Kaithi Handwriting Samples

I was thrilled to find a facsimile of Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India in the university library. Plans to go and see the original at the SOAS library are afoot, but till then I’m happy with this one. I have borrowed the second volume of the fifth part; this is the one that covers the Kaithi script.

The handwriting samples exhibit some deal of regional variation in the shapes of letters, based on the dialect that is being written. Most of the changes in shape look like a function of speed, but some not so much; see the /ṇ/ in the second column of the first row, for instance. The following table (click on the image for larger size) from the book shows the Kaithi alphabet as written by Tirhuti, Bhojpuri and Magahi scribes.

Handwriting Samples
There are handwriting samples that have a continuous headline, and those without; with word spaces, a dash for a word space or without any at all. The first two samples are in the Maithili dialect of Bihari from Darbhanga and Purnea district respectively; next is the Magahi dialect from Patna; and finally, the last two are the Bhojpuri dialect from southern Saran and eastern Gorakhpur.

Type in Transit — No. 23 in London

On my last trip to London, I spent a lot of time on the number 23 from Westbourne Park to Liverpool Street (and Liverpool Street to Westbourne Park), getting down and climbing back on whimsically. Armed with my camera phone and the will to stand next to the information display rather than sit comfortably, I clicked a lot of photographs of the LED letters.

The lowercase letters are five units high. The ascenders and capitals extend two units upwards, and the descenders are two units deep. Every letter space comprises a single unit and word space three units. Here is a selection of images—

Sajou Albums

In his last session of Typographic Delights, Twynman covered the subject of monograms. On exhibit that afternoon were various books on embroidery patterns. Most of these were Sajou Albums from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

I got down to doing what I love to do and like the designs from Lettering for Stitchers, began digitizing the patterns into pixel typefaces on Fontstruct. The going has been slow with Dissertation Week taking up most of my time in the last few days, along with working on my typeface after feedback from the class and from Gerry.

Named in the order of their appearance in this post, the Fontstructions can be downloaded from Sajou I, Sajou II and Sajou III.

Approaching end-of-term

This week was Gerard’s second visit to the department since we started, and things went very well until I encountered my arch nemesis, the lowercase /s/ once again. After spending Friday trying to work it’s design out, I still don’t have an /s/ that doesn’t look like it is falling over, or has weight in all the wrong places!

We had a wonderful early Christmas dinner with Gerard. He was also kind enough to bring chocolate alphabet from the Netherlands to celebrate an early St. Nicholas Day with us.

I began work on the Devanagari typeface that will work along with the Latin. After a lot of tests and some positive feedback, I think I have found a good direction to follow.

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Next week, we have intensive sessions to prepare us for approaching our dissertations. I’m looking forward to writing a dissertation with more enthusiasm than seems acceptable. I have two research topics in mind, and I’m equally interested in pursuing both. I can already see that I will be completely torn when I have to choose only one.

End of term is approaching and it will be great to go into the holidays on a positive note, and that means knowing more clearly what I want to achieve with both the practical project and dissertation. It has been good going till now and I hope the next ten days will bring some more answers.

Duncan Forbes’ A Smaller Hindustani and English Dictionary

Following up on the theme of dictionaries from my last post, here is another one. This is Duncan Forbes’ A smaller Hindustani and English Dictionary. It was produced in 1861, about forty years after Shakespear’s dictionary. It does away with problem of multi-script typesetting completely, and is printed entirely in the Latin alphabet. This decision comes with a disclaimer from the author, who writes, ‘It is needless for me to remark that the work is not intended to supersede the Oriental character, a knowledge of which must be ultimately attained by all those who mean to distinguish themselves in Her Majesty’s Indian Service.’

This dictionary also highlights the origin of every word, and distinguishes them as Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Tartarian and Greek, as well as “aboriginal or purely Indian” and those peculiar to Dakhani or to the Deccan.

What I found most interesting are the contractions used to create compound verbs. The system is explained in the preface—

… following contractions are used in the formation of compound words: k, for karnā, “to make;” h, for hōna, “to be, to become;” j for jānā, “to go, to be;” r, for rakhnā, “to keep, to have;” d, for denā, “to give;” l, for lenā, “to take;” ḍ, for ḍalnā, “to throw” and b, for bāndhanā, “to bind.”

See them in use in the second entry in the image below.

The same system of compound word formation, in abbreviated form, is also used in the vocabulary section of Eastwick’s A Concise Grammar of Hindustani, which was published three years previously.

John Shakespear’s Dictionary, Hindustani and English

I’ve been looking at Hindi dictionaries to get a sense of the information provided within each entry. Of the dictionaries I’ve looked at, the oldest so far is John Shakespear’s Dictionary, Hindustani and English, which was published in 1817. As the name of the dictionary suggests, it deals with Hindustani (which is not necessarily the Hindi we see in the books of today). Shakespear introduces about this “dialect” and its many names in the preface—

The dialect called zaban-i-urdu, rekhta, hindi or Hindustani, was formed through the intercourse of the Muhammadan invaders of India with the people they found in the country: and though its structure is chiefly Indian, yet the materials of which it is composed are taken abundantly, almost at pleasure, from the Persian, Arabic and other foreign languages, as well as the various dialects peculiar to the Hindus. Being thus derived from many sources, and as a living language, so constructed, liable to continual increase and alteration, it is extremely copious, and very indeterminate both as to the words which may be used and the sense in which many words are adopted.

