The Secrets of Medieval Fonts | Hacker News Reader

The Secrets of Medieval Fonts

medievalbooks.nl

102 pointsrobin_reala12 comments

This is one of my favorite blogs on the Internet. For some reason, browsers decided to abandon the standard and useful RSS meta tag, but medievalbooks does indeed have one if you wish to subscribe: https://medievalbooks.nl/feed/

I love RSS, but I've noticed that every time I explain the concept to a non-technical person and how they would go about adding feeds and setting up a feed reader it's perceived as a complicated non-starter. I could attribute that to my own failure to explain it, but normally I'm pretty good at making technical things simple for laymen so idk.

Obviously there's something wrong with RSS because it's a good idea that's been around a long time and it doesn't appear to be popular with the general public.

I'm fairly certain they have the broad strokes of this right, at least to the degree allowed by available data. But on the finer points I'm not as convinced.

Dating a sample to within a year or two based on minute differences in the script seems quite unreliable. While there are certainly trends that develop over time, individual authors are by no means tied to them. The trends followed by one author could be decades away from implementation by another, or could be ignored entirely. Even betting on internal consistency is risky, and vulnerable to influence from things like the author's mood, diet, sleep patterns, and the phase of the moon.

The free 225-page book referenced in the blog post (https://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=606213) is, of course, well written and scrumptiously designed.

For those of you who were confused by the title as I was:

> I am aware, of course, that scripts and fonts – as used in the title – are not the same thing. However, I like the comparison of the two, and used it here, because just like medieval script, a font also varies on the level of family (Times New Roman) and execution (e.g. a 12 point letter).

I thought maybe someone had developed some modern fonts from medieval scripts ... this is talking about hand-written scripts, which is still way cool.

What's the linguistic term for retroactively applying a word like this? Its like referring to a horse-drawn cart as a "medieval car". I don't think calligraphers would get too upset about it--and maybe contemporary English actually allows it. It is the reverse of how these things were thought of though in the past.

> Its like referring to a horse-drawn cart as a "medieval car". I don't think calligraphers would get too upset about it--and maybe contemporary English actually allows it.

I see it as more like referring to medieval nobles as "hunting with dogs", when the actual term in use at the time would have been "hounds". If you don't think it's weird for, say, a Russian guy to refer to ancient letter forms using a Russian word for that sort of category rather than "script", you also shouldn't think it's weird for English speakers to use their word rather than an archaism.

No, a 'font' is a tool for the mechanical representation of text. First with wood/metal, then with later technologies. Hand drawn letters are in scripts or styles. I think I've been too charitable with my words.

As used, a "font" is a particular inventory of letter forms, distinguishing, say, ℂ from C, when both of those represent a platonic capital letter 'c'. That is the sense in which modern English speakers are applying it to inventories of letter forms in medieval writing.

Checking Merriam-Webster, I see that "font" is defined (in the relevant sense) like so:

> an assortment or set of type or characters all of one style and sometimes one size

It is being used here to refer to an assortment of characters all of one style, which seems like a good match for the modern definition.

In contrast, "script" has the following senses:

    1(a) something written: "text"
     (b) an original or principal instrument or document
     (c) (1) "manuscript"
         (2) the written text of a stage play, screenplay, or broadcast

    2(a) a style of printed letters that resembles handwriting
     (b) written characters: "handwriting"
     (c) "alphabet"

    3 a plan of action

(quoted words are how I've represented references to other dictionary entries)

The only sense referring to the style or appearance of characters in a "script" is explicitly restricted to printed text.

Perhaps the linguistic term you were looking for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_shift ?

This is really cool I just wish the images were clickable for higher resolution versions.

Here is the advertisement sheet for scripts, by Herman Strepel.

http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=urn:PTP:DenHaag:KB:76D45_d...

"Converts characters into yellow/gold N'ko, a modern unifier of the Manding languages spoken by mansas throughout medieval North Africa."

https://www.npmjs.com/package/goldmansachs

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