The Elephants Memory

The Elephant's Memory created by Timothee Ingen-Housz was created with the intention of being used to replace written text, a universal pictorial language .he name "The Elephant's Memory" plays on the fact that a huge amount of people would need to learn and remember all they symbols and their meanings for it to be successful. I don't think it works very well as I can't understand most of the symbols on their own, and when placed together to form a sentence I find it even harder! This proves that the alphabet we use today is good. I don't really understand why this guy thought it would be a good idea to go back and use pictograms again...?

The Elephant's Memory, Timothee Ingen-Housz "Seeing elephants shot by men makes me cry"

Gutenberg's epitath

"In the long run the general public, the last judge of the printer's endeavours, will benefit by it, and the printer will continue to hold the proud position of a man - as Gutenberg's epitaph puts it - 'well-deserving of all nations and languages'

Taken from '500 years of printing'.

S. H. Steinberg

"It is no exaggeration to describe Gutenberg's invention as Germany's most important single contribution to civilisation."

S. H. Steinberg taken from '500 years of printing'.

Print or digital?

"The printing press has made it possible for millions of people to read the same text at the same moment: wireless, television, and the cinema enable millions of people to hear the same text spoken and see the same performance acted at the same moment... The peaceful coexistence of print, sound, and vision is to a large extent guaranteed by the psycho-physiological make-up of the human race..."

S. H. Steinberg from '500 years of printing'.

Printing presses were established...

1464 Cologne
1466 Basel
1467 Rome
1469 Venice
1470 Paris, Nurnberg, Utrecht
1471 Milan, Naples, Florence
1472 Augsburg
1473 Lyon, Valencia, Budapest
1474 Cracow, Bruges
1475 Lubeck, Breslau
1476 Westminster, Rostock
1478 Geneva, Palermo, Messina
1480 London
1481 Antwerp, Leipzig
1482 Odense
1483 Stockholm

The spread of printing

"It is no exaggeration to describe Gutenberg's invention as Germany's most imporatnt single contribution to civilisation. However, the printers who , from about 1460 onward, went on their travels from Mainz wer little concerned with German culture. They were craftsmen and business men; they wanted to make a living; and they adapted themselves and their art to the conditions of international trade. Until printing had firmly established itself as an everyday commodity, that is to say, until well into the beginning of the sixteenth century, a map showing the places where printers had settled down is virtually identical with a map showing the places where any commercial firm would have set up an agency."

Taken from '500 years of printing' by S. H. Steinberg.

Is movable type good?

Movable type is an old practise which seems to be coming back into fashion as all things vintage get bought back to life and we are searching for more handmade things. I would like to find out how movable type helped communication and bought us to where we are today. I need to research the history of movable type and decide whether is is good for our development.

Is leading good?

I know that leading comes from the days of letterpress and movable type but I would like to find out if manually altering leading is still applicable in todays digital age. If so then I would say that leading is good. I need to research how leading (a very hand made aspect of typography) is used today and how much freedom we have with it.

Are majuscule and minuscule characters good?

I prefer to read text in sentence case, and get annoyed when people continuously write in lower or upper case. I think majuscule and minuscule are good, but in the right context. I need to research to find out why we write in sentence case and why it is good. Also I would like to find out if other people have a different view to me. Surely the one which would be good in this case would be the case which is most legible to read.

Is 3D typography good?

For this project I am focusing on the hand crafted 3D typography (making letterforms from objects) and environmental typography, the letterforms that are present without being forced to be there (such as a hinge looking like the letter L). I love digital but do feel that we rely on it too much and have forgotten about the asthetics of reality. With digital work getting better and better sometimes I wonder, why not just go out and do it for real?

I feel 3D typography is good as it expresses reality. It is a much more human thing and we can touch and feel it, we can know it is real. Currently my view of some 3D typography is that it is good because it is of a high quality. I need to specify exactally what about 3d Type is of high quality and if it has a positive impact on people, thus it is good.

Basics Design:Typography

Here is an example of majuscule and minuscule text in design. Both examples and previous posts MAJUSCULE, minuscule, German nouns and Spacing have been taken from 'Basics Design: Typography' by Ambrose and Harris.