All headwords are in Perso-Arabic, the meanings in Latin and wherever the word origins are from Sanskrit the word and/or its etymology is repeated in Devanagari. Before every word its origin has also been explained by using the initial letter of the language it comes from.

Week 5

Week 5 is over and we’re already halfway through the first term. The last week had two firsts—the first core seminar and the first Non-Latin session with Fiona.

Monday

→ Typographic Delights, with Michael Twynman
In this session with Twynman, we saw forms—receipts, certificates, registrations, deeds. All printed text that needs interactivity. Rafael D. has compiled a comprehensive photo set from the sessions so far on Flickr.

Tuesday

→ Core Seminar: Nicolette Gray, A history of lettering
Elena presented her seminar built around the core text, A history of lettering: creative experiment and letter identity, written by Nicolette Gray. Gerry has posted a list of books and articles we discussed based on Elena’s presentation at the Typenotes blog. I found Gray’s book, Lettering as drawing: the moving line very interesting, and I’m planning to read it sometime this week.

→ History of Letterforms, James Mosley
Following up from gothic types last week, Mosley spoke to us about la littera antiqua, taking us through architectural lettering in Italy and showing us, in particular, the works of Luca Pacioli and Felice Feliciano.

→ Non-Latins 1, with Fiona Ross
I had been waiting very anxiously for our non-Latin sessions with Fiona. We started the non-Latin  sessions with a look at Indian scripts. After a brief introduction, Fiona divided us up in two groups, and handed a set of letters from the north Indian scripts to one group, and the south Indian ones to the other. We had to identify letters belonging to the same script, place them together and then arrange everything the right side up.

Along with Lisa, Ben, Rafael S., Azza and Michele, I was a part of the group tackling the south Indian scripts. This made the exercise so much more fun than it would have been had I worked with the north Indian ones. Like everyone else, I had to use visual cues from the letterforms to categorize them when my knowledge of the script was limited.

In the afternoon, Fiona gave us a presentation about Indian scripts. She gave an introduction to how syllabary scripts work, and discussed typographic issues such as defining character sets, the effects of technologies like hot-metal on the Non-Latin typefaces and the importance of being able to distinguish between embellishments and identifying features in a letter.

Wednesday

→ Pattern Languages for Typeface Design, with Rob McKaughan
Rob McKaughan, who was a student at the MATD programme last year, presented his dissertation research on pattern lanhuages to us. Pattern language is a term that was coined by architect, Christopher Alexander. By identifying how good design solutions solve a specific problem context, patterns are created. They can be used by other designers to solve complex design problems, by referencing different patterns simultaneously. Based on pattern language models for software engineering and architecture, Rob had devised a pattern language for designing a typeface for newspapers as a part of his practical project.

Type in Transit: Reading and London

There is tonnes of LED displays in the buses in Reading and London and inside the tube stations. I’m surprised I haven’t photographed more than I have. In London, there is always a hurry to get somewhere. Hopefully, over the holidays I’ll have more time at my leisure and compiling these images will be a great distraction from work.

Bus Stop in Reading
This set of images below is from a photograph I took on my first visit to the town center in Reading, right after I had arrived. The alphabet is unicase. All the letters have been force-fitted into five units, making letters like the /m/ too narrow and leaving too much space around letters like the /l/ and /i/.

Picadilly Circus, London Underground
And these are images from the platform at Picadilly Circus station from my trip to the city for TypoLondon. The uppercase letters from this display are compiled here.

Design Conferences

I have been to two design conferences since I moved to Reading—TypoLondon and St. Bride’s Critical Tensions (where I tried to live-tweet once more and lost steam after the first day). I was witness to some good presentations and some bad, and my appetite for attending these events is quite full for now. I’ll be happy to not go for any more and wait for the next ATypI conference instead.

Attending two in close succession reminded me of my grouse with most design conferences. It is those designers who present slide after slide of of their own work with banal descriptions and little or no context. To them, Robin Kinross offers some great advice—

“… those terrible lectures where a designer shows their work. But they can be interesting when the designer shows the project and tells the story. If they can step back a bit and give some idea of what was going on at the time, put themselves into some relation to other things.”

Week 4

Since I’ve already written a lot through the week, here is the rest of week 4 in a collection of links and photographs (read about the demonstration of the Monotype System and the project we worked on with Gerard Unger).

→ Typographic Delights with Michael Twynman
This week Twynman showed us cinema magazines, and we discussed the process of photo-gravure, looking at picture postcards under magnification identifying different methods of production.

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→ Letterpress Induction Session

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→ Gerard’s presentation on Dwiggins