The Alphabet is Broken, So I Fixed It!
Morten Rand-Hendriksen
AI & Ethics & Rights & Justice | Educator | TEDx Speaker | Neurodivergent System Thinker | Dad
Our son is learning to write at 4 years old which is both humbling and amazing for a parent who at 40+ still struggles with dyslexia. Anyway, he was writing the word "Dinosaur" and accidentally made the vertical line too long at the top, so it ended up reading "binosaur."
Very upset, he demanded an explanation of why his D turned into a b and I explained it's because whomever designed the Latin alphabet made a Big Mistake. So I fixed it, in a tweet:
I also posted the same picture here on LinkedIn.
Here's my argument:
If we assume the alphabet is designed with some sort of logical consistency in mind, the uppercase D is facing the wrong way!
Seriously, look at each letter:
Bb, Cc, Ee, Ff, Hh, Jj, Nn, Pp, Rr, Ss, Zz, the letters with pronounced directionality repeat the same pattern in their uppercase and lowercase versions.
And so is the D in this picture. Because I fixed it.
"omg i will never stop seeing this."
How did we get here? I am not a historian of typography and I've done about 2 minutes of research, but it appears at one point in time the D actually faced the left way, but then someone decided to turn it the right way which I think we can all agree is the wrong way:
Oh, Etruscan D, who did you offend so gravely we ended up with your inferior mirrored twin?
领英推荐
"What about I and l and 1?!?!?!"
Not surprisingly, people have Opinions??when it comes to the alphabet and font design in general, and lots of them piped in with their own objections to the letterforms we use to communicate meaning. Two stand out in particular for their frequency of mention:
There was also some noise about uppercase Q. I think people just don't like letters with tails?
To these opinionations I counter that while the uppercase D is a design flaw of the alphabet itself, where uppercase G and the indiscernibility between I and l and 1 are concerned, these are issues of font design.
The lowercase g is a variation over the uppercase G as demonstrated in this amazing illustration I made:
As for I and l and 1, this is squarely on the designers. Case in point, nobody will mistake these different glyphs in the Hack font:
Let's update the Latin alphabet!
So, what's the point of all this? Do I really think we should change the uppercase D in the Latin alphabet? No. Actually, yes, but I know that's never going to happen so I'm not going to try. The reason I'm sharing this with you is because I think it's important we think about things like this: Why the standards that are so commonplace we don't really think about them exist, how they came about, and how we can improve them.
The Dd thing is a real problem for people learning to write, and many commenters echoed our son's sentiment. It is weird, and I'd love to hear an explanation from a typographer or linguistic historian who knows how this came about. As it stands, to me this is an artifact of the weirdness of our designed world. The uppercase D is backwards, and we pretend to agree that that's OK. People, myself included, are weird.
--
Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a Senior Staff Instructor at?LinkedIn Learning?(formerly Lynda.com) focusing on?front-end web development and the next generation of the web platform. He is passionate about diversity, inclusion, and belonging and works every day to build bridges between people to foster solidarity. Design is political. Code is political. Hope is a catalyst.
Training with ReactJS
3 年As I was reading this, I was doing a quick scan of the rest of the alphabet (you picked Helvetica for the font..."a man of culture" as the saying goes ??) and I started tracing in the air as if to write the letters with a pen.... Following with what you did with the 'D,' I'd say that the 'A' has a misplaced stroke and the 'N' is written upside-down. I'll try to explain how I'd correct the letters: For 'A,' if you leave a gap in the stroke to the left of its "eye," I think it would help in making it feel more similar to write its lowercase counterpart. For 'N,' simply turning it upside-down can make the stroke direction a lot more similar to writing 'n.'
Senior Learning Design Consultant at Coursera
3 年Morten this is such a great article! Any parent can easily sympathize with the confusion and frustration around b and d. Thanks for fixing the alphabet! Now back to making coding courses
Software Engineering Instructor at Multiverse. We provide equitable access to economic opportunity, for everyone.
3 年Robert Young Charles Roper did you see this?
Accessibility and Inclusive Design Strategist Specialising in Atomic Design Systems and Social Model User Data.
3 年So little of this has anything to do with dyslexia. The answer to why 4 year olds reverse letters is because they are 4. We all reverse letters when we are learning to read at a young age and most people grow out of this by the age of 6. Equal proportions of dyslexic and non-dyslexic people never make that change. It's more prominent for dyslexics as they also have other reading impairments so the letter reversing issue compounds the problem. You are looking at reading but shapes are also dictated by writing. We write left to write and reversing shapes can impair that function as they support right handed, left-to-write writing. Left handed people struggle with many letter shapes because of the direction of writing and the shapes. Lastly, dyslexia is not less prevalent in different languages but it the opacity of the language can reduce the impact. German and Italian have strict rules when it comes to sound. When we read we turn what we have seen into sound and then comprehend it. Thats where the bit of my brain goes wonky. So if I have misread a word I can't compensate. So good font design reduces the cognitive load for me and there is less likelihood of me misunderstanding the word... but English throws me under the bus as the rules so often go out of the window.
Providing English<>Spanish interpretation and translation services as a staff member of the New York Unified Court System.
3 年Loved this post.