Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Alpha Beta of Scripts

We writers love our scripts. The shape of the letters that form our words are delightful in themselves. Don't you love the sensuality of writing little figures on paper and having them grouped together into meaning that someone else can read, meander, slide, buckle, careen off on? The sounds that those little scratchings correspond to is amazing too.

Our natural landscapes lie behind our alphabetic typographies. The fonts of our language reflect the pure forms of nature:

...scientists have pooled the common features of 100 different writing systems, including true alphabets such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and our own; so-called abjads that include Arabic and others that only use characters for consonants; Sanskrit, Tamil and other "abugidas", which use characters for consonants and accents for vowels; and Japanese and other syllabaries, which use symbols that approximate syllables, which make up words.

Remarkably, the study has concluded that the letters we use can be viewed as a mirror of the features of the natural world, from trees and mountains to meandering streams and urban cityscapes.

The shapes of letters are not dictated by the ease of writing them, economy of pen strokes and so on, but their underlying familiarity and the ease of recognizing them. We use certain letters because our brains are particularly good at seeing them, even if our hands find it hard to write them down. In turn, we are good at seeing certain shapes because they reflect common facets of the natural world.

from: Alphabets are as simple as...

In Arabic I see deserts and mirages, genies, a spirit that is as boundless as the open sky, tents under hot sun and blown by sandstorms, lyrical dwellings sculpted out of baked, whitewashed sandstone; I see the sinewy motion of Middle Eastern belly dancers, the crowded markets of barterers. In Hebraic I see a nomadic people, Hanukkah candles, the flame of an inner deified light. Chinese pictographs are as beautiful and intricate as the detailed landscapes of China, and in them I see also pagodas and monuments; they reveal a complexity of thought that I can only marvel at. If our letters mimic plains, mountains, streams, trees, branches, rocks and are shaped by our natural landscapes, our architecture is most certainly a gesture of the typographies of our alphabets.

We are drawing our world when we write.

Our architectures are our calligraphies writ large.

Meaningful marks on the page, jottings limning our natural environments, our sensory apparatus' translating our world into symbols that we can think through.

Arabic calligraphy and architecture


Chinese (Mandarin) pictograms and pagodas

(images courtesy of Google :)

4 comments:

  1. Oh! Yes! I love this.

    ... word verification: kalipu

    What kind of landscape does that describe??

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  2. architecture as giant expressions of typography... what a creative thinker you are! yes, i can see it now. our symbols permeate our visual world, but also, didn't typeography evolve from pictograms which were inspired by objects in the world? hmmm... lots to ponder today. certainly all of it supports the refinement of abstract thought over time. thanks for the thought provoking post!

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  3. MB, kalipu -? hmnn... :) 'Oh, yoo hoo, Kali-pu?' Or the dark goddesses excrement? (Now, like you, I am a dog owner too.) Oh, I could get sillier and sillier... 'Twas a good one, that verification. Now we know, at least. Watch out for KALI-PU!!

    Snowsparkle, you are always welcome here. After the Kalipu, I just can't stop laughing. More seriously, yes, I think of it all as the 'gesture' - a word I've always loved - from the landscape to the shapes of letters to our architectures. And obviously I must go off and research the history of typography... I'm not sure the Sumerians were using pictograms, which is why it took so long to translate the Rossetta Stones... it wasn't until they found a version in Greek or something that they were able to decipher the language. In the West at least, the first writing was accounting! Accounting! Ah, sigh. Records-keepers created written language. It's stunning really.

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  4. Anonymous7:18 AM

    can someone tell me the translation for the name "faiz"?

    ReplyDelete

A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___