Discussion split from here on request

 

In older swedish official print Blackletter Fraktur and Roman are combined i peculiar ways. Here are samples from The Instrument of Government from 1634 by Meurer and 1772 by Salvius. Fraktur was body text and Roman accent.

In older swedish official print Blackletter Fraktur and Roman are combined i(n) peculiar ways. 

​In Germany this was continued until the 20th century. If word or name was considered “foreign”, it was typeset in a “foreign” font style, i.e. Roman letters. 

​In Germany this was continued until the 20th century. If word or name was considered “foreign”, it was typeset in a “foreign” font style, i.e. Roman letters. 

​It was not that simple by the way: According to the latest custom I am aware of (according to the Duden dictionary), only words from Romance languages whose inflection or pronunciation wasn’t German and that weren’t proper names were written in roman type. Thus, for each of the words set in roman type in the examples there was at least one reason not to set it in roman type according to these rules.

Interesting, and apparently this printer had many sheeps [ref to Goudy].

… and that weren’t proper names were written in roman type. ​

But wasn’t it also based on the practical reason, that earlier blackletter fonts usually didn’t have foreign diacritical characters and so using a “French” typeface for setting “René” was the best way to go?

But wasn’t it also based on the practical reason, that earlier blackletter fonts usually didn’t have foreign diacritical characters and so using a “French” typeface for setting “René” was the best way to go?

For special characters, I have seen the following three solutions:

• Setting the whole word in roman type.
• Setting only the special character in roman type.
• Creating blackletter variants of the special character – my blackletter Duden features amongst others a blackletter Œ (for Œuvre).

However, all works I know of only applied this to words with special characters and not to all words from languages with special characters (i.e., without the restrictions of the rules I mentioned), but I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody did it somewhen. Therefore I doubt that this was the origin of these rules, but it’s difficult to make any more substantiated statement about this.

And because it wasn’t mentioned yet: the same thing was also common in handwriting. Here are two pictures I took today at the house of German poet Friedrich Schiller showing two letters from around 1800. Note how the Roman writing is used instead of Kurrent for foreign words as “Esplanade” and the proper name “Joseph Charles Mellish von Blÿth”. 

 

... however, the second page also shows that Roman writing wasn't used consistently in these cases. Last paragraph, first line, last word: "Esplanade" appears in Kurrent again. I guess the reason for using Roman writing for "Esplanade" on page one is not because it's a foreign word, but because it's a proper name (and people wanted to make sure that it is deciphered correctly).

What strikes me is Schiller's apparent struggle to write roman cursive as opposed to the elegant flow of his Kurrentschrift.

Well, it was a “foreign” script at the time, not the “German” script people would write normally — if they could write at all.