Letterform Innovation?

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  • donat raetzo
    donat raetzo Posts: 57
    Philipp Stamm's full story  in the "Typografische Monatsblätter" is 20 pages, well illustrated. The magazine is hard to come by, i can provide photos of the pages if demanded.
  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 297
    donat raetzo said:
    Philipp Stamm's full story  in the "Typografische Monatsblätter" is 20 pages, well illustrated. The magazine is hard to come by, i can provide photos of the pages if demanded.

    I’d love to read it. But from what I can see, his ch ligature glyph does not phonetically distinguish the ich-laut from the ach-laut.
  • donat raetzo
    donat raetzo Posts: 57
    John Butler said:

    I’d love to read it. But from what I can see, his ch ligature glyph does not phonetically distinguish the ich-laut from the ach-laut.
    i will take photos of the pages for you. but i can't follow your reservation regarding "ich" and "ach" – in the german language it sounds identically. do you think of "ach" like in "heartaches" ? Philipp Stamm focussed on the german language, maybe that's why it does not convince you fully.
  • Carl Crossgrove
    Carl Crossgrove Posts: 8
    Besides serif and sans serif, most letters are instantly recognize able as themselves. I know that it isn’t a very good idea to make an unreadable font, but type design is a creative work as any other.

    This one sentence has a lot to unpack. Slab serifs were regarded as freakish and abominable when it first appeared. Baskerville was feared as likely to hurt people. Innovations which we now see as fairly mild, like sans serifs, have been resisted by a percentage of the population, like any innovation. But “a creative work like any other” compresses a lot of different kinds of creative work into one category, which is missing a LOT. Is a chair just a different kind of creative work from a dance? Is a shoe equivalent to a painting? Think about what those differences are. Typefaces aren’t even complete until humans, who all learned to read the same kind of writing, are looking at them. Functional works are basically participatory by design, and all the participants need years of previous training, or the same basic foot shape. Does your, or G B Shaw’s radical alphabet, erase or replace all that cultural literacy? You can’t take-or-leave the safety instructions on an airplane the way you can ignore bad art. 
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,229
    i can't follow your reservation regarding "ich" and "ach" – in the german language it sounds identically.

    According to standard German phonology, these are allophones with a palatal versus velar distinction. So while ch is a single phoneme, there is a distinction in its pronunciation, which in German phonology is based on the quality of the preceding vowel.

    I think it is an interesting question whether a writing system needs to record such a distinction in order to qualify as ‘phonetic’.
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 1,988
    edited November 2023
    The distinction between Ich-Laut [ç] and Ach-Laut [χ] is phonetic but not phonemic. I would argue that the usership is not served by observing purely phonetic distinctions, as many people wouldn't even be aware of the differences and would routinely get them wrong while writing. (E.g., de-voicing of voiced consonants, or loss of stop aspiration in st-, sp-, sk-.)
  • donat raetzo
    donat raetzo Posts: 57
    Christian Thalmann said:
    In Swiss German maybe. ;)
    uh, sorry - i am biased by my daily language :-)

    thanks for clarifying.

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