Majuscule text design

Minuscule text design

Spacing

As lower case letters tend to flow into one another it is considered bad typographical practise to letterspace themas this makes the text more difficult to read. Capitals depend less on each other, and so we are therefore more used to viewing and reading them with space in place.

S P A C I N G

s p a c i n g

I can definitely read the majuscule letters easier than the minuscule letters in this case.

German nouns

Certain languages can look uncomfortable when set in Roman. German for example uses initial capital letters at the start of written nouns. This disrupts the scanning motion of the eye.

"I went to the Shop in my Car to buy Food, a Book and a Video."

minuscule

lowercase letters were developed by alcuin in the 8th century, these allowed text to be divided into sentences and paragraphs by beginning the first word of a sentence with a capital letter.

MAJUSCULE

TEXT SET IN MAJUSCULE CHARACTERS REQUIRES THE READER TO CONSTRUCT THE WORDS BY READING EACH INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER, WHICH CAN BE SLOW AND TIRING.

Scan not read

"Blocks of text are considered easier to read when set in Roman, Old Style or Antiqua, which is to say a combination of majuscule (upper case) and minuscule (lower case) characters. This is because the human eye 'scans' the text using ascenders and descenders to recognise words rather than constructively reading each and every word. Majuscules share the same height and have fewer visual shortcuts for the eye than minuscules, which have ascending or descending stems that assist scanning."

Taken from 'Basics Design: Typography' by Ambrose and Harris.

Small cap

"A small cap is far more harmonious with the body text because it has been specifically re-cut to have the same width strokes as those of the regular characters."

Ambrose and Harris from 'Basics Design: Typography'

Case variations

Small caps do not overpower the surrounding text, but make a point of highlighting a section. Lowercase letters are used for cody copy and capitols can be used to emphasis a specific bit of text. With capitols they can appear to be shouted and aggressive.

Example from the Minion typeface family - taken from 'Basics Design: Typography' by Ambrose and Harris. 

Participant 1 evolution

I wanted to see what other people's evolution of their alphabet looked like compared to mine as I predict different people would have different legibilities as the speed of writing increased. Here is participant 1.

Participant 1 capitols






There is definately a difference between the top (slow) and bottom (quick) letterforms. We can see especially on the A, E, G and Q how the cross strokes have increased. Also the stems and legs of most letterforms have become more curved and less ruler straight.

Participant 1 lowercase (reversed)





Here the participant wrote from quick to slow. I can see that the r has a limited ear. Also the descender height decreases with speed.

My evolution

From the post 'The origins of abc' I tried to see how my personal alphabet changed with speed. By doing this I can directly see how the alphabet as a whole evolved from the letter A being drawn as an Ox to the mark we recognise it as today.

As outlined in my previous post, it suggestes writing the alphabet at different speeds. Starting with your most orecise handwriting and getting as fast as you can.

Capital lettered alphabet








When I wrote the alphabet in capital letters the difference is quite hard to see. There is clearly a change as I speed up that rate I write, but it is pretty minor.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.









When I wrote this sentence (which contains all the letterforms in our alphabet) you can clearly see a change, my letters get more joined up and less legible. I can see how the alphabet evolved from more complex images to the quite simple marks we use today.

David Jury

"There is potential for significant improvements, as long as we can retain previous good practise while accepting the best of what digital technology can deliver."

David Jury is the author of 'Letterpress, new applications for traditional skills' and 'What is typography?'

Printing timeline

Pre 15,000 B.C. - Prehistoric man first painted art on the walls of his caves in what is now northern France and Southern Spain.

5,000 B.C. - The earliest Babylonian writings appeared.

3,500 B.C. - Papyrus came into use as a writing surface.

3,000 B.C. - Clay stamps were used to validate written messages. Clay tablets were also used as a writing surface.

750 B.C. - Greek inscriptions were carved into stone slabs with a hammer and chisel.

200 B.C. - A method of refining parchment from sheepskin was discovered - supposedly by the King of Pergamum. The name "parchment" is derived from "Pergamum."

