Sinhalese is pretty darn splendid. Manchu is one of my favourites. The ancient Cypriot syllabary reminds me of Matisse paper-cuts, at least how interpreted by the Imprimerie nationale. But for sheer, heartbreaking beauty there are few things to match the highest quality nasta'liq.
I'm partial to the Tamil script myself, but I see how Sinhalese can have more fans.
How much does calligraphy factor into this? You can find breathtaking examples of calligraphy that can make the most mundane of scripts look like the most beautiful things on Earth. How would an outsider judge the Latin alphabet presented with samples of Roman inscriptions, blackletter, and copperplate calligraphy lettering respectively?
I was hoping someone would say Burmese. Travelling there made me realise just how different other alphabets can be. It's also really nice to hear spoken, lots of fricatives and approximants. And they have a 'creaky' tone!
Indeed. Like how I used to watch Spanish-language TV with great pleasure until I actually learned Spanish, at which point I realized they were just saying the same crap that was on American TV. Now I watch Korean TV.
Also, it's worth noting the typical disparity between beauty and functionality. Tibetan for example is actually a horrid writing system when it comes to expressing the language.
Latin? Dunno, I think our alphabet is pretty unbeautiful – a strange compilation deriving from various historical sources. Of course, there's the comfort of familiarity, but aesthetically speaking, more "unified", or "designed" alphabets seem more appealing to me, more coherent.
"So, are we too positivist or politically-correct to mention our ugliests?"
Maybe too much in love with writing systems in general? I for one am having a really hard time thinking of an ugly alphabet.
Hmm, maybe Futhark doesn't seem very aesthetic (but still highly interesting of course). I'm not too fond of Hiragana either – Katakana looks way cooler ;-).
While I have to agree the shapes of the fuþark really aren't very pretty in themselves, I think they have a great decorative kind of beauty. And when written rather than carved in wood or stone, I think they had great potential that were never properly developed. Also, one has to admire an alphabet that supposedly were deprecated (is that the right word?) around 1300, but still were in daily use in Telemark in the early 19th century. The last authentic rune inscriptions were made in Dalarna around 1910, supposedly.
I think the Latin alphabet is beautiful because of its inconsistence. And because of its unsurpassed extensibility.
I actually love the Latin lowercase with its sense of rhythm. Even if it came about due to a mishmash of languages, it has a form which includes the planned with the accidental.
> I think the Latin alphabet is beautiful because of its inconsistence.
That's just apologism.
> And because of its unsurpassed extensibility.
It's been extended so much simply because that has helped the West make more money, not because of any inherent quality. Furthermore, most of the extensions are quite ugly, cumbersome and dysfunctional.
Chris, then I don't understand how you could put Hangul on top. (For the record, I love Hangul, but not for its appearance, which is what this thread is about, at least to me.)
--
BTW, these classic Latin chauvinisms and more
are addressed in my Spatium/Hyphen essay.
Sindre, that sample is a bit unfair (see what Jongseong said about calligraphy above). I've got nothing against Futhark, except I don't find the letterforms themselves particularly beautiful, and I thought this thread is (ok, was) simply about shallow aesthetic considerations. :-)
Chris: You say you love the Latin lowercase, but do you also love the combination of UC/lc?
> It’s been extended so much simply because that has helped the West make more money, not because of any inherent quality.
That's a gross oversimplification. As languages evolved, they had to reflect the sound changes, while maintaining etymological logic and consistency. French, for instance, had evolved to a stage were too many words had become homonyms, so accents, cedillas and circumflexes were needed. Portuguese and Lithuanian, for instance, lost a lot of final n's and m's, which led to the nasalization of the preseding wovels, expressed by adding a tilde in Portuguese and an ogonek in Lithuanian. The umlaut of the Germanic languages expresses the changed wovel, while keeping the relationship to the root. And so on and on. This is the kind of extension I'm talking about. One alphabet made usable for several related languages. How did the West make money on Romanian putting a circumflex over an a when its pronounciation changed to i, of etymological reasons? Brilliant minds have made the Latin alphabet work better than any other alphabet in the world. When Turkish was written with Arabic script, it was close to incomprehensible, because of the crucial vowel harmony that just could not be properly expressed.
> Brilliant minds have made the Latin alphabet
> work better than any other alphabet in the world
There it is! Cultural chauvinism, which can permeate anything, including writing systems. It even causes people to not realize for example that the Latin alphabet doesn't even work well for English! Nevermind its idiotic hyper-reliance on an x-height. Saddest of all however, such chauvinism causes people to rape an entire people's psyche by inventing monstrosities like the Vietnamese script.
> When Turkish was written with Arabic
> script, it was close to incomprehensible
That's a massive -and convenient- exaggeration.
Some people (like Thomas Milo) would even say it's completely wrong.
Ah, sorry about that, Nina. That's a very valid point, indeed. I guess we Norwegians still have some kind of inferiority complex, after all those years of Dane rule. You're right, the fuþark is functional (no horizontal strokes, that won't work when carving in wood), not pretty. The Turks developed a very similar script, so did the Hungarians.
I knew you would bring that up. And I agree 100 per cent. Vietnamese looks like shit (though I believe it works). That doesn't make my claim invalid. Concerning English, that's the fault of bored monks and halfwits during the middle ages, and a result of the sponginess of the English language. That's why it's a great pity that English has become the new lingua franca.
> Some people (like Thomas Milo) would even say it’s completely wrong.
