A history of alphabets from around the world

The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering by Frederic W. Goudy Chapter 5: Letters Before Printing AT FIRST the Romans used two varieties of characters: capitals & cursive. The capitals were square-shaped and were used for inscriptions, and for lines requiring emphasis or prominence, as we use capitals nowadays, and for writings of importance. Figure 16 shows some square capitals carefully drawn from a fragment of the FIG. 16 SQUARE CAPITALS, FROM VERGIL'S AENEID. [FOURTH CENTURY] Aeneid of Vergil, written on vellum about the end of the fourth century. The letters are rather heavy and not very compact, and with but little spacing between the words. The only mark of punctuation is a kind of comma raised to the top of the line of writing. F is made slightly taller than E, as also L and occasionally I. * The cursive or running characters which are the originals of our lower-case types or minuscules were used for correspondence or for documents in which more formal writing was not necessary or desirable. This script, offering little of practical use, is not shown here. * The early Roman scribe based his written forms on the stone-cut letters. Note the similarity of such letters as B, C, P, R, in figure 16, and the same letters as represented in the author's "Hadriano" type [fig. 41, p. 86]. From the fourth century to the seventh, four principal types of character were in use - the capital of the earliest documents; the uncial, almost exclusively predominant after the fifth century; the cursive script in its various modifications as employed for purposes FIG. 17 RUSTIC WRITING OF THE FIFTH CENTURY of everyday use; and finally a modified uncial, which prepared the way for the later minuscule. The early form, whether Greek or Roman, was the square capital with its relatively few curved lines, which, when rounded, was used for manuscript writing and called "rustic" [fig. 17], as it was somewhat more fanciful or flexible than the form used for cutting in stone or for fine writing. Continue to page 2

Sign up for our weekly newsletter Email: The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering by Frederic W. Goudy Introduction What Letters Are Letters in General The Development of the Roman Capital Letters Before Printing The National Hands The Development of Gothic The Beginnings of Types The Qualities of Lettering Some Practical Considerations Notes on the Plates Greek alphabet Hebrew alphabet Sign language alphabet Cherokee alphabet Russian alphabet Phonetic alphabet Braille alphabet Egyptian alphabet Cyrillic alphabet Aramaic alphabet Morse code alphabet Runic alphabet