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History of the Letterform 3

Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things: indeed, it has been said that the invention of writing is more important than all the victories ever won or constitutions devised by man. The history of writing is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expressi on, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention. When and to whom in the dim past the idea came that mans speech could be better represented by fewer symbols [to denote certain unvarying sounds] selected from the confused mass of picture ideographs, phonograms,

and their like, which constituted the first methods of representing human speech, we have no certain means of knowing. But whatever the source, the development did come; and we must deal with it. To present briefly the early history of the alphabet requires that much collateral matter must be disregarded and a great deal that is omitted here must necessarily be taken for granted; the writer desires, however, to present what seems to him to be a logical and probable story of the alphabets beginnings.

Although it has not yet been proved conclusively, it is quite possible, and altogether probable, that the traders of Phoenicia and the Aegean adopted both the use of papyrus and Egyptian hieratic writing, from which developed the Phoenician alphabet. Whether all the earliest writing systems of different countries sprang from one common stock of picture writing, we shall, perhaps, never surely know; we do know that the picture writing of Egypt exercised a very great influence, and it seems quite safe for us to assume that crude attempts by those ancient Niledwellers to express thought visibly or to record facts by a series of

pictures - or by diagrams sufficiently pictorial, at least, to connect them with well-known objects [disregarding the earlier mnemonic stage or use of memory aids like the quipu or knotted cord, of which the rosary is a modern example constitute the origin of the abstract and arbitrary signs or symbols which we call letters.

Introduction

Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things

New words are being invented all the time to keep up with changes in technology and daily life. This may have been one of the reasons the Phoenicians came up with the innovative notion of a phonetic alphabet: one in which the letters represented sounds. It was an elegant and practical idea, and its obviously had a huge impact on the nature of writing to this day. A pictorial written language worked fine for the earlier Egyptian culture. For example, to the Ancient Egyptians, a picture of a man with a weapon clearly meant warrior. But in the more complicated society of the Phoenicians, the distinction between merchant and moneylender was not so easy to represent with an illustration. To address this problem, the Phoenicians worked out a modified picture-based alphabet. Now each picture did not represent the object itself, but rather, one of the sounds in the name of the object depicted. The letter P is a perfect example. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, a drawing of a mouth would have meant just that: a mouth, or perhaps someone talking.

In the Phoenician alphabet, the symbol of a mouth represented the sound of its Phoenician name, pe. The Phoenician P actually had two forms. One had a rounded shape that looked a little like an upside-down J, and the other was a more angular form derived from a Sumerian symbol. The Greeks borrowed the sign from the Phoenicians, but here things get a little confusing. What looks like our P in the Greek language was actually their symbol for the r sound, while their p sound was represented by a more geometric, asymmetrical shape. This character was then further modified, and as the Greeks were compelled to do, made symmetrical. The final outcome was the sign they calledPi. The Romans inherited their more rounded P, which looked much like the earlier Phoenician sign, through the Etruscans. In time the Romans turned the letter around and, in the process, developed the monumental P that is the prototype of all forms of our letter.

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History of the Letterform 5

Quick Anatomy

Hx

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Quick Fact
Frutiger, designed by Adrian Frutiger, took 7 years to develop and even after 40 years still continues to be one of Linotypes best selling fonts.

kK
Quick Fact
Georgia typeface created by Matthew Carter was named after a headline saying Alien heads found in Georgia

character. The Semitic sign kaph, the forerunner of our K, was a threestroked character that represented the palm of an outstretched hand. While several versions of the kaph were used by the Semites, and more specifically the Phoenicians, all were composed of three strokes drawn in a similar fashion. First, the character was a simple drawing of Some letters are slaves to fashion. a hand. Next, the character looked Theyll change their images for something like our Y with a short any number of reasons: to satisfy middle stroke between the two the whim of some snazzy new longer diagonals. Finally, it was writing utensil, or even because simplified even more and turned theyve taken up with a different on its axis so that its two diagonals language. The K, however, sticks pointed left (like a backwards to the tried and true. Its remained version of our K). But even as the virtually unchanged for the last three character was modified and turned thousand years or so. in several directions throughout its K was the 11th character of the evolution, the basic form remained ancient Semitic alphabets, a nearly the same. position it still retains in our current The Greeks took the simplified character set. In form, it has probably varied less than any other

version of the kaph and introduced symmetry into the design. Eventually, they also turned the character around so that the diagonals faced right. The Greeks even kept the basic name of the letter, changing it only slightly, to kappa. In the Greek language, two signs represented the k sound: K and Q. The Etruscans, however, had three signs for the same sound: C, K, and Q. The early Romans adopted all three, but in time dropped the K, using it only for words acquired from the Greeks, or those of an official nature. The latter use was probably the reason the K made it to the Roman monumental inscriptions, which set the standard for our current design.