I'd say he's completely wrong. Why did teachers use the Latin alphabet in schools before the reform, do you think?
Let's just get back to the topic! It's just a bit of fun, not about culture clashing and bashing, or about western superiority/inferiority. Just show us the alphabets you like, for whatever reason....
Am I alone to think that especially on Typophile, tangents and deviations from the original topics often make for the most fruitful and interesting discussions?
@ Altaira, Maybe you are right about this. I like a good discussion as much as you do, I just like to see some nice examples as well ;-)
So bash away if you wish!
"Chris: You say you love the Latin lowercase, but do you also love the combination of UC/lc?"
Nina, Yes I do! As much of a technical problem itis to space as a type designer, I still love the way it looks and makes a page and still works with photos and illustrations. It does not get in the way of them. Evolution by un-design can bring things into focus and force us to see their own beauty by their opposition.
Chris, but are you sure you wouldn't feel the same about any other alphabet that you would happen to grow up with? And then stress its particularities as exactly the things you love about it? I mean, if I'd grown up with the fuþark and now spent my days and nights typesetting and even designing it (funny thought), I might think it's beautiful. Probably because of its angularity. :->
Which would mean that your comment possibly says less about Latin than about how we tend to feel about our cultural environment.
That Cherokee alphabet looks like an extension of the Latin alphabet to me. But I know it isn't. The inventor just copied some of the letters, without knowing their value.
Repeating a few, but these really resonate with me ...
Tamil
Telugu
Malayalam
Sinhala
+
Wish the way the lowercase "g" evolved in Latin sort of also happened with the rest of the letters; whereas we could have ended up with more complex "g"-like forms to play with today.
"Chris, but are you sure you wouldn’t feel the same about any other alphabet that you would happen to grow up with? And then stress its particularities as exactly the things you love about it?"
Actually, my first alphabet was Greek. With Greek, I find the capitals too distant in form from the lowercase. Granted, they came many years apart. The capitals were more influenced by Phoenician culture and the lowercase more Byzantine and Turkish so I can understand the disconnect. When it came to typesetting, Europeans had a predominant influence and brought the technology after the Greeks were free of the Ottomans. There was no original Greek type by native Greeks for years. The caps became very Roman looking but the lowercase is its own world. Gerry Leonidas does a brilliant job with describing the history and is far better the person to describe it than me.
Getting back to your point, Nina, I feel I am more in love with latin as a graphic designer and user of type than I am of its written script and early history. I like the pages it makes and the even texture. I like the way it adapts to so many typeforms and styles and not so fussy a tradition to follow. I don't see this with large quantities of very calligraphic scripts like Arabic or Chinese. To me, Chinese looks great in small quantities and is more lovable written with a brush than typeset. I must admit that Palatino Arabic, designed by Nadine Chahine, has really made me more of a believer in Arabic as a typeface rather than a written script!
I don't think a person can ever escape their early upbringing and feel a level of comfort with what they know best. Others can develop a hatred for type coming from a culture they blame for some wrongdoing. Blackletter has been given an unfair demonic label because many people equate it with the Nazis even though it was around for hundreds of years before there was such a group as the Nazis.
I quite readily admit to being a lover of letters or symbols and don't feel any need to dislike any in particular. I have grown to like Cyrillic even though it is just plain insane as a system that was designed as a whole. There are plenty of glyph pairings in Cyrillic that just look stupid together but I guess that is what happens when the king makes the decisions and nobody can say, "Dude, that really does not work" like we can here in the Critique forum. :-)
Writing and typesetting is an outgrowth of culture and therefore subject to strange combinations of thought or accident. I just accept this and take my job as a designer to just work with it rather than damn the whole culture for daring to differ from what I would have done if I were the supreme master, King, Czar, Clergy, Poet, Philosopher, Learned Teacher, or Tyrant.
"Wish the way the lowercase “g” evolved in Latin sort of also happened with the rest of the letters; whereas we could have ended up with more complex “g”-like forms to play with today."
fuþark & Sinhalese. Discovered both when I was very young, fell in love with the looks of them. Thought sinhalese was the most beautiful writing I had ever seen, like little mice running over a paper :)
Mehallo: So is anyone then supposed to read that? ;-)
**
Chris, that was a beautiful declaration of love. :-)
Sorry for letting you grow up with a different script than you did!
"With Greek, I find the capitals too distant in form from the lowercase. Granted, they came many years apart."
But isn't that exactly the case with Latin too? I agree though that in Greek the difference seems even more pronounced, with much "softer" forms in the lowercase.
Regarding the adaptability of Latin (vs. more complex scripts) to different styles, that's a good point. But this would also hold true for other scripts that have a limited character set, limited complexity, and maybe somewhat disconnected lettershapes, no? Like Greek. Or Cyrillic. Or many others in fact.* Am I mistaken?
* But I guess sadly, there won't be all that many different styles designed for a script unless its "market" is large enough to enable a broad type design culture, which of course Latin is vastly benefiting from.
"But isn’t that exactly the case with Latin too? I agree though that in Greek the difference seems even more pronounced,"
Yes, Nina, The Greek is orders of magnitude different in its current state still while the Latin has grown more familial as time has gone by. There have been centuries of Latin type designers around to do many thousands of fonts since Guttenberg. The Greeks had to make do with what the Dutch and Brittish could do with existing equipment in Greece and this brought numerous limitations including using Latin punches for Greek capitals where possible. The Europeans had no malice in their actions, they were just making do with the tools available. Without the Latin-script-using Europeans, there would have been no Greek type at all for even more centuries.
