A thought occurred today when I was looking through my collection of fonts. I have over 300 fonts on my PC, give or take a few. There are countless thousands more available online.
Do other alphabets, like Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic, and so forth, have this variety of ways of writing or displaying their text? Or does all Arabic, for example, look more or less the same? Is the variety of typefaces for our alphabet unique?
This may seem like an obvious question but I honestly have no idea, and it’s going to bug me all week if I don’t figure it out.
The short answer is yes. The longer answer (how many) will have to be provided by someone else. And, of course, we have to ask you do you mean just computer fonts, or fonts in their more traditional meaning?
For example, Arabic has a huge number of styles. In Islam, calligraphy is one of highest art forms; I am guessing that it’s because Islamic doctrines discourage the representation of living things in art. Islamic artists focus on geometric designs and calligraphy, resulting in many variations of very beautiful fonts.
I don’t know about Cyrillic, but I know that Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Korean all have a wide variety of fonts. Some of them are nearly unrecognizable except by natives.
For Cyrillic and Greek, modern computer systems (certainly MacOS X, and I imagine Windows as well) come with extended typefaces that cover those alphabets, and in the same style as the Latin letters. I’m looking at the “Times” font right now on my own screen, and hey, there they all are. Cyrillic letters that look like Times-Roman.
And there, “Helvetica” as well. Sadly though the same is not true of “Lucida Bright”, now that I’m looking at it — so I guess the Russians and Greeks are out of luck there.
I don’t know whether historically, before personal computers and desktop publishing, the Russians used a “Cyrillic Times” or “Cyrillic Helvetica” in their printed works. That is, did they usually copy the style of Western typefaces, or did they mostly invent their own typefaces, some of which happen to look like ours? Was there ever a Cyrillic Old West typeface? Or Cyrillic Friz Quadrata? Probably not. (Which is a shame. I love Friz Quadrata.)
Now that I re-read the OP, I don’t think I’m helping answer the question much. But I’m just as interested in the answer.
I dunno, perhaps it’s simply due to a lack of exposure on my part to writing in other alphabets, but it seems to me there’s countless ways to show our basic alphabet. Arabic, to use a fairly arbitrary example, always seems to look exactly the same to me.
It is exposure; once you become familiar with a script you can readily distinguish between different fonts. The alumni magazine of the university where I work recently published an article on an alum who graduated with a degree in graphic design and is doing a lot of work in designing different Arabic fonts. At one point she gripes about the local Spinneys (which is a British grocery store chain); when putting their name in Arabic on the store, they pretty much just transferred to Arabic the standard English font they use to make their store signs, serifs and all. The designer is complaining because serifs are not a part of Arabic fonts, and the result is something that (to her) looks stoopid.
Arabic script is extremely versatile and for centuries before printing or typefaces ever existed there were numerous forms of the alphabet developed for different purposes. Islam forbade or discouraged the depiction of humans or animals or living things in art or religious art, so writing became the focus of creativity.
In addition, there is an art to using the Arabic script to say or show more than one thing simultaneously. Take a look, for example, at the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the center, there is a symbol comprised of four crescents and a sword. Well, it’s also a stylised representation of a tulip. Well, it’s also the word Allah.
Take a look at the decorative borders separating the coloured bars of the flag. Well, yes, it is a decorative border, much like one might see in Western art or architecture. It is also the phrase Allah hu Akbar (“god is great”) repeated.
It’s not easy to create a symbol that is both a picture and a word using the Roman alphabet. Yes, it is done sometimes, but in the Arabic script it is done far more commonly.
It always looks the same to you because you don’t know the script and you don’t know what you’re looking at.
Now, take a look at the flags of the prefectures and municipalities of Japan. Most of them use mon symbols. And most of those are both stylised images of things or concepts and at the same time depict words or initials. Japanese families and corporations often use such multiple-meaning symbols.
Now, also consider that computerised fonts are a relatively recent phenomenon, less than 30 years old perhaps. Printing has been around for centuries and that has been plenty of time for almost all the scripts in the world to have developed multiple forms, many of them based on already existing variations in written forms.
Take a look at the variety of Bengali script typefaces available from one source in the form of computerised fonts. (They’re at the bottom of the page and depict the phrase namashkar o shagatam, roughly “greetings and felicitations”).
On this page there is a listing of Bengali news sources. The second column offers links to Web sites for news in Bengali. Look at the variety of ways the Bengali script is displayed in the newspapers’ logos.