Why Roman typography is the most developed typography between other writing system?

[Gunarta]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Hi People!

Why Roman typography is the most developed typography between other writing system? The alphabetic writing system that we use today,
i started asking that for my self days ago and i got no answer. Thank you.

[daverowland]

I'd imagine it's a combination of being:
Most widely used
Less complex than other scripts
Less characters than most scripts - ie. quicker to build fonts
Right place, right time

[Riccardo Sartori]

most developed typography

Please define better.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Because of the power and reach of ancient Rome.

[hrant]

Good question.

Of course it's a combination of many things, including luck! But also the Industrial Revolution, which came from the West's strong materialistic streak.

hhp

[AzizMostafa]

https://typography.guru/xmodules/typophile/files/Cerdik%20Jawi.pdf
https://typography.guru/xmodules/typophile/files/Silang%20Kata%20Kelopak_0.pdf

[Riccardo Sartori]

I still disagree with the assumption, at least in its vague formulation.
However, I will point out that the concept of “development” itself is typically a western concept, and since latin alphabet is the western script of choice, saying that its typography is the “most developed” is something just short of a tautology.

[hrant]

It's nice to hear this sort of thing from a Westerner, and I'm no fan of chauvinism, but some cultures are better at some things than others. For example Armenian culture is highly developed* in many ways, and more developed in type design than many other cultures, but still not as developed as with Latin.

* Which BTW is not a Western concept, it's a human concept. In fact animals probably have it too, it's just hard for us to tell.

hhp

[quadibloc]

Since the Latin alphabet has but 26 letters, it is clearly much easier to design a new font for it than it is for Chinese, Japanese, or even Korean.

Many other scripts, though, aren't much more complex than the Roman script; Thai, Tibetan, Devanagari, Burmese, Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, and Amharic, as examples.

Here, "more widely used" is clearly a factor. But another factor, not noted in the list given above, is that the Latin alphabet, being used in the United States and Western Europe, is the alphabet of most of the world's richest countries.

Thus, there is more money to spend on developing new typefaces for newspapers, magazines, books, and advertising than in most other places. Japan is also a wealthy country, but its script has many more glyphs, and Israel, Georgia, and Armenia belong to the developed world as well, but their scripts belong only to one small country in each case.

Thus, if we confine ourselves to objective measures - the number of available typefaces, the economic importance of type design - the Latin alphabet is far ahead for obvious reasons. The objection that quantity is not quality can be made, however, and it's true that despite the handicaps noted, there are plenty of good typefaces available for many of the other script systems noted.

The Cyrillic and Greek scripts, which I didn't give as examples above, are less widely used than the Roman script as well, but they're so closely related that a large number of typefaces are shared between all three writing systems.

[Andreas Stötzner]

First, we talk about the *English* alphabet rather than about the Latin.

Latin: A B C D E F (G) H I (K) L M N O P Q R S T V X
English: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Second: I don’t think that graphical aspects do count much here. Latin/English (bicameral!) is less complicated than Chinese but more demanding than e.g. Hebrew. So what?

Third: I think it has much to do with that:
– Roman imperialism – spread of the Latin alphabet;
– English colonialism – spread of the English alphabet;
– US-American … world dominance – further spread of the English alphabet.
There you go.

[quadibloc]

I wouldn't want to speak of the English alphabet, because that would imply the Germans and the French and the Italians obtained their writing systems from the English-speaking countries, which, of course, is nonsense.

Even if we are responsible for the letters J and W. I'm not sure we are, and I'm quite certain U isn't a British invention, but instead originated on the Continent after the fall of Rome.

EDIT: W might have originated from uu in English; U, however, was definitely a Continental invention from the Middle Ages, and J, according to Wikipedia, turned up first in German, then Italian, and then French before the English borrowed it from them.

EDIT: It may also be noted that there is an urgent need to add the following letters to the Latin alphabet:

Бб, Гг, Дд, and Зз

...in order to replace b, g, d and z in Pinyin. In this way, the Latin alphabet will have b, б, and p as three distinct letters to properly represent the three consonants of this type in the Shanghai dialect, assigning the voiced one to English b, which it matches in sound.

Of course, without worrying about Chinese, just to represent the sounds used in English, we need to add

Жж, Чч, and Шш

Θθ is also needed, but here, instead of going to the Greek alphabet, we could just go to Icelandic (and older forms of English) to get Þþ.

[Number3Pencils]

Korean also has a three-way contrast between plosives (and even an affricate). They solve the issue nicely by just doubling the consonants. So the word for "lid", 뚜껑 [t͈uk͈əŋ] with tensed t and k, is transcribed "ttukkeong". With no need to borrow anything from Russian.

Foreigners here in Korea have enough trouble figuring out the existing Romanization, and it's quite simple. I can't imagine if they tried to add entirely new letters. Not to mention that no one would be able to type "дuгeong".

[russellm]

English colonialism – spread of the English alphabet;
And French colonialism, Spanish colonialism, Dutch colonialism, German colonialism, Danish colonialism, Portuguese colonialism, Italian colonialism, Belgian colonialism ....