The other issue is the number of native Greek type designers. How many type designers of Latin fonts can you name who are dead, even long dead? How many Greek type designers are from more than a century ago? Damn few if any. Almost all native Greek type designers are still alive today and most of them are young and just beginning their careers. I predict that their influence has not barely begun and will make its mark in the decades to come. Most type you have seen which has a Greek character set was not designed by Greeks. This will change. Gerry's young students will make their names known and there will be a fabulous era of Greek type to come soon.
I think one objective measure for the aesthetics of a given script is how much the people who actually use it day to day care about its presentation -- which in turn could be measured by how prominent, prevalent and well developed the art of calligraphy is for that script. By this standard I believe Chinese (and Japanese, which could be considered a variation of Chinese) would clearly come first, Arabic probably second.
AFAIK, nowhere in the world is the ratio between the number of professional (full-time) calligraphers versus painters nearly as high as in China. Same goes for the ratio between calligraphic versus typographic signs and logos (of course I'm not talking about signs that are written by hand because there's not enough money to pay for a printed one, I'm talking about signs featuring professional calligraphy that usually costs quite a bit).
That is indeed a fabulous book. I love it and learn what I can from it even if there is no English translation available. When I bought it, the shipping from Russia cost more than the book,
How much do you think these alphabets benefit from the calligrapher's hand? How bland would they be if they were set in a Courier-like font and we saw them every day?
Henry, FWIW the Armenian alphabet is held in very high esteem by us (not least because it helps us fight assimilation). Pretty much every Armenian church shows it on one side of the altar, and every schoolchild learns poems etc. about it and its creator, Mesrop Mashdots.
Jesse: the trick is to see beyond instances of rendering (be they calligraphic, typographic or anything else) to what the script is really like.
Hrant, that reminds me, I spotted a bunch (well okay like 3 lines) of Armenian text at the Vatican. It had some interesting capital ligatures on it.... is this common in all caps inscriptions?
«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)
Nina: Regarding the adaptability of Latin (vs. more complex scripts) to different styles, that’s a good point. But this would also hold true for other scripts that have a limited character set, limited complexity, and maybe somewhat disconnected lettershapes, no? Like Greek. Or Cyrillic. Or many others in fact.* Am I mistaken?
I think they could, potentially, but they often don't. My guess is that Hrant's comment about resisting assimilation has something to do with it. People using Latin script feel no need to defend it against the hegemony of some other culture, so they do all sorts of wacky stuff to it, but users of less dominant scripts are often very conservative. Even, ironically, when the style being protected is itself a product of past cultural hegemony. Cherokee script, for example, is locked into a model based on American typography of the early nineteenth century; if you tried to make a Garamond Cherokee or a runic Cherokee or a brush-stroke Cherokee, I don't think it would easily be accepted as culturally authentic.
Sindre: That Cherokee alphabet looks like an extension of the Latin alphabet to me. But I know it isn’t. The inventor just copied some of the letters, without knowing their value.
The story is a lot more complicated than that. Sequoyah's original design was quite different from the form of Cherokee that is most familiar to people. When the script was first cut in type, many of the forms were rationalised and, in the process of making them more 'typographic' made to resemble Latin letters.
Chris: The Greeks had to make do with what the Dutch and Brittish could do with existing equipment in Greece and this brought numerous limitations including using Latin punches for Greek capitals where possible. The Europeans had no malice in their actions, they were just making do with the tools available. Without the Latin-script-using Europeans, there would have been no Greek type at all for even more centuries.
Chris, you need to read Konstantine Staïkos' Charta of Greek Printing, which documents the fundamental role of Byzantine refugees and other Greek emigres in the development of Greek publishing, beginning in Italy and spreading across Europe.
Matthew, those actually I would call overlapping - which is actually not too common in Armenian. But cap ligatures are in fact common, especially in older inscriptions.
Now those are ligatures! :-)
Including triples. Taken at the Geghart monastery in the Summer of '07. I got lucky with the moody lighting (there are holes in the ceiling, since most of the monastery is carved directly out of the side of a mountain, so no windows).
archaica, "People using Latin script feel no need to defend it against the hegemony of some other culture, so they do all sorts of wacky stuff to it, but users of less dominant scripts are often very conservative."
Thanks – this is an interesting perspective. I hadn't thought about variety in type design that way (more in terms of "what the market allows for"). But I guess oftentimes the two overlap.
**
henrypijames, "I think one objective measure for the aesthetics of a given script is how much the people who actually use it day to day care about its presentation — which in turn could be measured by how prominent, prevalent and well developed the art of calligraphy is for that script"
Don't you think it should be possible to consider the aesthetics of the basic structure of lettershapes without considering their case-by-case execution?
Besides, the aesthetic prevalence of calligraphy over other tools/executions really is in the eye of the beholder. FWIW, Burmese (which I mentioned) looks great to me (printed) even though –or maybe just because– it seems quite constructed and "abstract" in a way, not "written".
But I guess that's where personal taste comes in, since we're talking about aesthetics only. And that's one realm that I think has very few "objective measures".
The initial question is a nice provocation. How to measure beauty, apart from heralding one’s personal preferences?
You can hardly compare Sinhala to Runes to Latin. And yet – we do ;-)
For me, the most beautiful alphabet is the classical one. And there is a classical style in Arabic, in Chinese, in Latin a.s.o. It may be interesting to compare these particular renderings of different scripts. One is likely to find as common features: the grown rather than the constructed (which means not: the curly rather than the straight!), a subtle detailing and balance between strenght and liveliness. When some do claim here, that they find Runes for instance rather not appealing, it may have something to do with the fact that the script hardly reached a matured state of classicism (Klassizität) in history. Which does not mean that it can’t reach that level at all.
