On atavism and cultural authenticity

Nick Shinn

Over centuries, the Latin script became simplified to adapt to various constraints, notably those of typographic technology.
Ultimately, even italics, which best represent the Western identity in scribal form—with all the attendant complexities—dropped the fancy ligatures and flourishes, and became, in the 20th century sans, a sloped version of the roman. 
But there is a different approach now, for other scripts, which is to have the technology adapt to the script qua script, i.e. covering both its meanings: that which is handwritten, and also a language encoding system:

• Simplified Arabic was rejected as being culturally inappropriate (type tech being Western no doubt played a part).

• The same phenomenon has occurred with Greek, in which a cursive ductus in the minuscules has been identified as being culturally significant; the cock-ups made by Western type designers, such as Eric Gill’s heavy-handed Latinization, may have had some influence.

• And again, users of the Inuktitut script like to see it looking very geometric-sans, as that is how the language was first rendered in a unique manner, rather than piggy-backing on the Latin alphabet.

Ironically, tech progress in the West has since the early 19th century resulted in a growing complexity of letter forms, eventually, with OpenType contextuality, being able to render the old scribal styles, as preserved in the joining-behaviour of formal calligraphy and vernacular handwriting. This effect was identified by Marshall McLuhan as the third law of his Tetrad, Retrieval:
What the new medium retrieves that was previously obsolesced.