Writing in the Margins, Part 4: The Impossible E

I didn't realize it for a long time, but my explorations of endangered alphabets introduced me in large part to writing that had not been profoundly altered by printing. The Latin alphabet is, in fact, an outlier in terms of how deeply, and how long, its dimensions, appearance and behavior have been shaped by the preferences and necessities of the printing press. In this excerpt from my book Writing Beyond Writing I explain how I make this point live and on stage.

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When I’m giving talks about the Alphabets, especially if I’m speaking to a class, I often call for a volunteer and, when someone puts a hand up, I hold out a marker and ask, “Will you come up here and draw a capital E?”

They come up to the whiteboard, a little warily, sensing a trick, and do it.

I say, “That's great, but the three horizontals are not quite parallel. Could you just fix that?”

When they’ve erased the lines and drawn them again much more carefully, I say, “Well, actually this one's a bit longer than the other one….”

So they correct that, and then I say, “And the vertical isn’t quite vertical….”? And maybe I go on to ask for serifs, and get more and more annoying in my polite demands.

The point is, it can’t be done. What they are attempting to “write” is a mechanically-reproduced image derived from letters on monuments that were created using stonemason tools—squares, straight-edges, agents of geometry. The human body is not designed to do that.

Then I show the class the E from the Eastern Cham script of Vietnam, and I say, "Okay, I want you to write this, with your fingertip, in the air."

They are a little self-conscious about this elaborate and somewhat extraverted act, but they do it, and I tell them to keep doing it, writing in the air, until they get the feel of it, until the motion starts to feel natural.

Then I say, "Okay, without stopping, just look around at everyone else. Look at their wrists, their hands, their fingers. That is the hand of a Thai dancer."

I’m making two points, here, I hope.

One is the difference between a script, something written by hand, and a typeface, something designed to be printed. One is an extension of the natural, graceful, expressive movements of the human body; the other is not.

The other points has to do with geometry, and with the values that are embedded in the graphic forms we call writing.

The Latin alphabet?as we use it today descended not from everyday Roman handwriting but from monuments to emperors. The letterforms themselves represent the virtues of a military empire: stability, balance, longevity. Almost any Latin uppercase letter stands on its own feet, as if bestriding the known world.

What’s more, every Roman emperor was by definition a god, so graphically, these qualities had to be represented not by ordinary, everyday, vernacular shapes but by ideal Euclidean forms: symmetry, parallelism, rectangularity, perfect circles. Shapes not found in nature.

The Cham script doesn't care about those values in the slightest. There’s a grace, and an implied balance, but no symmetry. It is still a human script rather than a divine one, or a mechanical one.

Writing Beyond Writing is for sale on Amazon, and also at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/writing-beyond-writing/, where in addition to the hardback and paperback editions you can also buy the digital edition, a popular option for those living outside the U.S.

Tim Brookes is the author of 20 books, all of them alas in the English language and the Latin alphabet, and the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project.