Category Archives: Handwriting

“It’s handwritten, but not by me!”

by Tim Gorichanaz Experience, Handwriting, Technology

Ah, the personal touch of a handwritten note.

Ever since the dawn of type, people have been talking about how special handwriting is. In type, the English alphabet has only 26 letters (make that 52, counting lowercase and capitalized forms), but in handwriting, there are infinite letters. Just think of all the ways you can write the letter g and have it still be recognizable. (Indeed there is an entire blog dedicated to this letterform.) When we read something handwritten, we get a sense of the personality and emotion of the writer. This is why, when printed Bibles came along, people found the words a bit lacking in spirit. And it’s why handwritten letters are so special for us, even today (if a bit sloppier).

With digital technology, we’re no longer limited to keyboards and mice for input. With trackpads and touch screens, we can combine some of the personality of handwriting with the capability of electronics. The latest update to Apple’s iOS on the iPhone and iPad takes advantage of this, giving people the opportunity to send handwritten and drawn messages. Recipients can even replay the drawing to see how it came to be.

iOS 10 handwriting feature

While exploring this feature, I was struck by what seems to be an absurdity: It comes loaded with a number of pre-written messages—hello, thank you, happy birthday, etc.—that you can simply tap and send. That is, you can send a handwritten message without actually having to write it. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised—it turns out ghostwriting love letters is a sustainable business (and I feel like it figured in the plot of a novel I read once, but I can’t remember what it was).

Still, this seems tremendously weird to me. Wouldn’t a recipient find it disingenuous to receive the exact same text again and again? Though, then again, will people actually use these pre-made messages? For now, all I can do is speculate.

 

Support an exhibition of endangered alphabets

by Tim Gorichanaz Handwriting

Glagolitic wordTim Brookes creates beautiful wood carvings in endangered scripts (see my previous post on Brookes’ work). This work is part of the Endangered Alphabets project, which creates educational materials for readers of minority languages and cultivates awareness around linguistic endangerment.

Endangered Alphabets has launched a Kickstarter campaign to support a new major exhibition of Brookes’ work as part of Mother Language Day 2017. The campaign just went live today and will run through July 21, 2016. Back the project now—rewards include postcards, books, clocks, dictionaries, unique carvings and more!

How should emphasis be marked in new writing systems?

by Tim Gorichanaz Handwriting, Technology

Writing in the Roman alphabet, as we do in English, is a major privilege when it comes to communicating online. If your language doesn’t use it, you will face some serious challenges, to say the least.

That’s why I was so delighted to hear about Phoreus Cherokee, a new and quite complete typeface for the Cherokee language.

Recently the Cherokee recognized that, in order for their language to survive, it needed to get online. The Cherokee lobbied Apple to include support for their language, and they were successful. But there was still an issue, visually: Because it was historically underprivileged, the language never got to flourish artistically, as other languages did. They only had two typefaces, and they were limited. “Many of the glyphs weren’t accurate or were completely wrong,” according to Roy Boney, a Cherokee language services manager (quoted in the article linked above).

Enter type designer Mark Jamra, who tasked himself with creating a complete typeface of the Cherokee syllabary. Watch the video below for more.

One fascinating part about this story is that Jamra doesn’t speak Cherokee, and he only became familiar with the writing system through this project. He studied historical documents in order to uncover the “essence” of each of the letters. In this way, as he says in the video above, “I wouldn’t just be channeling the one-off quirks of some writer in, say, 1853, but rather I’d be basing them on forms that anyone could read who could read Cherokee.” Brilliant.

The story and video mostly focus on Jamra’s innovation in creating an italic version of the script, as well as lowercase glyphs. Now, this is quite interesting. At first, the creation of these glyphs seems unequivocally good: After all, more = better.

But not all languages have upper and lower case, and not all use italics (and bolding). These are conventions of the Roman alphabet as it’s evolved over time, and I can’t help but think it’s colonial, presumptuous, etc., to assume that all languages ought to have them.

Take Japanese, for instance. There’s now upper/lowercase distinction in Japanese, and there’s no italic or bold. A number of conventions have developed instead. To give a quote or title, the Japanese would use half-brackets, 「like this」.  For emphasis, they would either alternate syllabaries (the language has two syllabaries that are used in concert), or use “emphasis points” (called bōten or wakiten) along the characters to be emphasized. This can be seen in the image below, a photograph from my copy of 星の王子さま (a.k.a. The Little Prince), where the characters けもの (beast) are being emphasized.

Page from The Little Prince - Japanese

All this is to say that different languages have different needs and have developed different ways to show paralinguistic distinctions. How we do things in our alphabet is not the only way! In a world where more and more languages are adopting the Roman alphabet, we should celebrate diversity where we still have it, shouldn’t we?

(Or maybe the real lesson here is that I have a bone to pick with everything!)