- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/6296251
A 30 minute video about the origin and evolution of fonts - or technically correctly: typefaces
cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/6296251
A 30 minute video about the origin and evolution of fonts - or technically correctly: typefaces
Actually interesting video! I’m clueless when it comes to fonts, but a few comments about the start (when he gives it some historical background):
I know, he’s oversimplifying it (as it is not the focus of the video), but it’s worth noting that this abstraction was done by the Egyptians themselves, while writing hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs often use something called the “rebus principle”, where you represent a word by a similar-sounding word. For example, “son of” /sa/ was often represented with ⟨𓅬⟩, a white-fronted goose /za/ - because they sound practically the same.
(It’s a lot like writing “I like The Beatles” as ⟨👁️👍🪲🪲⟩. Why ⟨👁️⟩? Because it sounds the same as “I”.)
What the Canaanites (including the Phoenicians) did was to use this rebus principle in a more consistent way, and only for the first consonant of the word. For example, ⟨𓉐⟩ (a house) representing [b] because “house” in those languages usually starts with that sound. That’s the start of the phonetic principle (graphemes represent sounds instead of concepts).
There’s yet another level of abstraction, that it’s hard to pinpoint when started to become relevant: instead of representing the “raw” sounds, you represent the underlying phonemes. It’s the reason, for example, that the /p/ in ⟨pit⟩ [pʰ] and ⟨spit⟩ [p] gets the same letter - because although they sound different, they’re still the same phoneme.
Ah, come on, that’s silly - neither is a “problem” of the lapidary early Greek alphabet. It’s just the absence of a feature that he’s used to, and the presence of another.
For comparison: this is on the same level as an Arabic or Farsi speaker saying “now, there are a couple problems with the modern Latin alphabet, such as lack of initial/medial/final forms, and writing the vowels with their own letters as if they were consonants.”
Further info on the alphabet. Be warned that it’s mostly trivia.
You seem to have some knowledge about the origin of letters. A couple of months ago I posted a link to a youtube video which explains how the months got their names:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9iOt48bTw4&list=PL5x1QB-VRuDtHCWcuSx0DgJr2mnuNXkSB&index=4
This channel has very interesting videos about the ethymological origins of different things. It’s worth watching. Also, there is a video in this channel where the “evolution” of the alphabet is explained.