Mæna 2010

APHY
RY
of the factors that may contribute to a peripheral
status.
Perhaps the most potent single source of poten
tial peripherality is the size of a culture’s population.
The size of the population is quite relevant
because the smaller the group of people
the less work is needed to reach a new cultural
consensus about associating a meaning
or sensibility with a letter style. The same
thing applies to the acceptability and identity
of a new or altered letter form. 5 Sometimes
it isn’t a new form but instead a substitution
of a form, for instance the letter “é” replacing
the combination “je” in icelandic in 1929.
See Figure 1.
Another potential contributor is the degree to
which the population is to some degree made
culturally isolated or distinct. The peripherality
that is generated in this case is not deliberate
but is instead a kind of side effect. It
1. Between the years 1708–1710 Czar Peter
the Great launched a reform of the Cyrillic
alphabet and all the letterforms changed
to new shapes he had chosen. Although
he didn’t have new shapes designed the
founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk forced Turkey to stop using Arabic
letters and to start using Latin ones in
1928. But the most extreme example
of radical change in writing systems is
the complete invention of the Hangul
Korean alphabet. Reportedly it was designed
by the fourth king of the Joseon
Dynasty, Sejong in the mid fifteenth
century.
This last example is especially amazing
because it is a new writing system rather
than a modification of one. Hangul system
replaced Chinese writing.
2. When you write about typography you
may be talking about two things - letters
(or more broadly glyphs) and their design,
and/or the design of things that make use
those letters. This article is limited to a
consideration of glyphs both typographic
and written.
3. Deconstructing legibility further the
identifiability of a letter also comes from
the presence of specific letter features;
from the way in which these features are
arranged; and from their relative proportion
to each other. A series of optical and
perceptual factors are also be relevant.
4. Questions of style and essential form
do also interact and so the distinction
made here should not be seen as absolute.
Similarly our interpretation of the voice
or atmosphere is not absolute and so may
vary as well.
5. Consider Iceland’s population which in
excess of 300,000 and contrast this with
the population of France which is in
excess of 64 million. Or Russia at 141
Million. Or China at over 1.3 billion. Figures
are from the November 2009 CIA
world fact book https://www.cia.gov/
library/publications/the-world-factbook/
index.html