preface Alphabet is a series of marks that we use to represent sounds, and they haven’t always been the way they do. Throughout the centuries, alphabet has continuously changed and evolved, up until the way they are today. Studying the history of letters has taught me that the way letterforms are now, may not be the way that they’ll always be, and through this book, I will be talking about some of the major alphabets that the current alphabet has evolved from. Evolution, as it is defined by the Oxford Dictionary, is the process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the earth; or the gradual development of something. However, to encapsulate the massive word into one: an evolution is a change. Now — a change, especially those that happened through a long period of time, can be visualized in many different ways: charts, compar- ison, the gradient between the two (or more) subjects. Yet, that is not how I envisioned this book to be. I perceive the change as a form of movement, and I would like to bring that movement into the alphabets to be discussed, as well as the way to indicate the evolution. Additionally, in the last section, I will be discussing 24 type- faces that have been prevalent in the history of type, and for the purpose of this book, I will start the book with the study of alphabet — not writing. Type Ancestry Years in typefaces 87 Phoenician Alphabet 02 Jenson 89 Arabic 03 Garamond 91 Hebrew 07 Fournier 93 Nabataean 11 Bell 95 Clarendon 97 Greek Alphabet 15 Akzidenz-Grotesk 99 Glagolitic 17 Copperplate Gothic 101 Cyrillic 21 Franklin Gothic 103 Centaur 105 Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift 107 Frozen Letters Futura 109 Gill Sans 111 Etruscan Alphabet 25 Peignot 113 Ogham 27 Mistral 115 Runic 35 Univers 117 Helvetica 119 ITC Avant Garde Gothic 121 Roman Development ITC Bauhaus 123 Trajan 125 Capitals 41 Template Gothic 127 Roman Cursive 45 Mason 129 Uncial 49 Base 9/12 131 Carolingian 53 Gotham 133 Blackletter 57 Whitney 135 Serif 61 Egyptian Serif 65 Sans Serif 69 Pixel Type Dot Matrix 73 Segmented Type 79 Bitmap 83 phoenician alphabet 01 — type ancestry The Phoenicians were a group of Semitic people, comparatively small by modern standards who occupied a number of towns; Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, amongst others, on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean in 11 BCE. The Phoenician is also linked to the color purple. Although the Phoenicians called themselves Kena’ani, or Canaanites, the Greeks have also called them the “purple people” and their country, Phoiniki — the Greek word for purple or crimson being phoînix. The Phoenicians travelled, and did tradings throughout the Mediterranean (the sea in the middle of the world), and their alphabet went with them, and it got noticed. A major difference between our Latin alphabet and that of the Phoenicians is that each letter had a meaningful name. A was called Aleph (which also meant cow), because the letter evolved from a simplified drawing of a cow’s head. However, the A that we know, just means A. The letter names are extrapolated from ancient Hebrew, with a key source being the alphabetic listing used in the Bible book Lamentations. The Phoenician alphabet is also the precursor of modern day Hebrew and Arabic. 02 arabic /phoenician ancestry — type 01 01.01/arabic Introduction to Arabic Alphabet The origins of the Arabic alphabet can be traced back to the writing of the semi-nomadic Nabataean tribes, who inhabited southern Syria and Jordan, Northern Arabia, and the Sinai Peninsula. Surviving stone inscriptions in the Nabataean script, a descendant of Phoenician alphabet, show strong similarities to the modern Arabic writing system. Like Arabic, their written texts consisted largely of consonants and long vowels, with variations on the same basic letterforms used to represent a number of sounds. Arabic is written and read from right to left, and their upper and lowercase letters do not have any distinctions. However, shapes of letters usually vary depending on whether they are in an initial, medial, or final position in a word. Punctuation marks were not adopted until the 20th century. Short vowels are represented by a set of marks below or above the letters, which helps in the pronunciation of a word. These marks are usually only written in the Qur'an, where correct recitation is really important. 