I think that this week for everyone is a pretty crazy one. I am going to do you all a favor by trying to keep this short (and to do myself a favor too). Since we just barely switched over from written knowledge to print, I thought I'd make sort of a bridge post about the transition and its effects on the way we write.
Compare these two writing samples.
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| A sample written script. |
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| Sample font from Gutenberg's Bible |
Obviously not all written things are that hard to read and not all print was that detailed and beautiful, but that is just an example.
A few weeks ago I got a random email from
FamilySearch about indexing. (Family Search indexing is a way that anyone can give service by transcribing old written documents into electronic type so that they are readily searchable for people studying their genealogy.) The email linked me to a few sites about paleography which got me thinking about the differences between our letters today and the letters of 'back then' and the way that print changed that.
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Script that, to my untrained
eye, is pretty much illegible. |
As we read in the
article for our class this week, our idea of reading as a personal thing is actually kind of unique. When writing was first developed, the people were transitioning from an oral culture and kept many of the qualities of oral knowledge. The vast majority of people were not literate and so were dependent upon
listening in order to understand books. People read aloud from books to pass on the knowledge. This meant that when writing developed, the purpose was to be able make it sound right. Thus there may have been relatively little regard for spelling things 'correctly' or more correctly, 'uniformly'. If sounds the same it didn't matter as much -- for example maybe my last name could be spelled Myles, Miles, Milez, Mayols, Mie-oles . . . Who knows. This, along with the evolution of our language often makes it difficult to read old documents that are handwritten.
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Sample script from Wycliffe's bible. Obviously not all
things handwritten were completely illegible. |
Letters themselves have actually evolved a lot over time too. Most of us know that in old documents the 's' and 'f' are basically interchangeable, but there were actually many different looking letters. Their 'c' would probably appear like our 'r' or 't'. An 'e' would look like our cursive 'o'. 'h' was a curvy line that has no modern counterpart, along with
many more letters that are difficult for us now to recognize. Everyone should really check out this whole paleography
tutorial and
this site that teaches about paleography and includes a series of documents that get increasingly difficult to read.
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Movable type very much standardized
the look of today's letters. |
Print changed everything. Gutenburg's printing press was one of the most revolutionary inventions in history. Along with hundreds of huge changes that it caused was the standardization of spellings and letters. Now every letter was virtually identical to others in the same document. Dictionaries standardized the way that we write. Letters were allowed to evolve from a cursive script to the way that modern typefonts look - cursive just isn't too practical with moveable type.
I have to say that legibility is one of my favorite benefits of our print and electronic culture. I couldn't do without it. I am guessing that our professor, as he is reading this is thinking the exact same thing - or maybe he hasn't seen my handwriting yet . . . ( :
I liked how you connected us back to the transitions between media, oral to written and written to print. I think that it is important to remember that the evolution of styles is a gradual process. We had a good discussion about that in class on Tuesday. It had excellent applications to the current transition from print to electronic.
ReplyDeleteI would like to mention a possible confounding factor in your thoughts about improved legibility through print. Scripts and fonts come in and out of style. The first script you have is a betarde which was common in Italy. Other scripts have different characteristics. Carolingian script proceeded gothic and was much more legible despite being hand written. In Germany books continued to be printed in gothic into the 1960s despite of being more difficult to read.
as you guys probably know I intern at a graphic design firm and as you guys probably also know graphic design is ALL about typesetting/font design. There are millions of fonts and millions of sizes and styles. There are millions of dollars poured into designing and developing these fonts. There are nuances and subtitles between fonts and yet they appear the same across every computer and every book in the world. Why? in large part due to Gutenberg. I am fascinated by the print medium. My only comment is that nothing is EXACTLY the same between computer and print mediums. Why? When will it be exactly the same??
ReplyDeleteIn your post you mentioned that people were dependent upon listening to others read to them before writing became more of a personal thing. During that time, people only spoke sounds that were pleasing to listen to. It's interesting to see now that our society is mostly based around private reading, that we are experimenting with font types and writing styles to see what is pleasing to look at and easiest to read from.
ReplyDeleteI like that Misa. We get to try new aesthetics. That connects nicely back to Will's comment that there are billions of different fonts. It an artform now. It can be beautiful. Good insight.
ReplyDeleteI like how you started with the family search and genealogy side of print and writing. It is definitely obvious in the census records, where my great-grandmother's name is spelled 4 different ways, that the oral connection was much stronger to writing than to print. Print information or ideas were more mind to paper, while written down things usually included the mouth as a middle man. Even if it is just muttering to yourself.
ReplyDelete