A history of alphabets from around the world

The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering by Frederic W. Goudy Chapter 4: The Development of the Roman Capital It is frequently remarked of the Roman capitals that there seems to be no good reason for the ungainly disparities in their various widths: To the writer, however, there is a fundamental reasonableness in their peculiar proportions [of which varying widths are an essential feature] that marks for him a close relation between these * See figure 14, page 45, below. capitals & their far--off Phoenician originals; nor are those proportions and widths merely a matter of conscious or elaborate design. There is, too, a profound consistency in the Roman alphabet as a whole - a relationship between the individual letters that compose it, owing to the following of a sound tradition by craftsmen free from conscious effort toward beauty. Those ancient craftsmen were much more anxious for consistency in the form & appearance of their work than concerned with the question of widths of individual letters. The earliest syllabic or alphabetic signs that evolved from the Egyptian pictographs by a process of conventionalization & simplification retained, in some degree and for a long time, traces of their pictorial origin. The spaces required for the representation of the different objects employed for the pictographs naturally varied just as the actual objects themselves varied in proportion or shape; the more abstract symbols which grew out of the pictographs through rapid writing and abbreviation became purely conventional forms the pictorial significance of which was eventually lost or forgotten. These forms became traditional and were adopted by the Phoenicians as the basis of their alphabet; the spaces required to express the conventional forms might easily have varied in the same way, since the abstract symbols themselves, no doubt, kept more or less closely to the varying widths of their pictorial originals. Therefore, the early Greek & Roman stonecutters, heirs to the genius of Phoenicia, produced letters as of forms the widths of which were already established for them; these they modified or altered to their own use only just sufficiently to meet the exigencies of the technical requirements of the tools employed in their production. Nevertheless, neither the materials in which they worked nor the tools employed for cutting had, at any time, more than a modifying influence over the actual shapes of the letters themselves - forms with which the workmen were already familiar and which under their hands gradually developed, by imperceptible refinements, into letter forms especially suitable to the tools employed. There was no material change or loss of their original or generic characters, the essential shapes, in which varying widths were an important detail, remaining practically unaltered. The writer's theory seems amply borne out by a comparison of the early Greek letters with their Phoenician originals: nearly all the Greek forms follow closely the widths of the characters from which each was derived. But whether or not the Phoenician characters follow, likewise, the widths of their hieratic originals, or the hieratic characters follow the widths of the pictographs they conventionalize, the writer is not able to ascertain, the materials for a careful examination of all the transitional forms not being within his reach. Continue to page 4

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