Industrialization of publishing, completion in the printing industry & advertizing.

[eliason]

The exact ideas in this thread were addressed by Henry Lewis Bullen a century ago in the passage quoted below. I find this passage really insightful. At the same time, the Orientalist assumptions expressed—typical of the time, 1912—are really distasteful in the context of colonialism.

"The model of roman types is at once the most rigid in its elementary lines, and the most flexible in its expression.

"If we except the Greek capitals (which were parents of the Roman capitals) and Russian (which is also derived from the Greek), all other alphabets now in use are solely cursives, in the sense that they are constructed with the purpose of being readily produced by pen or brush, even in their most formal uses. Hebrew characters are... representative of hundreds of oriental alphabets similarly cursive in their structures, each of which conforms with an almost unvarying model. None of these lend themselves to decorative effects. While most of them are graceful, none afford scope to the designer; seemingly fluid, they are actually unyielding. They fitly typify the oriental civilizations, which, like their alphabets, had become stereotyped long before the invention of typography, and have remained practically unchanged ever since.

"Opposed to these numerous and more ancient oriental cursive characters is the solitary roman letter model, structurally more severe and less graceful, seemingly less pliant, but actually more expressive. The roman letter is exactly typical of the ever-changing, ever-progressing occidental civilization; and probably the models of the characters by means of which the occidentals have been educated for centuries have had a stirring and beneficial psychological influence, which would have been lacking if Europe had adopted an alphabet purely cursive in its structure."

[hrant]

Nice quote - thanks Craig.

Speaking of chauvinism (still prevalent two decades later) here's a gem from Stanley Morison that I just had to quote in my "Latinization: Prevention and Cure" piece:

"The Roman alphabet is not merely in possession, but it is in possession by right of conquest. The conquest was not made possible, or even expedited, by external authority; the victory of the Roman letter was due to its inherent flexibility and rationalism."

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

The bicameral alphabet predates typography.

And the innovations of employing contrast in layouts through mixing upright with italic (16th century) and different weights (regular with bold, 19th century) did not develop in the fraktur culture of northern Europe, which also used the Roman alphabet.

So it is the Antiqua which has developed typographically, not the Roman alphabet (Latin script) per se.

However, it could be argued that the Fraktur has developed more variety of letterform than the Antiqua, especially after perusing Fraktur Mon Amour. How much of this variety existed in fonts prior to the 20th century, or was it more of a script phenomenon?

Latin script scripts are something else again, but their development has been primarily outside typography.

[1996type]

I am writing an essay on the development of Humanist typography, which should answer your question. Like so often, it is a combination of different events in history.

[1996type]

Just for your information, Humanist typography is often referred to as Roman typography. I prefer the term Humanist, since it is much more true to the origins of it.

[John Hudson]

Humanist typography is often referred to as Roman typography. I prefer the term Humanist, since it is much more true to the origins of it.

Note that the use of the term 'roman' to refer to a style of type and typography references not classical Rome but the development of the first humanist types by Sweynheim and Pannartz at Subiaco, just outside Rome, and then within the city itself. The Subiaco types have been described as 'half-Roman', i.e. somewhere between blackletter and the contemporary humanist book hand. The types they made in Rome after 1467 are the first 'roman' types, and strongly influenced Jenson, who really established the style.

So I'd say that 'humanist' and 'roman' are entirely synonymous in the context of typography: the one describes the cultural origin and the other the geographical origin.

[dberlowgone]

Germs, guns and steel. Then ASCII.

[froo]

Of course, [...] just to represent the sounds used in English, we need to add
Жж, Чч, and Шш
We have them in Latin already: ž č š.

[1996type]

Thank you John. How do you know all these things? The esay I'm writing should've been written by you, I guess :)

I guess another reason to use 'Humanist' rather than 'Roman' is because the term 'Roman' is also used for 'upright', as in, the opposite of Italic.

[John Hudson]

Yes, if you're going to talk about both roman and italic, then humanist is a good term: roman type is based on the humanist formal bookhand, and italic type is based on the humanist informal secretary hand.

[quadibloc]

@froo:
We have them in Latin already: ž č š.

Yes, that's true; but presumably accented letters are confusing, and so each sound should have a separate letter all its own, rather than borrowing a letter for another sound just by putting an accent on it.

Instead, to avoid what happens with Vietnamese, accents would be reserved for use as tone marks - so that the Latin alphabet would be fully suited for writing Chinese, which is what started me on this.

Of course, when it comes to vowel sounds, on which I did not touch, wholesale borrowing from, say, Greek would be required in order to add extra vowels to the language. Maybe Armenian too!

The idea being to have something like the Shaw alphabet, but composed entirely of conventional and pre-existing letters. And with a few extra letters for non-English sounds like the German U-umlaut (also used in Chinese!) and the Russian yerry (Ыы).

[hrant]

My kind of thinking.

hhp