>Let’s hope the Chinese don’t drive it into extinction, eh?
I think the opposite might be true. The Chinese government is very active in pushing support for the so called "minority languages" through standards such as GB18030.
Steve, I have that shot in double that size, but I assume that's not good enough. I might have hi-res shots somewhere - I'll check - but I doubt it. What's on your mind? If it's important I can have my people* take some photos next time one of them makes the trip**. I don't know how the lighting is in Spring - if I took that shot mid-morning in Summer, what time in Spring would match?
* Literally and figuratively. :-)
** Or they might actually have good shots already.
> I think the opposite might be true.
Indeed - and I think the main thing that can really threaten the Tibetan script is Western: chauvinistic and/or penny-pinching lack of proper support in software*. That sort of thing has caused wholesale abandonment of writing systems (for example emailing in Armenian is typically done via ad-hoc Latin transliteration) as well as debasing of scripts (as happened with the original Linotype's Arabic).
22.Mar.2009 4.08pm
Sinhalese
22.Mar.2009 4.08pm
Georgian.
«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)
22.Mar.2009 4.14pm
Korean
ChrisL
22.Mar.2009 4.30pm
Elfish
22.Mar.2009 4.30pm
Sanskrit.
22.Mar.2009 5.04pm
Khmer
22.Mar.2009 5.52pm
Tibetan, by far.
Distant second: Arabic.
hhp
22.Mar.2009 5.59pm
Pics would be so helpful in something like this -)
22.Mar.2009 6.07pm
It's Armenian. ;)
22.Mar.2009 6.52pm
Sinhalese is pretty darn splendid. Manchu is one of my favourites. The ancient Cypriot syllabary reminds me of Matisse paper-cuts, at least how interpreted by the Imprimerie nationale. But for sheer, heartbreaking beauty there are few things to match the highest quality nasta'liq.
22.Mar.2009 7.23pm
Sinhalese? The Official Script of Coca-Cola™?
hhp
22.Mar.2009 8.23pm
Overview of some nice ones (including some already mentioned) is here.
23.Mar.2009 3.44am
Tibetan and Japanese!
23.Mar.2009 4.47am
So far I have seen, Bengali (or Bangla) is the most beautiful script on the earth.
\\
23.Mar.2009 4.47am
I'm partial to the Tamil script myself, but I see how Sinhalese can have more fans.
How much does calligraphy factor into this? You can find breathtaking examples of calligraphy that can make the most mundane of scripts look like the most beautiful things on Earth. How would an outsider judge the Latin alphabet presented with samples of Roman inscriptions, blackletter, and copperplate calligraphy lettering respectively?
23.Mar.2009 5.01am
I think Burmese looks absolutely amazing. Like something that Aliens would write.
Armenian is beautiful too.
23.Mar.2009 5.29am
I was hoping someone would say Burmese. Travelling there made me realise just how different other alphabets can be. It's also really nice to hear spoken, lots of fricatives and approximants. And they have a 'creaky' tone!
23.Mar.2009 6.54am
Hanacaraka, the old javanese script
23.Mar.2009 7.18am
Mongol I think. But which one do you think is the most beautiful on baseball caps?
23.Mar.2009 8.36am
Alphabets that you can read are a lot less beautiful than those you can't. At least, this has been my experience with Hebrew and Hangeul.
23.Mar.2009 8.42am
Indeed. Like how I used to watch Spanish-language TV with great pleasure until I actually learned Spanish, at which point I realized they were just saying the same crap that was on American TV. Now I watch Korean TV.
Also, it's worth noting the typical disparity between beauty and functionality. Tibetan for example is actually a horrid writing system when it comes to expressing the language.
BTW, David: Japanese? ;-)
hhp
23.Mar.2009 8.49am
So, are we too positivist or politically-correct to mention our ugliests? :-)
hhp
23.Mar.2009 8.53am
>So, are we too positivist or politically-correct to mention our ugliests?
Klingon
>But which one do you think is the most beautiful on baseball caps?
Klingon
23.Mar.2009 9.11am
23.Mar.2009 9.23am
What is that, David? I'm pretty much in love with the latin alphabet, I guess.
23.Mar.2009 9.36am
Mayan is great (though I don't know if it qualifies as an alfabet?)
Korean is great too, as is Burmese (which I did not know)
cheerio Queneau
23.Mar.2009 9.37am
Oh and I have to second frank: I'm pretty much in love with the latin alphabet as well (it's also the only one that makes sense to me...:-) )
cheerio Queneau
23.Mar.2009 9.40am
Frode -- Samaritan.
23.Mar.2009 10.39am
Wow some really great answers, havn't heard of a lot these.
23.Mar.2009 10.51am
And what a good Samaritan it is, I love the perpendicular stresses.
"Mayan is great"
I love Mayan too, but reading in bed, late at night and turning those 128 kg pages is tough.
23.Mar.2009 10.55am
Inuktitut is not the most beautiful, but I will mention it here in case others disagree.
http://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/udhr_inuktitut.gif"
23.Mar.2009 10.59am
Latin? Dunno, I think our alphabet is pretty unbeautiful – a strange compilation deriving from various historical sources. Of course, there's the comfort of familiarity, but aesthetically speaking, more "unified", or "designed" alphabets seem more appealing to me, more coherent.