105 A.D. - Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese monk, announced the invention of paper to Emperor Chien Ch’u. The first paper was made from mulberry and other barks, fish nets, hemp and rags.

400 A.D. - True ink was invented from lamp-black and used in China for brush writing and later for woodblock printing.

450 A.D. - Seals were printed with true ink. This was the first instance of actual printing with an incised stamp upon paper.

650 A.D. - The Chinese Buddhist monks first experimented with the duplication of images by rubbings, charm blocks and stencils. This was the forerunner of the true block printing of the 9th century.

868 A.D. - The Diamond Sutra, the first printed book, was printed. It is a roll sixteen feet in length and was the original form of Chinese book printing.

1035 A.D. - Waste paper was first repulped and used as a material for papermaking. The birth of recycling.

1041 A.D. - Movable type was invented in China by Pi Sheng, but because the Chinese characters did not lend themselves to the technique, the invention had little use in that country. Rather than an alphabet, the Chinese used thousands of "symbols." That made for a pretty difficult job in sorting their "type."

1282 A.D. - Italy became the first European country to use watermarks. From the period between the 13th and 16th centuries, over 16,000 individual watermarks have been identified.

1298 A.D. - Marco Polo reported that during his trip to China, he witnessed the printing of paper money.

1309 A.D. - Paper was first used in England.

1403 A.D. - The Royal type foundry in Korea produced the first movable type in that country. The Koreans found the process very practical and used it extensively. It was more practical for them than the Chinese because they had less than 100 characters in their alphabet.

1423 A.D. - The earliest dated European woodblock print. It shows St. Christopher bearing the infant Christ.

1454 A.D. - The earliest and first dated document printed from movable type in Europe. It is a 30-line indulgence granted by Pope Nicolaus V to those who donated money for the struggle against the Turks. This is attributed to Gutenberg.

1455 A.D. - The 42-line Bible known as The Gutenberg Bible was completed by Fust and Schoeffer. This was the first major effort in Europe using movable type. Gutenberg started the work, then lost his company when he was unable to pay loans made by Fust.

1462 A.D. - The first printer’s mark or "device" was used by Fust and Schoeffer of Mainz, Germany. This printer’s mark is now the official logo of the International Association of Printing House Craftsmen, or the Craftsmen’s Club.

1469 A.D. - The first use of Roman type in printing.

1477 A.D. - William Caxton brought the art of printing to England.

1501 A.D. - Aldus Manutius introduced his famous series of classics. It was in these that the italic form of type was first used. These were history’s first "pocket books."

1540 A.D. - The first printing was done in North America when Juan Pablos printed Manuel de Aldutos. Pablos is believed to have printed an earlier book but no trace of it has turned up.

1563 A.D. - By Letters of Patent of Charles IX of France, it was forbidden for any French printer to print without permission under penalty of being hanged or strangled. More than one printer found himself at the end of a noose for the violation of this law.

1639 A.D. - Elizabeth Glover set up the first printing plant in the Colonies. Her pressman, Stephen Daye (or possibly Daye’s son, Matthew) printed the first book in the Colonies, when the Cambridge (Mass.) Press printed The Whole Booke of Psalmes, more commonly known as TheBay Psalm Book. Only five copies are known to exist.

1655 A.D. - The first true English language newspaper, and the oldest existing newspaper, The London Gazette was published. The first 23 issues were called The Oxford Gazette. After the plague, when the Crown moved back to London from Oxford, the newspaper moved also.

1702 A.D. - History’s first daily newspaper was established when Elizabeth Mallett issued The Daily Courant in England.

1711 A.D. - Addison and Steele first issued The Spectator, considered to be one of journalism’s finest accomplishments.

1724 A.D. - Benjamin Franklin arrived in London and obtained employment as a printer’s apprentice in the shop of Samuel Palmer.

1731 A.D. - Edward Cave brought out his highly successful periodical, The Gentleman’s Magazine. This was the first publication to use the name "magazine" in its title.

1768 A.D. - Abel Buell was the first to cut and cast type in the American Colonies.

1769 A.D. - The first printing press made by an American craftsman was the work of Isaac Doolittle, a clock and watchmaker.

