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Comment by hoseja | Hacker News Reader

"The most striking features of Gothic architecture are the narrow, vertical proportions and the pointed arches. Gothic-era writing mirrors these concepts."

They didn't have printing press or some conscious aesthetic architecture-typecafe correspondence. That's just how the letters evolve if you want to quickly and densely copy them with a quill. It's like trying to draw meanings from connections between cuneiform and ziggurats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter

"Why do all of this? Because otherwise, the base of the building would look like it was sagging, and the columns would look like they were about to fall outwards."

Or, you know, it would ACTUALLY sag. The columns would ACTUALLY fall outwards.

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The constraints for writing with a quill on expensive parchment were the same in Northern Europe and in Southern Europe.

Despite that, during the "Gothic" time, the Gothic writing style preferred in Northern Europe (Textura quadrata, or Textura sine pedibus for the most expensive manuscripts) was clearly different from the Gothic writing style preferred in Southern Europe (Rotunda), the Northern one replacing all curved lines with broken segmented lines and having taller and narrower letters, while the Southern one preserved some of the curved lines and had wider less tall letters.

The same style differences could be seen in the architecture of expensive buildings, like churches, so there is little doubt that it was a difference in taste, not a difference caused by material constraints. The material constraints only caused both styles to use condensed bold letters, together with a lot of abbreviations.

I’m sorry but what you write is simply not correct. Gothic writing is actually a form of calligraphy and the very stilted shape that the characters have make it actually very hard/cumbersome/slow to write. Textura is one of the styles and it is called that because the whole page was supposed to look evenly “gray” when it was filled with writing. For fast writing, people always developed a sort of cursive because that letter shape seems to almost automatically appear once the human hand uses a pen-like instrument with our (Latin/Greek/Western) writing and is writing fast. The Romans had a cursive for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) and many others after them did too. This was also used for quick messaging of news/instructions as opposed to monks copying books for months on end.

As for what you said about the sagging and the pillars falling out, that’s also incorrect. In the article, I mentioned the classical orders, which are Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. Only Doric temples used the curvature of the stylobate and the inclination of the pillars throughout. In the other two styles, this was very rare, if it happened at all. The two largest temples of the other two styles didn’t have it for example: The temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens is a Corinthian style temple which has a flat stylobate and no inclination of the columns. The same goes for the Artemision (Temple of Artemis) in Ephesus. There are countless other examples. The entasis is (mostly) the only thing that was transplanted from the doric style to the other two.

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