"So, are we too positivist or politically-correct to mention our ugliests?"
Maybe too much in love with writing systems in general? I for one am having a really hard time thinking of an ugly alphabet.
Hmm, maybe Futhark doesn't seem very aesthetic (but still highly interesting of course). I'm not too fond of Hiragana either – Katakana looks way cooler ;-).
23.Mar.2009 11.00am
"I love Mayan too, but reading in bed, late at night and turning those 128 kg pages is tough."
I don't know how Moses did it either, take two tablets and call me in the morning :-)
ChrisL
23.Mar.2009 11.17am
Nina, the Latin caps are sublime.
The lc however is pretty lame.
hhp
23.Mar.2009 11.25am
Yah, I was looking at the Latin as a complete package, Hrant. The UC/lc disparity somehow kills the "design concept" (insert funny smiley here).
23.Mar.2009 11.59am
While I have to agree the shapes of the fuþark really aren't very pretty in themselves, I think they have a great decorative kind of beauty. And when written rather than carved in wood or stone, I think they had great potential that were never properly developed. Also, one has to admire an alphabet that supposedly were deprecated (is that the right word?) around 1300, but still were in daily use in Telemark in the early 19th century. The last authentic rune inscriptions were made in Dalarna around 1910, supposedly.
I think the Latin alphabet is beautiful because of its inconsistence. And because of its unsurpassed extensibility.
23.Mar.2009 12.07pm
I actually love the Latin lowercase with its sense of rhythm. Even if it came about due to a mishmash of languages, it has a form which includes the planned with the accidental.
ChrisL
23.Mar.2009 12.27pm
> I think the Latin alphabet is beautiful because of its inconsistence.
That's just apologism.
> And because of its unsurpassed extensibility.
It's been extended so much simply because that has helped the West make more money, not because of any inherent quality. Furthermore, most of the extensions are quite ugly, cumbersome and dysfunctional.
Chris, then I don't understand how you could put Hangul on top. (For the record, I love Hangul, but not for its appearance, which is what this thread is about, at least to me.)
--
BTW, these classic Latin chauvinisms and more
are addressed in my Spatium/Hyphen essay.
hhp
23.Mar.2009 12.42pm
Sindre, that sample is a bit unfair (see what Jongseong said about calligraphy above). I've got nothing against Futhark, except I don't find the letterforms themselves particularly beautiful, and I thought this thread is (ok, was) simply about shallow aesthetic considerations. :-)
Chris: You say you love the Latin lowercase, but do you also love the combination of UC/lc?
23.Mar.2009 1.05pm
> It’s been extended so much simply because that has helped the West make more money, not because of any inherent quality.
That's a gross oversimplification. As languages evolved, they had to reflect the sound changes, while maintaining etymological logic and consistency. French, for instance, had evolved to a stage were too many words had become homonyms, so accents, cedillas and circumflexes were needed. Portuguese and Lithuanian, for instance, lost a lot of final n's and m's, which led to the nasalization of the preseding wovels, expressed by adding a tilde in Portuguese and an ogonek in Lithuanian. The umlaut of the Germanic languages expresses the changed wovel, while keeping the relationship to the root. And so on and on. This is the kind of extension I'm talking about. One alphabet made usable for several related languages. How did the West make money on Romanian putting a circumflex over an a when its pronounciation changed to i, of etymological reasons? Brilliant minds have made the Latin alphabet work better than any other alphabet in the world. When Turkish was written with Arabic script, it was close to incomprehensible, because of the crucial vowel harmony that just could not be properly expressed.
> That’s just apologism.
No, it's not. That's what I think.
23.Mar.2009 1.17pm
> Brilliant minds have made the Latin alphabet
> work better than any other alphabet in the world
There it is! Cultural chauvinism, which can permeate anything, including writing systems. It even causes people to not realize for example that the Latin alphabet doesn't even work well for English! Nevermind its idiotic hyper-reliance on an x-height. Saddest of all however, such chauvinism causes people to rape an entire people's psyche by inventing monstrosities like the Vietnamese script.
> When Turkish was written with Arabic
> script, it was close to incomprehensible
That's a massive -and convenient- exaggeration.
Some people (like Thomas Milo) would even say it's completely wrong.
> No, it’s not. That’s what I think.
Actually, it's mostly what you want to feel.
hhp
23.Mar.2009 1.15pm
Ah, sorry about that, Nina. That's a very valid point, indeed. I guess we Norwegians still have some kind of inferiority complex, after all those years of Dane rule. You're right, the fuþark is functional (no horizontal strokes, that won't work when carving in wood), not pretty. The Turks developed a very similar script, so did the Hungarians.
23.Mar.2009 1.30pm
> sick monstrosities like the Vietnamese script.
I knew you would bring that up. And I agree 100 per cent. Vietnamese looks like shit (though I believe it works). That doesn't make my claim invalid. Concerning English, that's the fault of bored monks and halfwits during the middle ages, and a result of the sponginess of the English language. That's why it's a great pity that English has become the new lingua franca.
> Some people (like Thomas Milo) would even say it’s completely wrong.
I'd say he's completely wrong. Why did teachers use the Latin alphabet in schools before the reform, do you think?
> Actually, it’s mostly what you want to feel.
How are you going to change that?
