How to design Serbian Cyrillic PART 2 — True Italics

Igor Petrovic

I've just published the "Serbian Cyrillic PART 2" article on my blog. The first one was about upright, and this second one is about true italics:

https://nostalgicdolphin.com/blog-post-3/

Italics proved to be harder to describe, taking a month to assemble this instructional study. The thing is that italics are still not strictly established in every aspect, so I had to research historical sources, the official orthography, other Slavic-Cyrillic, modern studies of Serbian handwriting, and personal opinions of type designers and common people.

In addition to being two blog posts, I am also considering putting these two articles into one downloadable PDF which would cost a few bucks. For those who haven't seen the first part, here is the link for it:

https://nostalgicdolphin.com/blog-post-1/

Andreas Stötzner

Thank you Igor, very good.

Igor Petrovic

Thanks Andreas, I appreciate it!

Tural Alisoy

Thanks, Igor. It was been a very useful resource. By the way, so to speak, Serbian б is like a Greek delta? 

John Hudson

so to speak, Serbian б is like a Greek delta? 

In writing, the ductus is similar

but in Cyrillic the top is always quite horizontal, while in Greek it may also angle downwards

John Savard

It's interesting that some of the Serbian Cyrillic italic forms are used in Russian handwriting, even if not in Russian italics. And, yes, this means that they may be found in the italics of some Russian typefaces too.

Tural Alisoy

@John Hudson
I saw that, so I compared it to a delta.

Igor Petrovic

Tural Alisoy said:

Thanks, Igor. It was been a very useful resource. By the way, so to speak, Serbian б is like a Greek delta? 

Thanks Tural, glad to hear that! As per the handwritten Greek delta /δ that John mentions, I don't know what the acceptable area of variance for it is.

For handwritten /б in Serbian, it can vary a lot. That is natural because it is an outstroke in the free ascender field that breaks connected writing. People tend to be creative at that moment. Here are some possibilities I recalled instantly. All of these are acceptable handwritten forms (субота):

 
In the article, I mentioned the Greek delta as a nickname for a /б subvariant that tends to deform the /o (base) counter in order to emphasize the handwritten ductus. Opposed to the classic and most common version which keeps the symmetrical counter of the /o base. 

It's interesting that some of the Serbian Cyrillic italic forms are used in Russian handwriting, even if not in Russian italics. And, yes, this means that they may be found in the italics of some Russian typefaces too.

Yes, it's interesting what was accepted as a typographic standard in various places that sourced the same handwriting tradition. After "The Great Exoduses of the Serbs", the Serbian intellectual elite and schools ended up in Hungary for about 150 years. They used a lot of Russian books because their printing and cultural development were censored there to a certain point. Even a special language developed "Slavonic-Serbian", which is a heavily Russianized form of the Serbian language. It was deemed snobby compared to the language of the common people that was deemed peasantry. So naturally, the Serbian literates used handwriting very similar to the Russian in that period.

The Serbian language reform conducted by Vuk Karadžić rejected "Slavonic-Serbian" and embraced the language of common people as a standard orthography. This was a brave revolutionary move that raised a lot of controversies and implicit persecution of Vuk by the Serbian intellectual and church elite in exile. He was even accused as a "satanist" Especially for borrowing Latin /j that was not present in any other Cyrillic.

This happened about 100 years after the Petrine reform, so Vuk's alphabet had a century to learn pros and cons. His main goal was the fully phonemic alphabet, by the credo "Write as you speak and read as it is written". So naturally, he needed some new solutions.

But still, the typographic standard had a long way to go, and it is still in development. mainly the italics as a midground between upright and handwriting. "Serbian" /б still hasn't entered the standard fully, but obviously it's an emerging trend in the local type design.