1794-98? A.D. - Aloys Senefelder invented the planographic method of printing known as lithography.

1812 A.D. - Konig built the first automatic printing press and installed it in the offices of The London Times.

c1815 A.D. - Samuel Bangs first set up his printing press on Galveston Island - making him the first printer in Texas. He was captured by the Mexicans and sent to Mexico City where he became that country’s public printer.

1824 A.D. - William Pickering introduced his "Diamond Classics," the first books to be bound in bookcloth. Prior to this time, if you purchased a book from a printer, you got the folded signatures wrapped in paper. You would take these to your favorite bookbinder for binding.

1833 A.D. - The first mass produced newspaper in America, The New York Sun, was issued. The publication sold for one penny, and thus the name, "the penny press."

1880 A.D. - Stephen Horgan printed the famous illustration "Shantytown" in the New York Daily Graphic. This was the first halftone photograph printed.

1952 A.D. - With the printing of The Wonderful World of Insects, electronics had at last come to the printing plant. This book was the first work which used the phototype process to commercially set type.

1961 A.D. - The introduction of the first Xerox machine.

1980 A.D. - The first operating 15th century style printing plant and type foundry on the North American continent opened at a Texas renaissance theme park by this author as an educational exhibit. That press and type foundry is now on display at the Kwik Kopy (ICED) world headquarters in Cypress, Texas.

1980 A.D. - The advent of the Internet.

Printing process timeline

The earliest dated printed book known is the "Diamond Sutra", printed in China in 868 CE. However, it is suspected that book printing may have occurred long before this date.

Before Gutenberg, printing was limited in the number of editions made and nearly exclusively decorative, used for pictures and designs. The material to be printed was carved into wood, stone, and metal, rolled with ink or paint and transferred by pressure to parchment or vellum. Books were hand copied mostly by members of religious orders.

Johannes Gutenberg

Johannes Gutenberg was a German craftsman and inventor. Gutenberg is best known for the Gutenberg press, an innovative printing press machine that used movable type. It remained the standard until the 20th century. Gutenberg made printing cheap.

Printing Processes
Linotype & Ottmar Mergenthaler

Ottmar Mergenthaler's invention of the linotype composing machine in 1886 is regarded as the greatest advance in printing since the development of moveable type 400 years earlier.

Teletypesetter

Teletypesetter, device for setting type by telegraph developed by F.E. Gannett of Rochester, N.Y., W.W. Morey of East Orange, N.J., and Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Company, Chicago, Ill. The first demo of Walter Morey's "Teletypesetter" took place in Rochester, New york in 1928.

Phototypesetting

Louis Marius Moyroud and Rene Alphonse Higonnet developed the first practical phototypesettingmachine. The phototypesetter that used a strobe light and a series of optics to project characters from a spinning disk onto photographic paper.

Silk Screening or Serigraphy

In 1907, Samuel Simon of Manchester England was awarded a patent for the process of using silk fabric as a printing screen. Using materials other than silk for screen printing has a long history that begins with the ancient art of stenciling used by the Egyptians and Greeks as early as 2500 B.C. A few years after Simon's patent, John Pilsworth of San Francisco developed a multicolor process of silk screening called screen printing. The term "Serigraphy", comes from the Latin word "Seri" (silk) and the Greek word "graphein" (to write or draw).

All information found from http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/printing.htm

Photography and typography

Oh my god. I love this guys work. It is amazing! ARGH! Ok... Calm...

My favourite pieces from his work are where he uses perspective to his advantage, creating images which are only truely visable in their entirety when viewed from a certain angle. He is currently working on producing an entire alphabet... I am seriously going to see if he has any need for an assistant if I have any time free. I would absolutely love to mix photography and typography!

Athlete

Jay-Z

WAD

Photographer Bela Borsodi shot the word alphabets for WAD magazine. It is reminds me of the H I made in visual language. If these letters were viewed from any other angle, they would not make sense. I love it. I think the intelligence needed to create such a beautiful piece is good.

