2656: Kerning: The Basics Mar 26, 2022
Kerning is the process of tweaking the spacing and proportion of the individual letters in a proportional font for printing, meaning that the letters are not all uniformly sized and spaced, such as a typewriter font. There are multiple ways to do kerning, including only adjusting the spacing between pairs of letters, or looking at a text more globally to fit things neatly on full lines. As a result, there is over- and under-kerning, where the letter sets will either be too close together or too spaced apart. Before digital typing, the process of kerning on a printing press was arduous, but there are certain letter pairs, like AV most famously, that were usually kerned to not look so far apart. After digital word processors became more common, many fonts would be programed to adjust spacing for many more combinations.
2651: Long S Rules Mar 21, 2022
In printing, as well as handwriting since the time of the Romans, there was a so-called 'long s' which appeared ⟨ſ⟩. This was not a random variant or a font of ⟨s⟩, but has its own rules about when it is used instead. In the 17th & 18th centuries, these were the standards for printing
• Round S ⟨s⟩ was always used before ⟨f⟩, before apostrophes, and at the ends of words.
•Long S ⟨ſ⟩ was always used in the beginning or middle including when the word was broken up with hyphens or abbreviated.
• If there were two successive S's, the first would be long and the last would be round. Some letters were known to usually be preceded by a long or round s, like ⟨b⟩ that usually has a round s.
2650: Long S Mar 20, 2022
There is something called the long s ⟨ſ⟩, which people may be familiar with from printed documents before the 19th century especially. This is often confused with an ⟨f⟩ on first glance, but the two are unrelated. The long s, distinguished from the 'round s', dates back to Roman times at the time the upper & lower case letters were being distinguished, but before there were clear rules about them. The Greek sigma also is unique in the Greek alphabet for having three forms, and represents broadly the same sound, but that's not related. This was later formalized in German printing especially. After the start of the 18th century, it became phased out as it was harder for typists, required an extra letter in print types, and was not seen as providing enough benefit to account for the extra work. There will be more on the form & history of the long s in coming posts.
2600: Sulfur & Sulphur: Why the Difference Jan 27, 2021
British English spelling tends to represent the more traditional version, but not always. The 'PH' in 'sulphur' has no basis in English. Usually, a 'PH' to represent the [f] means that it was spelt with a φ (Phi) in Greek, but 'sulfur' is not from Greek. Moreover, the spelling in Latin or French where English adopted this spelling is also not with a 'PH'. This is where the American English spelling comes from, with the British spelling being a result of a later insert.
2593: Ç Jan 18, 2021
The letter Ç, known as C-cedilla, is used among many Turkic language along with some Romance languages like French & Portuguese. It is not, however, sed for the language where this symbol originated: Spanish. Moreover, in other languages this represents the [s] sound, but in Old Spanish, this was /t͡s/ before /a/, /o/, and /u/, like a Z in German, but this is not how it was adopted later. Later by Early Modern Spanish, this represented a /θ/ or /s/ before those same letters but fell out of use altogether after. In Turkic languages however, this is usually for /t͡ʃ/ (like CH in English 'chew'), or [s] in French. A number of other languages took it on but usually in line with one of these.
2584: Incongruent Spelling of 'Plait' Jan 10, 2022
Sometimes, spelling that doesn't appear congruent with the standard pronunciation never would have been. Sometimes letters are added for historical reasons, as many writers of Middle English wanted to have stronger ties between French or Latin. In the case of 'plait', pronounced [plæt], there actually was an alternative spelling in Middle English of 'plat' but also 'plait' as rhymes with 'plate' in certain regions. The spelling of 'plait' remain but not with its original pronunciation.
2514: R Rotunda: ꝛ Oct 30, 2021
There are numerous examples of pairs of letters that get combined into one ligature, which does happen even today. In a sense, that is how the German ß was formed from <S> and <Z>, but as in that case, it's only a specific pair. For a time, a form of writing lower case <r> existed known as the R rotunda which looked like <ꝛ>, and, lacking a line on the left, would be tacked on to letters only if one such like existed, like <d> or even curved lines like after <o>. This was especially used for blackletter, or in other words, the font most associated with the Middle Ages. This helped to develop the modern cursive form of <r> which is notably different to its upper-case or printed counterparts. Indeed, blackletter has some characters which, without prior knowledge, would not be interpretable to a reader today, but this case was notable since there was another form of the letter used for when there was no other letter to apply the r rotunda onto. Because this character was not popular outside blackletter fonts, it more or less fell by the wayside in the 16th century with the overall decline of the script.
