printing in Venice

“Nicholas Jenson . . . former master of the mint at Tours . . . had been sent to Mainz in 1458 by the French king to learn Gutenberg’s secret, [and] returned to France in 1461. Finding that the son of Charles VII, who had succeeded to the French throne, was not not interested in the new art, he emigrated to Italy where he met with more enthusiasm.
Some time before 1470 he started printing in Venice. He so perfected the roman small letters that his type forms became models not only for printers in his own day but for all since who have cared for the beautiful letter forms.
Jenson’s type was beautiful, and the letters fitted harmoniously together on the page because he did not try to imitate handwriting, as did so many of the early printers and type-cuttters, but accepted honestly the medium in which he worked. He took as inspiration a fine manuscript hand, but only as inspiration, and then worked as an independent craftsman in metal. He did not try to follow the pen slavishly.
This French maker of coins and types brought much glory to Venice. . . . Another Venetian who followed him and used his fonts of type, however, won even greater fame both as printer and type designer. Aldus Manutius was his name.
Aldus . . . put more care into the designing and setting and arranging of his type and the actual printing than had most of his predecessors. He produced some of the finest books of all times. Others had printed large books; he made small and cheap ones, well printed and easy to read. A special type that he designed for these little books, based on a slanted “familiar,” or local, handwriting was the first italic type.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

a true ‘small-letter’ alphabet

“In 781 Charlemagne invited to his court a famous English scholar from York named Alcuin. . . . In 796 Alcuin, encouraged by Charlemagne, started a school at the Abbey of Saint Martin’s at Tours. . .
First of all, Charlemagne gave Alcuin the job of managing the revision and rewriting of all Church literature. . . .
Alcuin set our first to teach his scribes to write as fine and readable a hand as possible. Fortunately he had leared to write the northern type of Angle-Saxon script, which ws the most beautiful then being written in England. It was a modification and further development of the semi-uncials of the Irish monks. Based on this form, a new style of writing which Alcuin developed at Tours was spread throughout Europe. . . .
The ‘Caroline’ alphabet (named for Charlemagne) which Alcuin designed, was a true ‘small-letter’ alphabet. . . . [T]he Caroline letters arrived at forms so closely akin to the letters we use every day . . . that the resemblance is immediately apparent. . . .
The sentence now started with a capital and continued with a true miniscule, not just a small capital.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

writing as compared to drawing

“[I]n Roman letters . . . all the strokes are not of the same weight; some are thick, some are thin, and the curves show a gradual change from thick to thin. This characteristic was not necessarily designed; it, like the more flowing shape of the letters, came about because the tools which were used in developing the letters gave them that character naturally. The Roman alphabet was developed through writing as compared to drawing.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

The missing letters

“The standard Greek alphabet had twenty-four letters; the standard late Roman alphabet had twenty-three; ours has twenty-six.
From the standard Greek alphabet the Romans took A, B, E, Z, H, I, K, M, N, O, T, X and Y with hardly any change at all. . . . Remodeling and finishing other Greek letters, the Romans produced C (and G), L, S, P, R, D and V. F and Q were taken from two old characters abandoned by the Greeks themselves. And that makes twenty-three. . . .
The missing letters, J, U and W, were not used by the Romans at all. U and W developed from V about a thousand years ago, and J developed from the letter I about five hundred years ago.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

all consonants, no vowels

“The Phoenicians, we believe, supplied the Greeks with nineteen characters—all consonants, no vowels. They wrote entirely with consonants. . . . It was a sort of ‘abbreviation’ writing. We sometimes do almost the same thing as, for instance, yr for ‘your’ and bldg for ‘building.’”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

the Moabite stone

“One of the finest specimens of Phoenician writing, and also the oldest known one that can be dated, is an inscription in the alphabet of Tyre written in the reign of Mesha, king of Moab, early in the ninth century B.C. This inscription on a stone tablet with a rounded top known as the Moabite stone, was discovered in 1868 in the vicinity of the Dead Sea and is now in the museum of the Louvre in Paris.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

Kyoorius Designyatra

the first Hindu characters

“In India, when the Hindu god Brahma decided to write down his teachings, there were no letters for him to use so he invented some. His patterns came mainly from the seams in the human skull. Brahma, they say, traced the first Hindu characters with his finger on leaves of gold.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

of divine origin

“Many peoples believe their language or system of writing to be of divine origin. The name of the Sanskrit alphabet is Devanagari, which means “pertaining to the city of the gods.” Hieroglyphic, used by the ancient Egyptians for their formal documents, carved in stone, means “sacred stone writing.” . . . The Assyrians had a legend to the effect that the cuneiform characters were given to man by the god Nebo, who held sway over human destiny. . . . The Mayas attributed writing to their most important deity, Itzamna. The lost prehistoric writing of Japan was styled kami no moji or “divine characters.” As late as the Christian Middle Ages, Constantine the Philosopher (another name for Cyril, apostle to the Slavs) is described as having had Slavic writing revealed to him by God.”

—Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

a true phonetic alphabet

“The Egyptian symbol for ‘sun’ was a picture of the sun. The spoken Egyptian word for ‘sun’ was re. The sun picture is often found in hieroglyphic inscriptions standing not for “sun” but for the spoken syllable re occuring in a longer word.
It remained for the Phoenicians and Hebrews finally to use their symbols with the exclusively phonetic value of single syllables or consonants, dropping the ideographic connotation altogether. At this point, we have the beginning of a true phonetic alphabet.”

—Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.