壹 (yī) – the complex form of ‘one’, which is used on banknotes, coins and cheques. Well actually the first one is a version of 一, the simple from of ‘one’.
The first two characters come from this site, which includes a number of other rare and unusual Chinese characters. The only one of them I’ve seen ‘in the wild’ is the Shanxi noodle one (no. 2), which appears in many Chinese restaurants in the UK.
Mystery con-script
Word of the day – typography
Typography is:
1. the art or process of printing from type;
2. the art or process of setting and arranging type for printing;
3. the arrangement, style, or general appearance of printed matter
(from yourdictionary).
It comes via French and Latin from the Greek τύπος (typos), to strike + γραφία (graphia), to write.
I chose this word today because I found an interesting blog about typhography called I Love Typography. As well as discussing typography, the author also gives advice on creating your own fonts, something that quite a few people ask me about. There are also some slightly less-than-serious posts, such as this one about Typoholism, “A disorder characterized by the excessive consumption of and dependence on type…”.
I think I ‘suffer’ from typoholism, and a related condition for which I can’t think of a word at the moment. Can you think of a word for my love of languages and writing systems? Perhaps ‘panglotophilia’.
Typo Tour
I received an email today about what is apparently the first Typographic Tour of Italy or Il Grand Tour della tipografia italiana. When I first saw the subject of the email I thought someone was organising a tour of Italy especially for typographers. Then I realised it’s actually a virtual tour via images and text on a website. There are also links to GoogleEarth, which enable you to see maps and images of the sites where the examples of type and lettering are found.
The site contains examples of inscriptions and signs from around Italy in a variety of styles and provides information about the people who designed the typefaces. Most of the information is in Italian, but there is also an explanation of the project in English.
Rivers of white and run arounds
Continuing yesterday’s theme of typography, here are a few more interesting typographic terms I came across today:
River of white
– a column of white space that occurs when word space in quite a few successive lines of type happen to end up below each other, as mentioned by P Terry Hunt in the comments on yesterday’s post.
Run around
– this when you fit the text around a picture or other design element.
Pagination
– this means either arranging the type and other elements so that they will be output in page format, or numbering the pages.
This is a term I heard frequently when I worked in the design department as a lone web developer surrounded by graphic designers. Since then the internet side of the company has expanded considerably.
Gutter
– the white space between columns on a page.
Widow
– either a single short line at the top of the page or column which is the end of a sentence or a paragraph, or a single word or syllable standing as the last line of a paragraph.
Source: http://www.typography-1st.com
Alphabets and email
One of the things I do in my job is to prepare html emails in many different languages, which are sent out by our web marketing bods. We’ve discovered that the text of emails in non-Latin writing systems often gets mangled in transmission, so to make sure the recipients can read the text, we send the emails in English with links to web pages containing text in the relevant languages.
Maybe one day you’ll be able to send emails in any language/writing system and be sure the text will display correctly at the other end. This doesn’t seem to be the case just yet.
I’ve also noticed that Latin transliterations are used by quite a few people who speak languages written with non-Latin writing systems in instant messages and other online chat and discussions. This may be because the systems don’t support of writing systems, or because they don’t always have the necessary input software and/or hardware to hand. Then again, some people might just find it easier to type quickly in the Latin alphabet.
Con-scripts
During the past few months only one or two constructed scripts per week have been coming into Omniglot headquarters, sometimes fewer than that. This week however, there has been a small flood of them with five new scripts so far, two of which are now online: Betacap, an alternative alphabet for English invented by Polly, and Handaues, an alphabet for a conlang invented for a calligraphy project. I’ve even been inspired to create a new script myself: Curvetic, another alternative alphabet for English.
I have numerous bits of paper scattered around my desk with ideas for con-scripts. Few of them seem to work very well when I try writing texts in them though. What I try to achieve in a script is one that looks elegant and/or could be a real writing system.
Classification of writing systems
People sometimes question the way the writing systems on Omniglot are classified. Most writing systems fit well into one category or another, but others straddle several categories, or don’t fit well into any category.
For example, when used to write Hebrew, the Hebrew script is an abjad or consonant alphabet. When it’s used to write Yiddish all the vowels are usually written, so is the Yiddish version a fully vocalised abjad or a phonemic alphabet?
Writing systems like Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Mayan are the most difficult to define. In many sources Chinese is classified as logographic, i.e. a writing system consisting of logographs or logograms, which are defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word”. This is not the best name for the script as only some Chinese characters are logograms. Other terms include morphosyllabic, logosyllabic, ideographic, pictographic.
In Visible Speech, John DeFrancis says that:
The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems.
Morphosyllabic seems to be a good term for Chinese, but what about Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Mayan, etc?
Any suggestions?