2513: I Longum: ꟾ Oct 29, 2021
Latin vowels used to be written with apexes, which looked more like traditional accent mark than the macrons used for writing out long vowels in Latin today. This was the only form of punctuation, if it can even be called that, sine historically Latin had no lower-case, no spaces words or breaks for sentences. The only other variable in this system was 'i longum' or 'long i', written as ꟾ which represented the long vowel but didn't take the accent mark. While it is true that J developed from I, it is more accurate to say that J developed from ꟾ. Moreover, in Latin orthography, if two i's would be written together, the second would be ꟾ to distinguish it from N or even U (V). Likewise, in Dutch, there is a common digraph for the long [iː] sound written as IJ, and often further stylized with a smaller i in front, sometimes written as Y, though the Y was not related historically.
2509: No 'Loue' Lost: The Break-Vp of U&V Oct 25, 2021
The distinction of U and V as it is now was neither invented nor random, but even into the 16th century, there was not a clear distinction between V and U. Often, V was used in either case if it would fall at the beginning of a word, and in the middle or end of a word, it would be a U, regardless of sound. This discernment between U and V as a phonetic marker happened starting during the renaissance, since Germanic languages and even modern Romance languages have this sounds distinct, but the process was not immediate. This is also, in part, why many words have a so-called silent E at the end, as it helped with disambiguation when the sound was [v] as in 'love' but not 'low' (or 'lou', especially before W came on the scene).
2495: Greek-Based Nubian Writing Oct 11, 2021
The Greek alphabet led to the creation of numerous other writing systems around Europe, including Coptic, Gothic, Latin (via Old Italian), Cyrillic (via Glagolitic), Armenian, and Georgian. As impressive as this is, it used to be practiced more broadly and thus adapted more widely, particularly with association to Christianity. Even after the Arab invasions, those kingdoms withstood and remained Christian, maintaining a Greek-based writing system until the collapse of their kingdom to the Mamluks and later Ottomans, by which point most people were illiterate and the writing fell into terminal decline.
2491: republic Oct 7, 2021
There is a prefix 're-' used either for repetition ('reshape'), negation ('react'), or intensity ('resound'), and while 'public' is a word 'republic' fits none of those above categories. This is because it comes from a Latin phrase, effectively a compound from 'rēpūblicā', the ablative form of 'rēspūblica'—the nominative [subject] form—meaning 'matter/thing of the people'. The loss of -S- is because 'rēspūblica' is two words, which are both being declined separately, and the -S- of 'rēs' (thing) doesn't appear in the form borrowed into other languages.
2452: New Latin Spellings: Things of the Past Aug 28, 2021
The words 'dinosaur' and 'deinonychus' both come from the same root, with the first element. The first part of 'dinosaur', coined in 1842, is from Ancient Greek δεινός (deinós) meaning 'terrible'. That said, it came to English through New Latin which has a standardized way of transliterating Greek into Latin letters, including going from Greek < ει > to Latin < ī >, and < ός > into < us >. Later, scientists stopped using (New) Latin as much—even though here it may technically be listed as being of New Latin—and even if they would, it was not with any real consistency: 'Utahraptor'. As a result, the word over 120 years later, 'deinonychus', uses <ei>.
2446: Times New Roman Aug 22, 2021
The most popular font of all time, and one of the most recognizable is Times New Roman, created in 1931 by The Times, a London newspaper. The Times only used this for 40 years of its 236 year history though, from 1932 to 1972, and since then the paper has changed fonts on five occasions, in part due to changes in the actual paper and overall layout styles. Still, these new fonts are mostly variations on the Times New Roman classic, which itself tried to draw on traditional italian styles of the early printing presses, hence the 'Roman'.
2349: Aluminum vs. Aluminium May 24, 2021
It's well known that the North American spelling and pronunciation of 'aluminum' differs from that of Britain's 'aluminium', but whether to use -i- or not may not really be the most interesting part of this spelling: it was originally just 'alumium' with no -n-. This is because the word is from Latin 'alumen', a name not for the metal but for the chemical compound known in English as 'alum' (not directly etymologically related) and into the 19th century it was the English, not Latin, where the name was taken from for a resultant 'alumium'.
