A history of alphabets from around the world

The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering by Frederic W. Goudy Chapter 7: The Development of Gothic, page 2 With the pen the pressure is not naturally in the middle of the stroke, but at one end. In forming the letter '0,' instead of the symmetrical roman form the Gothic '0' is the more natural one. It was easy to cut the Roman form in stone & preserve symmetry. Gothic letters are essentially written forms made with one stroke of the slanted pen, and while the Caroline letters written in the same way kept an open, round appearance, in the Gothic, for the sake of greater economy of space, the curves were reduced to straight lines [at first of scarcely varying thickness], making the letters narrower, more angular, and stiffer, until the written page was made up of rows of perpendicular thick strokes connected at the top & bottom by oblique hairlines. Gothic capitals, however, tend to roundness, and in a way are incongruous; but they do break the monotony of an exceptionally rigid form of minuscule, perhaps happily, although they seldom seem to belong to them. The glory of the Roman alphabet lies in its capitals, while that of the Gothic letter lies in its lower case. This is but natural, since the Roman alphabet originally was FIG.34 VARIATIONS OF GOTHIC CAPITAL 'A' an alphabet of capitals only. In Italy alone the earlier roundness was preserved, & while of course affected later by the Gothic tendency, the letters never entirely acquired the extreme angularity of northern European writings. The fifteenth-century formal writing of the Italians became the foundation of the roman types which now supersede all other forms for printing books. Figure 34 shows six variations of the Gothic 'A' drawn by craftsmen of different nationalities at different periods: No.1 is from the tomb of Richard II, about A.D. 1400; No.2, from an English chancery manuscript of the fifteenth century; No.3, from the work of Albrecht Durer, early sixteenth century; No.4, from an Italian manuscript of the sixteenth century; No.5, from a seventeenth-century Flemish Gothic type form; & No.6, from an alphabet dated 1901, by the American architect, Bertram G. Goodhue, well known for his achievements in the Gothic style. FIG. 35 'GOUDYTEXT' CAPITALS, DRAWING FOR TYPE Continue to page 3

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