Volume 17–1 (Low Res).pdf

The `I' and T not only follow each other in
the alphabet and look a lot alike—they also, to a
very large measure, share the same history.
The Phoenician ancestor to our present 'I'
was a sign called "Yodh," meaning a hand bent at
the wrist. This sign, if you stretched your imagination,
could be construed to look somewhat like a
hand. Some say that this sign can be traced even
further back in history to the ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs of a leaf, which supposedly later
evolved into a hieratic symbol which also resembled
a hand. This Egyptian part of the 'I' story is,
however, probably a typographic fairy tale. First,
because the Sumerian and Assyrian-Babylonian
symbols which predate the Phoenician, and to
some degree have been influenced by the Egyptian
culture, bear no resemblance to a hand.
The original Phoenician symbol evolved over
time into a zig-zag shape which was eventually
adopted by the Greeks. The Greeks tended to
simplify the symbols that they adopted from the
Phoenicians, and the Yodh was no exception. In
their hands the zig-zag became a simple vertical
line. And they eventually changed the name of
the letter to "Iota:'
Yodh was the smallest letter of the Phoenician
alphabet. As such, iota has come to mean
"the smallest possible thing," as in "There is not one
iota of truth in what you just said:' Also the word
"jot" which comes to us via Latin from the Greek
iota usually refers to a small note or mark.
HEADLINE: ITC FRANKLIN GOTHIC BOOK, ITC GALLIARD ROMAN TEXT: ITC KABEL MEDIUM, ITC CASLON NO 224 BOOK
Like the `G' and `F,' the T is another
letter which took some time to make
up its mind which sound it represented.
The Phoenicians used it as a semi-
consonant, as the 'y' in toy. When it was
adopted by the Greeks around 900 B.C.,
they used the letter to represent the "ee"
vowel-sound. Then in the early Latin
language it represented the vocalic
sound T—and the consonant `j.' Even-
tually somebody probably got tired of
using the same letter to represent two
sounds, and tried to differentiate them
by lengthening the T slightly to repre-
sent the T sound. In the 16th century, a
lettering artist decided that just the
simple lengthening of the letter was too
subtle a change to distinguish the `i'
from the `j, and added a hook to the
bottom of the stroke; finally, the distinc-
tion between the T and T was complete.
There are two theories as to how the
T and T obtained their dots. One sug-
gests that the T got its dot first, around
the 13th century, in an attempt to fur-
ther distinguish it from the The other
theory states that the `i' got the dot first
(at about the same time) but to help
distinguish it from characters like the
`in,"n; and `u' when it fell in close prox-
imity to those letters in text copy.
The T is just 'I: It isn't difficult to
draw, and has no optical considerations
or caveats to contend with. Draw a
straight vertical line the width of a stan-
dard stroke and season with serifs when
necessary. That's pretty much it.
The hook of the ',I' should extend
just slightly below the base line (for opti-
cal reasons) or very far below the line,
which allows it to be spaced more evenly
with other characters—and provides
a little more distinction or drama to
the basic shape. The end of the hook
can be terminated with either a serif or
a ball terminal. The ball terminal is a
privilege of the In a classical Roman
alphabet (to which the ',I' does not
belong) it can be used on no other letter.
Allan Haley