Language Culture Type

Language Culture Type International Type Design in Age of Unicode.The book contains two large sections: the first is a series of articles about various aspects of type design and its use; the second is the result of the competition. The book is best examined in reverse order. The competition celebrates the best typefaces designed over five years from 1996 to 2001. Over one hundred typefaces featuring fourteen different alphabets and writing systems are represented in five categories: text designs, display designs, text/display type systems, type superfamilies and pi fonts. Winning entries are presented as a spread with the typeface, a brief biography of its designer, the typeface as used in a setting and a brief reflection on the development of the font, which includes historical references, descriptions of the experimental context for letterform development or calligraphic origins as appropriate. The end result is a feast for the eyes. Two entries in particular characterize the spirit of this enterprise. DenHaag, designed by Alexander Tarbeev and Marwel Shmavonyan, is a multilingual sans serif typeface supporting Armenian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin scripts. Pigiarniq, designed by Wm. Ross Mills and commissioned by the Canadian Territorial Government of Nunavut, is a family of multiscript fonts used for Latin and syllabic scripts. The fonts are simplified sans serifs to support combined settings of these scripts. Yet another cross-writing system entry is Really, a serif font family designed by Gary Munch, for Cyrillic, Greek and Latin systems. The quality of 'bukva:raz!' is exceptional. Given the linguistic limitations of most individuals (judges included), examining and judging the fonts submitted for language systems others than one's own or one closely associated with the norms of one's writing system, must have been a serious challenge. Appreciating the visual rhythm of the written language, its peculiarities whether positive or negative in regard to both form and space from an aesthetic point of view, must have engendered some interesting discussion among the judges. The judges included: Matthew Garter, Yuri Gherchuk, Akira Kobayashi, Lyubov Kuznetsova, Gerry Leonidas, Fiona Ross and Vladimir Yefimov. Maxim Zhukov, who has focused years of attention and much experience on multilingual typography, chaired the judging. Switching now to the first half of the book, there are eleven essays. Robert Bringhurst's essay, Voices, languages and scripts around the globe, observes that the most prominent alphabets are Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. But their distribution and use among language families is not systematic based on sound systems or similarity across languages. For example, Latin script is used beyond English or the romance languages for such diverse tongues as Finnish, Turkish, Basque, Vietnamese and Native American languages to name a few. This essay provides a global context in which to appreciate the contents of the book. Bringhurst applauds and criticizes the 'official' nature of The World's Writing Systems (Daniels & Bright, 1996) and proposes a classification system based on the work of both Peter Daniels and his teacher I.J. Gelb. A handsome diagram at the end of the article demonstrates Bringhurst's classification in use. It is based on discriminating whether a visible language system is semographic, prosodie, syllabic or alphabetic and in what combination. Each aspect is defined by a quadrant of the circle. A specific language's position in a quadrant of the circle, whether near to or far from the center, together with the color and shape of the position marker, all have meaning. Bringhurst refers to the diagram as taxonomic wheels for writing systems used in twelve of the world's languages. Among the spoken languages are Cree, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, English, Arabic and Hebrew. For comparative purposes and to better reveal the nature of the diagram's system of meaning, he also includes Algebra and Classical European Music as other languages. John Hudson's article, Unicode from text to type, is technical in nature but clear in its description of the problem of developing a universal coding system to accommodate the distinct units of various global languages. The original 8-bit character encoding system that provided 256 discrete positions for characters accommodated most European languages with limited character sets. But Chinese with 80,000 characters was not so lucky. A double-byte encoding increases the number of unique codepoints to 65,536 (256 x 256), but even this was inadequate and has now evolved into a 32-bit encoding that accommodates 1,114,111 characters. The need for such a universal and agreed upon system reflects cross platform needs, accelerating cross-cultural communication and problems associated with multilingual settings. Put in the context of global languages or examined more specifically in terms of variant characters such as ligatures, variable addition of diacritics and writing systems with complex positioning requirements to name few, makes the need for and operational use of so many unique codepoints clear.

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