The Beauty of Typography

You're probably thinking why there is such a wierd title for today's post but there are two good reasons for it.

1. I came across this blog post called 'The Beauty of Typography' today and found it really interesting so I wanted to share it with you. It's writted by Jessica Bordeau who is a student (or was a student, depending on when her profile was last updated!) and she has collected together a massive amount of information on the different alphabets and writing systems of the world.

Her article is in two parts and includes Chinese Characters, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Sini, Thai, Hebrew, Latin, the Cyrillic alphabet, Armenian, Georgian, Mongolian and Inuktitut. Personally, I think the Georgian and the Armenian writing systems are the most beautiful, but in Jessica's article you can find out about the ideas behind the systems, like Hebrew, for example. Hebrew uses 'Gematria,' which is 'the system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other.' If you click here, you can find out more about it and how Gematria actually works within the language.

And 2. I couldn't think of anything else to post about!

Here's an example of the Georgian alphabet:

I particularly like the letter ts'ili because it looks like an ice cream! :)

This is an example of Mongolian handwriting. Mongolian is descended from the Uyghur script and it, and the other descendants, are unique in that the writing is vertical and written from left to right, unlike Chinese writing.

The article has lots of really interesting information and I urge you to check it out if you're interesting in how written languages are formed. Jessica also has a list of resources at the end of each article that are also useful for further reading.

I hope you enjoyed this post and I will be back to my normal, shoe-y self soon!