23.Mar.2009 1.40pm
Hey guys,
Let's just get back to the topic! It's just a bit of fun, not about culture clashing and bashing, or about western superiority/inferiority. Just show us the alphabets you like, for whatever reason....
cheerio Queneau
23.Mar.2009 1.51pm
Am I alone to think that especially on Typophile, tangents and deviations from the original topics often make for the most fruitful and interesting discussions?
23.Mar.2009 1.56pm
I also really like the Cherokee alphabet, it has some beautiful characters.
cheerio Queneau
23.Mar.2009 1.55pm
@ Altaira, Maybe you are right about this. I like a good discussion as much as you do, I just like to see some nice examples as well ;-)
So bash away if you wish!
cheerio Queneau
23.Mar.2009 1.56pm
"Chris: You say you love the Latin lowercase, but do you also love the combination of UC/lc?"
Nina, Yes I do! As much of a technical problem itis to space as a type designer, I still love the way it looks and makes a page and still works with photos and illustrations. It does not get in the way of them. Evolution by un-design can bring things into focus and force us to see their own beauty by their opposition.
ChrisL
23.Mar.2009 1.56pm
No, you're not alone, Nina. Let's wait for Mr Papazians reply.
23.Mar.2009 2.10pm
Waiting in anticipation.
Chris, but are you sure you wouldn't feel the same about any other alphabet that you would happen to grow up with? And then stress its particularities as exactly the things you love about it? I mean, if I'd grown up with the fuþark and now spent my days and nights typesetting and even designing it (funny thought), I might think it's beautiful. Probably because of its angularity. :->
Which would mean that your comment possibly says less about Latin than about how we tend to feel about our cultural environment.
23.Mar.2009 2.16pm
That Cherokee alphabet looks like an extension of the Latin alphabet to me. But I know it isn't. The inventor just copied some of the letters, without knowing their value.
23.Mar.2009 2.20pm
I'm with Simon, Elvish all the way.
23.Mar.2009 2.24pm
Cyrillic
Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne
23.Mar.2009 2.39pm
Chris, what writing system do you not like?
> How are you going to change that?
Writing, I guess. (Sorry If I disappoint.)
BTW, please call me Hrant.
hhp
23.Mar.2009 2.44pm
Does anybody know where I can find a good book
with the Cyrillic alphabet?
Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne
23.Mar.2009 2.54pm
Instead of just a book with Cyrillic, what
about a book about Cyrillic type design?
http://store.artlebedev.com/books/design/kniga_pro_bykvy/
hhp
23.Mar.2009 3.27pm
Repeating a few, but these really resonate with me ...
Tamil
Telugu
Malayalam
Sinhala
+
Wish the way the lowercase "g" evolved in Latin sort of also happened with the rest of the letters; whereas we could have ended up with more complex "g"-like forms to play with today.
s.
mehallo.com
23.Mar.2009 3.34pm
"Chris, but are you sure you wouldn’t feel the same about any other alphabet that you would happen to grow up with? And then stress its particularities as exactly the things you love about it?"
Actually, my first alphabet was Greek. With Greek, I find the capitals too distant in form from the lowercase. Granted, they came many years apart. The capitals were more influenced by Phoenician culture and the lowercase more Byzantine and Turkish so I can understand the disconnect. When it came to typesetting, Europeans had a predominant influence and brought the technology after the Greeks were free of the Ottomans. There was no original Greek type by native Greeks for years. The caps became very Roman looking but the lowercase is its own world. Gerry Leonidas does a brilliant job with describing the history and is far better the person to describe it than me.
Getting back to your point, Nina, I feel I am more in love with latin as a graphic designer and user of type than I am of its written script and early history. I like the pages it makes and the even texture. I like the way it adapts to so many typeforms and styles and not so fussy a tradition to follow. I don't see this with large quantities of very calligraphic scripts like Arabic or Chinese. To me, Chinese looks great in small quantities and is more lovable written with a brush than typeset. I must admit that Palatino Arabic, designed by Nadine Chahine, has really made me more of a believer in Arabic as a typeface rather than a written script!
I don't think a person can ever escape their early upbringing and feel a level of comfort with what they know best. Others can develop a hatred for type coming from a culture they blame for some wrongdoing. Blackletter has been given an unfair demonic label because many people equate it with the Nazis even though it was around for hundreds of years before there was such a group as the Nazis.
I quite readily admit to being a lover of letters or symbols and don't feel any need to dislike any in particular. I have grown to like Cyrillic even though it is just plain insane as a system that was designed as a whole. There are plenty of glyph pairings in Cyrillic that just look stupid together but I guess that is what happens when the king makes the decisions and nobody can say, "Dude, that really does not work" like we can here in the Critique forum. :-)
Writing and typesetting is an outgrowth of culture and therefore subject to strange combinations of thought or accident. I just accept this and take my job as a designer to just work with it rather than damn the whole culture for daring to differ from what I would have done if I were the supreme master, King, Czar, Clergy, Poet, Philosopher, Learned Teacher, or Tyrant.
ChrisL
23.Mar.2009 3.44pm
Tengwar.
—Noam
23.Mar.2009 3.46pm
"Wish the way the lowercase “g” evolved in Latin sort of also happened with the rest of the letters; whereas we could have ended up with more complex “g”-like forms to play with today."
Complexity? Bring it on!
(Sorry, couldn't resist. ;-) )
23.Mar.2009 3.47pm
Arabic... no question there. i have some amazing Arabic calligraphy samples if anyone is interested.
23.Mar.2009 3.56pm
Mehallo asked for complex lower case forms, Nina. You suppplied him with complex upper case forms. That's unfair.