The difference between the North American and British spellings came after the name was changed to keep with the convention of using Latin roots. For some time the -um and -ium were used interchangeably even by the same individuals, but the British scientific opinion was that it didn't appear to sound as classical, but in America -ium was at first actually more popular anyway. Both of these terms had variant levels of popularities in the respective regions but the current situation was more or less established by the turn of the 20th century.
2344: A History of G and Z May 19, 2021
The letter Z is pretty uncommon in English and at the very end of the alphabet, but this was not always the case. Much like in the Hebrew or Greek writing systems, this letter (or its equivalent) both are numerically 7th though now in Greek it is 6th in order. The elimination of Z was done deliberately by the Roman censor Appius Claudius who saw Z as a foreign letter even though this is only true insofar as Latin doesn't really use it; it was very much present through the creation of the alphabet. This was then replaced with the Roman-invented G now occupying the 7th position, with G being based off of C in form to represent that it is just the vocalized form. The use of the letter G to represent [d͡ʒ] (as in 'giraffe') is from French orthography.
2304: AZERTY & QWERTZ Apr 7, 2021
In addition to the English QWERTY keyboard, there is the French-language AZERTY layout, and the German and Slavic QWERTZ. Granted, many of those have variants to themselves, such as the Swiss keyboard—which is based off the German QWERTZ—but has special keys that either have German diacritics (ÄÖÜ) or French accented letters (ÀÈÉ), but usually for a languages special characters, they will be in the same place, with 2 keys to the right past (P), and 3 past (L).
In the beginning of the 20th century, many alternative keyboards were used but did not catch on in large part because while keyboards were not as widely used as today thanks to computers, the people who used them—mostly secretaries—were trained in QWERTY or AZERTY.
2300: Rocky Origins of QWERTY Apr 3, 2021
The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, marketed as the Remington No. 1, saw the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard, so named for its arrangement of four rows of keys. in the order we are familiar with now around the globe. It was not until the Remington No. 2 however that this would gain any popularity. For one thing, it only had capital letters, and it was not possible to see what was being written as one wrote, known as a blind writer. It was also expensive and took training to operate, with all of these factors and generally poor marketing leading to a popular lack of enthusiasm. Still, the 1874 design did lay the foundation for its more successful successor, and now ubiquity among the adoption of its keyboard layout, at least with English. Other languages such as French will use different arrangements of keys for the same keyboard; in the case of French it is known as the AZERTY. In both cases, there were competitors who introduced other layouts, but these never caught on.
2283: Folk Etymology: sovereign, foreign & reign Mar 17, 2021
Though the spelling in English can often paint a picture for the history of the language and etymology of words, this is not the case with the word 'sovereign'. This comes from the Latin 'superānus'—also the root of 'soprano'—from the root 'super' (above) which led to the Old French 'soverain'. The connection to the word 'reign' is entirely from folk etymology. It is believed that the -g- in 'foreign' was also added with association to 'reign'.
2272: Intro to Hunsurik: Brazil's Own German Mar 6, 2021
The language of Hunsurik, a German language spoken in Brazil, in many ways mirrored the historical process seen in the development of German in the 18th and 19th centuries. In those times, there was no standard German, neither in spelling nor in dialect. Eventually in the early 19th century this started to take place in Germany along with the unification of the country around what is now the standard, but with mass immigration to the Americas, German use in Brazil instead involved the Hunsrück dialect in part due to numerical superiority among the German immigrants. The spelling as well does not resemble that of Standard German, resembling certain aspects of Dutch and Portuguese orthography, but despite having around 3 million speakers and a number of school its writing is not standardized or even completely codified.
2268: doubt and 2 Mar 2, 2021
Though it may not be too surprising that the word for ‘doubt’ is also related to words for ‘two’ including ‘duo’ and indeed ‘two, but keep in mind this replaced an earlier word with the same quality: Old English ‘twēo’ (doubt) from the same root as ‘two’. Likewise, the German word for doubt is ‘Zweifel’ which clearly has the root ‘zwei’ (two) in it. Moreover, the Latin root ‘dubitāre’, which led to the current English word is thought to come from habeō (I have), combined with the Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁ “two” as in ‘holding two’ making the word seemingly even more literal, but actually the sense in Latin would be closer to ‘hesitate’.
Notably, the word ‘doubt’ in Middle English was not spelt with a B, but this was added later to correspond with the Latin root even though the Old French root, and the modern French derivative ‘douter’ (to doubt) aren’t spelt that way.