 A

P & S

Obsessions make my life worse and my work better

Stefan Sagmeister expresses this statement with 3D typography by using money to illustrate this in Waagdragerhof Square in Amsterdam for Urban Play. I think this is good as it brought lots of people together. Some one tried to 'steal' the artwork once it was left for the public and in an effort to 'preserve' the artwork the police swept every remaining cent away. The quality and thought that went into creating this work is so precise, and good.

Over 100 volunteers helped set up the piece

Obsessions make my life worse and my work better

Stone alphabets

Olyff is a typographer and graphic designer. Over the past 20 years she has collected nearly 30 stone alphabets. These stones have been collected and look like letterforms to make up a complete collection. I think it is brilliant! I think this 3D type is good because it is natural and that must be good! There is no re-touching or editing. It is pure typography. Literally. 

Stone alphabet

Sentances

Aoyama Hina creates Sentances with scissors alone. "The pieces are labour intensive - a short work will take up to five hours to make, while a long work could take up to three months. Hina says "I don't follow tradition, but I am trying to create a mixture of the traditional and modern styles to product my own world through this style."' - 3D typography.

I believe as this is of such high quality and standard, Aoyama Hinas work is good. The amount of time, effort and love that goes into all her work is amazing and shows the passion behind her work. Her 3D typography is good. 

Sentances

Karrie Jacobs

"Moss letters and rock letters are not intended to answer to questions of readability or legibility, but rather they are totemic objects intended to lure type back to the human side of the screen."

Karrie Jacobs 'Talking type back to the human side of the screen' in '3D typography' by Jeanette Abbink and Emily CM Anderson.

Type is on the way out

"What Gutenberg did over 550 years ago was invent a system in which the letters of the alphabet were cast in lead. For the centuries that followed not much really changed. Before you could print a book or newspaper, you needed to have metal type. All that went away, beginning in the late 1940s, as cool phototypography gradually took over the place of hot metal. And type as object receded even further into the past when digital typesetting took over in the 1980s."

"Until recently, everything that mattered was on paper: the Constitution, the Bible, The New York Times. Lately, the consequential stuff tends to arrive via iPhone text message. Sure, it's still Helvetica, and carries with it a whiff of that typeface's customary autority, but type today is a mere blip. It lives out its entire life cycle on the far side of the glass, intangible, remote, non-corporeal, elusive, transitory."

These two quotes have been taken from 'Talking type back to the human side of the screen' written by Karrie Jacobs from '3D typography' by Jeanette Abbink and Emily CM Anderson. I think these quotes emphasise how type is changing with society, and more importantly, the 24hour society we live in today. Everything must be delivered quickly, and setting type by letterpress is time consuming. I think letterpress is good. However I also think that internet based type is also good as it communicates in a much quicker way and we can receive instant updates. This is important to match the way we live our lives today, constantly progressing.

Jeanette Abbink and Emily CM Anderson

"Beautiful objects unto themselves, the hand-wrought pieces reflected upon the crafted letters they described in ways we found to be illuminating, soulful and sometimes whimsical."

Jeanette Abbink and Emily CM Anderson in the preface of '3D Typography' talking about their involvement in 3D type steming from their redesign of 'American Craft' magazine.

Case

Originally two cases were used for storing metal type. The top one for the capital letters and the one below for the small letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase are derived from this. Interesting fact!

Too big? Too small?

"Leading is the invisable framework running vertically down a page, and together with type size and line length it has the greatest effect on the readability of a piece of printed text." Taken from 'Type & typography' by Phil Baines & Andrew Haslam.

Upper and lowercase leading

Again, taken from the book 'Finer points in the spacing & arrangement of type' by Geoffrey Dowding he states the issues with leading when it comes to upper and lowercase.

"If displayed lines in upper- & lower-case are mechanically leaded, then, in the majority of cases they will not appear to be properly spaced. Care is necessary in adjusting the leading of the lines so as to give visually even spacing between them. As the number of lines in a title, for example, increases, so does the problem of leading; and this problem of visual spacing is further increased when words in, or lines of, capitols, are introduced into the setting."

Example scanned from book of leading adjustments for upper and lowercase letters.

How much leading?

Geoffrey Dowding lays out the norms and rules of leading in his book 'Finer points in the spacing & arrangements of type'. I will summerise the points which I think are most relevant to my project 'leading is good'.