Edit: Er, not really, after re-reading. Withdrawn. Shame on me. Blush.
23.Mar.2009 3.57pm
fuþark & Sinhalese. Discovered both when I was very young, fell in love with the looks of them. Thought sinhalese was the most beautiful writing I had ever seen, like little mice running over a paper :)
23.Mar.2009 4.00pm
No, you're right, Sindre! Argh. Sorry. Shame on me!
I'll spare you the lowercase ;-)
Edit: OK, he said "with the rest of the letters"… :-)
23.Mar.2009 4.01pm
an a with a Laotian curl ...
an e with a small swash from Telugu ...
it would be blasphemy, but could be fun.
And look at all the new Latin parts we get to name!
(if you thought crotch was funny ...)
(Maybe we just take the accents we have and do something spectacular with them!)
s.
mehallo.com
23.Mar.2009 4.10pm
Mehallo: So is anyone then supposed to read that? ;-)
**
Chris, that was a beautiful declaration of love. :-)
Sorry for letting you grow up with a different script than you did!
"With Greek, I find the capitals too distant in form from the lowercase. Granted, they came many years apart."
But isn't that exactly the case with Latin too? I agree though that in Greek the difference seems even more pronounced, with much "softer" forms in the lowercase.
Regarding the adaptability of Latin (vs. more complex scripts) to different styles, that's a good point. But this would also hold true for other scripts that have a limited character set, limited complexity, and maybe somewhat disconnected lettershapes, no? Like Greek. Or Cyrillic. Or many others in fact.* Am I mistaken?
* But I guess sadly, there won't be all that many different styles designed for a script unless its "market" is large enough to enable a broad type design culture, which of course Latin is vastly benefiting from.
23.Mar.2009 4.45pm
"But isn’t that exactly the case with Latin too? I agree though that in Greek the difference seems even more pronounced,"
Yes, Nina, The Greek is orders of magnitude different in its current state still while the Latin has grown more familial as time has gone by. There have been centuries of Latin type designers around to do many thousands of fonts since Guttenberg. The Greeks had to make do with what the Dutch and Brittish could do with existing equipment in Greece and this brought numerous limitations including using Latin punches for Greek capitals where possible. The Europeans had no malice in their actions, they were just making do with the tools available. Without the Latin-script-using Europeans, there would have been no Greek type at all for even more centuries.
The other issue is the number of native Greek type designers. How many type designers of Latin fonts can you name who are dead, even long dead? How many Greek type designers are from more than a century ago? Damn few if any. Almost all native Greek type designers are still alive today and most of them are young and just beginning their careers. I predict that their influence has not barely begun and will make its mark in the decades to come. Most type you have seen which has a Greek character set was not designed by Greeks. This will change. Gerry's young students will make their names known and there will be a fabulous era of Greek type to come soon.
ChrisL
23.Mar.2009 4.45pm
@hrant
Ah, thanks for the link. book looks interesting
Its unavailable for the moment :(
Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne
23.Mar.2009 5.00pm
I think one objective measure for the aesthetics of a given script is how much the people who actually use it day to day care about its presentation -- which in turn could be measured by how prominent, prevalent and well developed the art of calligraphy is for that script. By this standard I believe Chinese (and Japanese, which could be considered a variation of Chinese) would clearly come first, Arabic probably second.
AFAIK, nowhere in the world is the ratio between the number of professional (full-time) calligraphers versus painters nearly as high as in China. Same goes for the ratio between calligraphic versus typographic signs and logos (of course I'm not talking about signs that are written by hand because there's not enough money to pay for a printed one, I'm talking about signs featuring professional calligraphy that usually costs quite a bit).
23.Mar.2009 4.49pm
That is indeed a fabulous book. I love it and learn what I can from it even if there is no English translation available. When I bought it, the shipping from Russia cost more than the book,
ChrisL
23.Mar.2009 4.50pm
Quick question, is there a book
about alphabets from around the world?
If not? Why isn't there one?
Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne
23.Mar.2009 4.53pm
Man, sometimes you just have to treat yourself.
Of course I have to run it by my wife first LOL.
Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne
23.Mar.2009 4.57pm
"is there a book
about alphabets from around the world?"
Bunches, do a search on writing systems and alphabets on Amazon or your vendor of choice.
ChrisL
23.Mar.2009 5.03pm
How much do you think these alphabets benefit from the calligrapher's hand? How bland would they be if they were set in a Courier-like font and we saw them every day?
23.Mar.2009 5.35pm
Henry, FWIW the Armenian alphabet is held in very high esteem by us (not least because it helps us fight assimilation). Pretty much every Armenian church shows it on one side of the altar, and every schoolchild learns poems etc. about it and its creator, Mesrop Mashdots.
Jesse: the trick is to see beyond instances of rendering (be they calligraphic, typographic or anything else) to what the script is really like.
hhp
23.Mar.2009 6.20pm
Hrant, that reminds me, I spotted a bunch (well okay like 3 lines) of Armenian text at the Vatican. It had some interesting capital ligatures on it.... is this common in all caps inscriptions?
«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)
23.Mar.2009 6.21pm
Nina: Regarding the adaptability of Latin (vs. more complex scripts) to different styles, that’s a good point. But this would also hold true for other scripts that have a limited character set, limited complexity, and maybe somewhat disconnected lettershapes, no? Like Greek. Or Cyrillic. Or many others in fact.* Am I mistaken?