K
History of the Letterform 7

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Quick Anatomy
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F
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History of the Letterform 9

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Quick Fact
The word Helvetica is Latin for Swiss

In its earliest years, the letter that evolved into our F was an Egyptian hieroglyph that literally was a picture of a snake. This was around 3,000 B.C. Through the process of simplification over many years, the F began to lose its snakelike character, and by the time it emerged as an Egyptian hieratic form it wasnt much more than a vertical stroke capped by a small crossbar. With a slight stretch of the imagination, it could be said to look like a nail. This may be why the Phoenicians called the letter waw, a word meaning nail or hook, when they adapted the symbol for their alphabet.

In its job as a waw, the character represented a semi-consonant sound, roughly pronounced as the W in the word know. However, at various times the waw also represented the v and sometimes even the u sound. When the Greeks assimilated the Phoenician alphabet, they handled the confusing waw with typically Greek logic: they split it into two characters. One represented the semi-consonant W and the other became the forerunner of our V. (The w sound became the Greekdigamma,or double gamma, and was constructed by placing one gamma on top of another.) While the character was eventually dropped from the Greek alphabet, it was able to find work in the Etruscan language. Here it did yeomans service until the Romans adopted it as a symbol for the softened v or double v sound. Even today, the German language

(an important source for English) uses the V as an F in words like vater, which means father and is pronounced fahter. Finally, the F found a permanent home as the very geometric sixth letter of the Roman alphabet.

Quick Anatomy
spine serif

Ff

The squiggly nu doubtlessly upset those organized, rational Greek minds, thus obliging them to redesign the character slightly to suit their sensibilities. First, they tried to give the angled strokes stability by making the last one a strong vertical support. But this made the letter (gasp!) asymmetrical! Obviously, this would not do, so the Greeks extended the other vertical stroke and made the two parallel.

Quick Fact
Futura is based on the geometric shapes representative of the Bauhaus period.

At first, the Romans, like the Greeks, incised their letters directly in stone, or inscribed them in soft clay. These early letters had no variation in stroke thickness and lacked most of the curved strokes we have come to associate with the Roman alphabet. In the first century A.D., however, stonecutters began to paint the letters on stone prior to cutting them with hammer and chisel. It was this pre-drawing process that gave our current alphabet its variance in stroke weight, rich flowing curves and, ultimately, serifs. During this evolutionary change, the Ns outside strokes became thinner and serifs were added.

nN

The early form of the N was always closely associated with water. When the sign was used by the Phoenicians more than three thousand years ago, it was called nun (pronounced noon), which meant fish. Before the Phoenicians, the Egyptian hieroglyph (or picture sign) for the n sound was a wavy line representing water. Around the 10th century B.C., the Greeks began adopting parts of the Phoenician alphabet as their own. In this way, they not only acquired the shape of the Phoenician nun, they also preserved its name to a point.

Although the Phoenician characters name was meaningless to the Greeks, its initial sound became the sound that the sign represented. The Phoenician nun thus became the Greek nu.

The Greek N passed on to the Romans with virtually no change in the basic design. Over time, however, subtle changes were made to all the letters the Romans borrowed from the Greeks, and the N was no exception.