04 ب ج ح اteh beh alefت thehث ha jim خ ر ز س dal khaد dhalذ sin zin ra ش ص ض ع ta dad sad shinط dhaظ ain غ م feh ghainف qafق kafك lamل mim ن و ي heh nunه yeh waw 05 06 01 — type ancestry ancestry — type 01 01.02/hebrew Introduction to Hebrew Alphabet Hebrew is a member of the Canaanite group derived from Semitic languages. It was the language used by the early Jews, but from 586 BC it started to be replaced by Aramaic. By 200 AD, the use of Hebrew as an everyday language had largely ceased, but it conti- nued to be used for literary and religious functions, as well as lingua franca among Jews from different countries. During the mid-19th century the first efforts were made to revive Hebrew as a everyday language. One man who played a major role in these efforts wasEliezer Ben Yehuda (1858 – 1922), who was the first to make exclusive use of Hebrew in his home, encouraged the use of Hebrew among others, as well as its use in schools. Today, Hebrew is spoken by some 5 million people mainly in Israel, where it is an official language along with Arabic. and a further 2 million people speak the language in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, Panama, the UK and USA. The first alphabet used to write Hebrew made its presence during the late second and first millennia BC. Hebrew alphabet is closely related to the Phoenician alphabet. The modern Hebrew alphabet was developed from an alphabet known as Early Aramaic. hebrew /phoenician 07 אבגד הוזחט יכךלמ םנןסע 10פףצץ קרש 09ת 01 — type ancestry ancestry — type 01 Introduction to 01.03/nabataean Nabataean Alphabet Nabataean alphabet is the writing system used between approx- imately 150 BC and 150 AD in the Nabataean kingdom of Petra in the Arabian Peninsula. Used by the Nabataeans to write the Aramaic language, this alphabet was related to the Aramaic alphabet (a direct descendant of Phoenician alphabet), one of nabataean the major Semitic scripts. /phoenician The Nabataean script gave rise to the neo-Sinaitic alphabet, the ancestor of the Arabic alphabet. Just like its Semitic forerunner, Nabataean had 22 letters, all representing consonants, and was written from right to left. Nabataean inscriptions have also been found in Egypt and Italy and on coins from Petra. A bilingual inscription in Nabataean and Greek scripts was discovered on the Aegean Island of Kos. The Nabataean script did not look like the distinctive and dynamic shapes of Arabic, but it’s naïve and doodle forms performed the important role of breaking from the visual lexicon of Canaanite and Aramaic lettershapes, leaving a tabula rasa for Arabic letters. 12 From left to right: h, z, w, h, d, g, b, (, s, n, m, l, k, y, ţ, t, š, r, q, Ş, p 13 14 greek alphabet 16 01 — type ancestry Herodotus (c. 484 – 425 BCE), a Greek historian, referred to Greek letters as phoinikeia grammata, or better known as Phoenicians letters. Although the Greek alphabet today has a modest number of users, it is the oldest alpha- bet in continuous use (dating back to the 8th century BCE) and Greece is the channel by which all of Europe became literate and gained the alphabet, including where the alphabet gained its name, alpha-beta. Proto-Sinaitic, North-Semitic and Phoenician scripts have been mentioned thus far as alphabets; yet this is not strictly true. They are consonantaries, or abjads, which are alphabets without vowels. The Greeks are the ones who then expanded the alphabet with symbols for vowels when they finally acquired them from the Phoenicians. The Greek alphabet eventually came to contain seven vowel letters: A, short E, long E, I, short O (omicron), long O (omega) and U. The Greeks changed the direction of writing, and developed a style of writing called ‘boustrophedon’. meaning how the ox ploughs, which meant that lines of text-read alternately from right to left and left to right. As they changed the direction of reading, the Greeks also changed the orientation of the letterforms. 16 glagolitic 01.04/glagolitic /greek ancestry — type 01 Introduction to Glagolitic Alphabet Glagolitic alphabet is a script invented for the Slavic languages approximately during the 860 CE by the Eastern Orthodox Christian missionaries St. Cyril and his brother St. Methodius. The two missionaries originated in Thessaloníki, Greece, on the southern edge of the Slavic-speaking world. They were sent from Byzantium to “Great Moravia” — likely centred around present day Moravia in the Czech Republic. The language they used, though not identical with that of the Moravians, was usable by the latter. This is now called Old Church Slavonic, or Old Church Slavic. Their mission in Moravia lasted only a few decades. The mis- sionaries’ disciples then went to South Slavic regions, more specifically Bulgaria and Macedonia, where they constructed a new script for Slavic in the 900s, based on capital Greek letters, but with some additions. This alphabet became later known as Cyrillic. Although dissimilar to Glagolitic in letter- form, Cyrillic had approximately the same number of letters as Glagolitic and identical sound values for those letters.