I think they could, potentially, but they often don't. My guess is that Hrant's comment about resisting assimilation has something to do with it. People using Latin script feel no need to defend it against the hegemony of some other culture, so they do all sorts of wacky stuff to it, but users of less dominant scripts are often very conservative. Even, ironically, when the style being protected is itself a product of past cultural hegemony. Cherokee script, for example, is locked into a model based on American typography of the early nineteenth century; if you tried to make a Garamond Cherokee or a runic Cherokee or a brush-stroke Cherokee, I don't think it would easily be accepted as culturally authentic.
23.Mar.2009 7.15pm
Sindre: That Cherokee alphabet looks like an extension of the Latin alphabet to me. But I know it isn’t. The inventor just copied some of the letters, without knowing their value.
The story is a lot more complicated than that. Sequoyah's original design was quite different from the form of Cherokee that is most familiar to people. When the script was first cut in type, many of the forms were rationalised and, in the process of making them more 'typographic' made to resemble Latin letters.
23.Mar.2009 7.19pm
Chris: The Greeks had to make do with what the Dutch and Brittish could do with existing equipment in Greece and this brought numerous limitations including using Latin punches for Greek capitals where possible. The Europeans had no malice in their actions, they were just making do with the tools available. Without the Latin-script-using Europeans, there would have been no Greek type at all for even more centuries.
Chris, you need to read Konstantine Staïkos' Charta of Greek Printing, which documents the fundamental role of Byzantine refugees and other Greek emigres in the development of Greek publishing, beginning in Italy and spreading across Europe.
23.Mar.2009 7.53pm
Matthew, those actually I would call overlapping - which is actually not too common in Armenian. But cap ligatures are in fact common, especially in older inscriptions.
Now those are ligatures! :-)
Including triples. Taken at the Geghart monastery in the Summer of '07. I got lucky with the moody lighting (there are holes in the ceiling, since most of the monastery is carved directly out of the side of a mountain, so no windows).
hhp
23.Mar.2009 8.15pm
Thank you
Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne
23.Mar.2009 9.13pm
Thanks, John, I'll look for "Charta of Greek Printing"
ChrisL
Edit:
John, it costs $350, a bit pricey for me :-(
24.Mar.2009 1.22am
archaica,
"People using Latin script feel no need to defend it against the hegemony of some other culture, so they do all sorts of wacky stuff to it, but users of less dominant scripts are often very conservative."
Thanks – this is an interesting perspective. I hadn't thought about variety in type design that way (more in terms of "what the market allows for"). But I guess oftentimes the two overlap.
**
henrypijames,
"I think one objective measure for the aesthetics of a given script is how much the people who actually use it day to day care about its presentation — which in turn could be measured by how prominent, prevalent and well developed the art of calligraphy is for that script"
Don't you think it should be possible to consider the aesthetics of the basic structure of lettershapes without considering their case-by-case execution?
Besides, the aesthetic prevalence of calligraphy over other tools/executions really is in the eye of the beholder. FWIW, Burmese (which I mentioned) looks great to me (printed) even though –or maybe just because– it seems quite constructed and "abstract" in a way, not "written".
But I guess that's where personal taste comes in, since we're talking about aesthetics only. And that's one realm that I think has very few "objective measures".
24.Mar.2009 2.50am
The initial question is a nice provocation. How to measure beauty, apart from heralding one’s personal preferences?
You can hardly compare Sinhala to Runes to Latin. And yet – we do ;-)
For me, the most beautiful alphabet is the classical one. And there is a classical style in Arabic, in Chinese, in Latin a.s.o. It may be interesting to compare these particular renderings of different scripts. One is likely to find as common features: the grown rather than the constructed (which means not: the curly rather than the straight!), a subtle detailing and balance between strenght and liveliness. When some do claim here, that they find Runes for instance rather not appealing, it may have something to do with the fact that the script hardly reached a matured state of classicism (Klassizität) in history. Which does not mean that it can’t reach that level at all.
24.Mar.2009 3.39am
Tibetan by a mile.
Khmer has a really nice alphabet too and I love the shapes in Korean, but Tibetan is just plain beautiful.
Let's hope the Chinese don't drive it into extinction, eh?
24.Mar.2009 7.55am
Hrant, do you have larger shots of the Geghart monastery inscriptions?
24.Mar.2009 8.01am
>Let’s hope the Chinese don’t drive it into extinction, eh?
I think the opposite might be true. The Chinese government is very active in pushing support for the so called "minority languages" through standards such as GB18030.
24.Mar.2009 8.11am
Nina: Does that stuff exist digitally?
24.Mar.2009 8.40am
Frode, I doubt it (but hey, you never know –
that would be a digitization project! ;-) )
24.Mar.2009 8.52am
Steve, I have that shot in double that size, but I assume that's not good enough. I might have hi-res shots somewhere - I'll check - but I doubt it. What's on your mind? If it's important I can have my people* take some photos next time one of them makes the trip**. I don't know how the lighting is in Spring - if I took that shot mid-morning in Summer, what time in Spring would match?
* Literally and figuratively. :-)
** Or they might actually have good shots already.
> I think the opposite might be true.
Indeed - and I think the main thing that can really threaten the Tibetan script is Western: chauvinistic and/or penny-pinching lack of proper support in software*. That sort of thing has caused wholesale abandonment of writing systems (for example emailing in Armenian is typically done via ad-hoc Latin transliteration) as well as debasing of scripts (as happened with the original Linotype's Arabic).
* Noting that we're still suffering from ASCII-7!
hhp