A Taxonomy of Written Language
The other leadoff essay is a thoughtful look at “voices, languages, and scripts around the globe” by Robert Bringhurst (author of The Elements of Typographic Style). In this essay, he presents a classification system for the world’s systems of written communication—a “taxonomy” of written language—which, though based on existing knowledge, is as far as I know entirely new. His wide-ranging cultural knowledge gives life and blood to this subject, which in other hands might sound dry but here connects us with the very heart of how we communicate with one another.
John Hudson’s essay shows how Unicode and OpenType can deal with multiple versions of the same basic glyphs—here, optional “f+i” ligatures in the Latin alphabet.
A two-page spread from Robert Bringhurst’s essay on language and type around the world, showing different ways of writing the same Chinese characters.
These two essays, Hudson’s and Bringhurst’s, set the stage, giving us an overall context for the more specific essays that follow. Among the languages and scripts dealt with individually, there are some that didn’t make it into this book because of impossible schedules. This just makes it obvious how rich the subject is, and how much more there is to be said.
International Teamwork
Many people contributed generously to make this possible. That’s one of those stock phrases that you read so often, but it’s heartfelt and very true. Matthew Carter made his text typeface Fenway, and his related display face Vincent (both can be seen here), available to us for use in the book, which is one reason the pages will be so readable. On top of this, he cheerfully added special characters as needed, even doing a version of the titling caps of Vincent where the upper serifs had flat tops, so the word “TYPE” in the title, which is set on the jacket front at a large size in all caps, would look right. For essays on Arabic, Hebrew, and Cyrillic type, we received needed fonts and permission to use them from Linotype, Zvika Rosenberg, and ParaType.
Any publishing project is a collaborative endeavor, but a compendium like this is more so than most. When I was out of the loop because of a family emergency, John and Maxim leaped into the breach and kept things moving along until I was free again. John’s eye for subject matter as well as typography caught editorial problems that mine might not have, and his extensive knowledge of multilingual typography made him the perfect person to be doing this job. At the same time, we have deliberately made no attempt to homogenize the contents of the book, especially the essays; each of the contributors has his or her own voice, and his or her own take on the subject. This is not the final word; it’s the opening salvo in an ongoing conversation.
Today and Tomorrow
Language Culture Type is a benchmark publication. With its showings of the winning typefaces from bukva:raz! and its variety of essays, it shows the current state of international type design, and it may in some fashion point the way to the future. In conceiving of this book and then in putting it together, we wanted to create a volume that would be a useful reference for years to come, as well as a fascinating glimpse for all of us at aspects of the world’s languages, cultures, and types that we do not yet know.
This article was last modified on March 10, 2022
This article was first published on April 26, 2002
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