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History of the Letterform 11

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As any Scrabble player will tell you, e has always been an important letter in our alphabet, used more often than any other. In the Internet age, however, e has achieved nearubiquitous popularity, since it can be tacked on at will on to almost any other word to imply the white heat of the technological revolution. Terms likee-business, e-zine, e-cash, e-textande-bookare now part of the daily language of many of us. The forerunner of these compounds is the comparatively venerablee-mail,first recorded as a noun in 1982 and as a verb in 1987. At first, thee-was just a convenient abbreviation for electronic.E-mailgained wider currency from the early nineties onwards, but many new users of the term were uncertain whether the initial letter was an abbreviation or a prefix, and whether the word should be written with a hyphen or not. Hence the alternative formsE-mail, Email,andemail. Where It All Began Flash back five millenia to Ancient Egypt. Several experts believe that the fifth letter of our alphabet or, rather, some of the sounds it represents were once indicated by the Egyptian hieroglyph for a house

or courtyard. Two thousand years vlater the hieroglyph evolved into the Phoenician letter called h, which represented, roughly, the sound of our h. When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician writing system, they had difficulty using about half of the Phoenician letters; most of these troublesome characters were modified to bring them into sync with the Greek language. Some were altered only slightly, others drastically. A couple were dropped altogether. The Phoenician h was one of the problem characters. The Greeks could not pronounce the first sound of the letter name. Being pragmatic people, and living in less complicated times, their solution was simply to drop the part of the name that was causing the difficulty. As a result, the Phoenician h became e and thus, our most useful vowel was born. A Final Modification over time, the Greeks gradually simplified the design of the Phoenician character, and flopped it so that its arms were pointed to the right. The end result looked remarkably like the E found in typefaces like Arial or ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

History of the Letterform 13

e
Quick Fact
Rockwell was featured in the Guinness World Records late 1980s and early 1990s publications.

D
d
Much of our alphabet is built on a representational strategy called acrophony (from the Greekacro,meaning uppermost; head andphony,sound). Acrophony means indicating a sound through the use of a picture or name of something that begins with the same sound. Childrens alphabet books do this all the time; they might use a picture of a dog, say, to represent the sound of the letter D.

When the Egyptians used the symbol for a hand (their word deret) to indicate the sound value of D, it served its purpose adequately. However, when the Phoenicians adopted much of the Egyptian hieratic system of writing (a kind of abridged form of hieroglyphics), they didnt know which objects many of the signs actually depicted. For example, it has been speculated that the symbol that represented a hand to the Egyptians looked like a drawing of a tent door to the Phoenicians. As a result, the Phoenicians called the character daleth their word for door. Different object, same D sound. The Greeks continued the acrophonic tradition, but rather blindly. Even without knowing the literal meanings of the symbols, the Greeks were content to adopt the Phoenician names (or something

close to them) to represent the Greek versions of the same letterforms. Thus, the Phoenician aleph became alpha, beth became beta, and daleth evolved into delta. Over time, the Phoenicians haphazard rendering of a door developed into the orderly, often symmetrical triangular Greek delta. Later in its evolutionary process, the triangular D was tipped to balance on one of its points. Still later, a rounded version of the basic shape came into use. It was this softened version of the D that was adopted by the Etruscans, from whom the Romans borrowed their alphabet. The Romans further refined the D into the balanced and deceptively simple letter we use today.

D
History of the Letterform 15

Quick Fact
Georgia typeface created by Matthew Carter was named after a headline saying Alien heads found in Georgia

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Quick Anatomy
arm ascender leg

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History of the Letterform 17

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Quick Fact
The word Helvetica is Latin for Swiss

The letter R is a more exceptional character than it first appears. Its not a P with a tail or a B with a broken bowl; when drawn correctly, the R is rich with subtle details and delicate proportions. It can be the most challenging letter for type designers to create, and the most dare we say rewarding. There is an Egyptian hieroglyphic on the Rosetta Stone that represents the consonant sound of R. The symbol is called ro and was drawn in the shape of a mouth. In hieratic writing, the symbol was elongated into more of a capsule shape. The Phoenician sign for the r sound was called resh, their word for head. Resh bore no resemblance to the Egyptian ro; it was depicted in the Phoenician alphabet by what we assume to be a simple rendering of a left-facing human profile. By 900 B.C. the Greeks had adapted the Phoenician letter and called

it rho. The Greeks reversed the orientation of the heads left-facing profile, which you might consider a step in the right direction toward creating the R. But they also converted the curve of the face into an angular form. The curve was eventually restored, and the letter ended up looking much like our P. The Romans borrowed the alphabet from the Greeks via the Etruscans, adding a short, obliqued appendage under the bowl. Seeing the advantage in having a differentiation between the R and P, the Romans further lengthened the stunted stroke into a graceful and delicately curved tail, which remains the trademark feature of our modern R

Quick Anatomy
spine serif