The amount of leading is usually decided by...

The nature of the work
Books and works of reference are normally leaded in very small amount if at all. This practise has not changed since the early days of printing. Because the book has been chosen because the reader wants to read it, the designer does not have to go out of his way to induce the buyer or borrower to read. However, the unwilling reader must be persuaded to read. The copy in newspapers needs to be well leaded to compensate for the conditions in which it is often read, such as in bad lighting on swaying or jolting trains or busses.

The body-size of the type
As the body-size of the type is increased (irrespective of the x-height) it is ideal to increase the leading proportionately.

The measure
Lines which are longer than 9 or 10 words in length must be leaded proportionately in order to compensate for the extension. If the leading is not increased, the reader could read the same line twice (doubling).

The x-height of the face
Generally the larger the x-height, the larger leading may be required to achieve the same legibility.

The design of the face
"If matter has to be set solid, seriffed faces generally, with the exception of those styled 'modern', are undoubtedly easier to read than the sans serifs because the serifs help the normal horizontal movement of the eyes in reading by carrying them along the line. No such guides exist in a sans serif face and unless the lines are impeccably set and well seperated by leading there is a distinct tendancy to movement in in another direction, i.e. a vertical, or up-and-down movement. Sans serif typefaces require more leading than any other kind of type."

Geoffrey Dowding

"It is a common but absolutely illogical practise to widely word-space our most condensed italic types and to set them in line after unleaded line and occasionally in page after unleaded page!"

Geoffrey Dowding was a typographer, an instructor in typographic design at the London College of Printing and wrote 'Finer points in the spacing & arrangement of type' which is where this quote is pulled from.

Alphabet timeline

Alpha and beta

An alphabet is a series of culturally agreed upon marks - letters - that represent specific sounds. Before the Phoenicians developed an alphabet around 1500 B.C.E, written language had depicted entire words at a time. The picture of a bull meant a bull, independent of its pronunciation. Being able to write, meant knowing thousands of marks that represented all the things in the known world. By developing a system dependant upon sound ('ah) and not object (bull) or concept (love), the Phoenicians were able to capture language with 20 marks instead of hundreds or thousands. In terms of letterforms, the Phoenicians were the basis of the alphabet.

The word 'alphabet' is a compression of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. By 800 B.C.E, the Greeks had adapted the 20 letters from the Phoenician alphabet, changing the shape and sound of some letters.

This has been adapted from 'A type primer' by John Kane.

Mark-Alain Ouaknin

"The second of the Ten Commandments states: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in the heavens above or that is in the earth beneath…’ This prohibition on the image forced the Semites, who still wrote their language in a pictographic writing, to rid themselves of images."

This comment is taken from 'Mysteries of the Alphabet' and is reference to explaining how an alphabet of pictograms evolved into a series of abstract symbols. 

Robert Brighurst

"Writing is the solid form of language, 

the precipitate."

Robert Brighurst is a Canadian poet, typographer and author.

The origins of abc

The origins of abc is a great article I found on I love typography. I have picked out the points which I think are relevant to my 'the alphabet is good' section of this project. I think it is important that I know how the alphabet we use today was constructed and how it has evolved to get better over the millions of years.

Sumer - Cuneiform - 4th millenium BC
Cuneiform started out as pictograms. These pictures later came to represent not only things (such as a bird) but sounds also. "It is clear that a written language with signs that represent sounds requires fewer characters than a language in which a sign stands for a thing or an idea. We use 26 letters (and the Romans used only 23 to create some of the most outstanding literature the world has ever known) while the Chinese, for example, have to learn thousands of characters to express themselves. Even early cuneiform comprised some 1,500 pictograms."

Cuneiform evolution








The Sumerian language ceased to be spoken in around 2000 BC, it was mostly replace by the Akkadian conquerers who adopted the written symbols. This form of writing was used until the 5th century AD.


Egypt - The writing of the Gods
Hieroglyphics started out as pictograms, similarly to cuneiform, they also later became used for sounds. Hierlglyphs came in several forms and styles, depending on the medium on which they were written, their purpose and their intended audience. 


The first alphabets - Wadi el-Hol
An inscription found in 1999 has been traced to around 1600 to 1500 BC and it includes the sign of an Ox head ('aleph) - the origins of the Latin A - the early Sumerian cuneiform also used the Ox as a sign. By around 1600 BC, in the region between the two dominant writing systems (cuneiform and hieroglyphs) other more sophisticated alphabets were being developed. 


Proto-Sinaitic
This alphabet was influence by Egyptian Hieroglyphs and each pictograph represented a sound rather than a thing or idea. "It is this proto-Sinaitic alphabet that really marks the starting point, the root of numerous modern-day alphabets, from Arabic and Hebrew to Greek and Latin."

Proto-Sinaitic evolution of E






The Phoenicians - The Purple People
"The Phoenician alphabet was probably developed for quick and easy to read notes that a merchant would make on his trips." "They owed their initial rise to a simple snail that can still be found on the coast of Lebanon and that, left rotting in the sun, could be used to make purple dye — thus the Greek-coined Phoenician or purple people, fromphoiniki, meaning purple or crimson." "This simple and ingenious modern alphabet of consonants from which the last vestiges of pictograms had been erased, is indeed a merchant’s instrument: easy to learn, to write and to adapt."

Phoenician alphabet







Greek - Enter the vowel
For a long time, the Greek scripts had no fixed direction, being written left to right, and right to left. IOn Greek scripts, we can see favour of abstract, linear forms and a dismissal of pictographic forms. "It appears that the Greeks simply adopted most of the Phoenician signs but added the vowels that the Phoenicians had left out."

Greek 3rd century












Etruscan
With a passionate attaction to the Greeks, they adopted much of their art and religious rites, along with the Greek alphabet. Within a few centuries the Roman Republic became the master of Italy and absorbed the Etruscans completely. However, their alphabet survived and prospered as it spread over the world with the expansion of the Roman Empire. 


Latin - Musical chairs & the tale of Z
"The Latin alphabet that we still use today was created by the Etruscans and the Romans from the Greek. It had only 23 letters: the J, U and W were missing. The J was represented by the I, the U was written as V and there was no need for a W. The story of the Z is particularly interesting.

The new letter G (based on C) was added; Z was borrowed from the Greek, then dropped as Latin had no need for it. G took its place in the line-up, until a little later when the Romans decided they needed the Z (when Greek literature became the vogue and they started to introduce many Greek words), they re-introduced it, but since its spot had be taken by G, it was sent to the back of the alphabet, where it remains to this day."

Detail from inscription 114 AD

In summary

"We stand in the 17th century, some 5,000 years after the Sumerians set stylus to clay. We now have a dual alphabet of 26 letters, uppercase and lowercase forms. There is hardly a straight line to be seen in the history of the alphabet. No Darwinian progress there, no survival of the fittest. Many of the aforementioned scripts developed side-by-side, some disappeared and reappeared, some can be shown to be the product of the mind of one man like Alcuin of York. And we do not know what would have happened if Hannibal had marched straight to Rome after winning the battle of Cannae instead of loitering."

"Writing and alphabets evolve for a number of reasons. We can explain the transition from pictograms to the linear, more abstract forms in terms of rationalization ... A victorious invader brings its culture, including its language, both spoken and written. Context is also an important factor: text cut in stone contemplating the deeds of emperors is something different than an advertisement for a brothel scratched on a wall in Pompeii. The substrate, or writing material (whether clay, stone, wax tablets, wood, metal, papyrus, parchment, or vellum; and the writing implement, a reed, chisel, quill, broad nib pen — they all affect the form the alphabet takes. The speed of the hand is another factor. As an interesting exercise, write the capital alphabet, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ slowly and deliberately — in your best hand. Now write it again at twice the speed. Finally, write it as quickly as you possibly can. The rapid hand introduces a reduced ductus (fewer strokes), and fewer pen-lifts, with those neat capital letters of the first round turning into something freer, more cursive. You can then further evolve your letterforms by using the most rapidly written alphabet, and begin to rationalise it, adjusting the proportions, altering the shading (contrast), and the result is an entirely a new hand."

Wow.