Why is there so much confusion around the Cyrillic breve (and other diacritics)?

pavljenko

Hey everyone, this is my first post.

Look what I dug up from a font dataset with a proportional distribution across styles: it turns out most modern fonts use the same glyph for the breve and the kratka. Unicode also treats them as a single character.

So why is it standard practice in the industry to draw the kratka and the breve differently? Where did this tradition come from, and what purpose does it serve today? I tried to trace its origins but couldn't find anything. Maybe some type designers here know?

John Hudson

The Latin breve and Cyrillic kratka evolved separately for most of their histories, and the various forms that are appropriate or inappropriate for one or the other reflect styles of lettering and type from those histories. The forms are related to the styles of the letters, and to the writing tools on which these are modeled. The higher the stroke contrast in the type style, and the more traditional the design, the more likely the kratka is to have a distinctively Cyrillic form, but even in low contrast, sans serif types the kratka may differ in size and sometimes vertical alignment (the kratka is often larger, and more prominent than the Latin breve).

[W]hat purpose does it serve today?

The same purpose it has always served: to represent the cultural evolution of writing systems and typography in contemporary technology.

pavljenko

John Hudson said:

The Latin breve and Cyrillic kratka evolved separately for most of their histories, and the various forms that are appropriate or inappropriate for one or the other reflect styles of lettering and type from those histories. The forms are related to the styles of the letters, and to the writing tools on which these are modeled. The higher the stroke contrast in the type style, and the more traditional the design, the more likely the kratka is to have a distinctively Cyrillic form, but even in low contrast, sans serif types the kratka may differ in size and sometimes vertical alignment (the kratka is often larger, and more prominent than the Latin breve).

[W]hat purpose does it serve today?

The same purpose it has always served: to represent the cultural evolution of writing systems and typography in contemporary technology.

Wow, great to see you in this thread. Yours were exactly the comments I kept running into while researching this — the Unicode list in 2005 and the TypeDrawers thread on extended Cyrillic in 2017. It's wonderful that someone of your standing just drops into a discussion like this.

Thank you, this is really valuable. But let me push back a little: could this tradition be, at least in part, a historical accident specific to the Russian alphabet? One could imagine a path-dependent story: where a new punch had to be cut, a distinct shape appeared; where an existing accent could be reused, it stayed. If something like that happened, we may now be treating as a mark of quality what began as someone improvising a missing sort.

The material I could find doesn't give a clear answer about where the kratka's form comes from. Accounts are usually vague: some trace it to the Greek breve, some to a Byzantine tradition. My own hunch is that the modern form settled in the post-Petrine reforms of the Russian alphabet in the mid-18th century — the Academy of Sciences introduced й into the civil type in 1735, and that seems like the moment when its shape could have been fixed.

There are also sources showing that the same inconsistency we see today already existed 150 years ago. In the 1870 specimen book of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences press, the Russian types I looked at draw the kratka over й as two drops joined by a thin arc. But on the sheet of additional sorts, cut mainly for Lepsius's linguistic alphabet and Sjögren's alphabet, other Cyrillic letters carry an ordinary Latin cup-shaped breve. So one and the same academic press was drawing these marks differently: a canonical form for the Russian alphabet, but no consensus about Cyrillic as a whole. The sheet is here: https://archive.org/details/obraztsyshriftov00iaka/page/n342/mode/1up

Nick Shinn

So why is it standard practice in the industry to draw the kratka and the breve differently?

Are you sure your sample is representative of standard practice?

I’ve always made them different—most diacritics are a bit of a chore, but matching kratkas to the style of the typeface is rather fun, IMHO.

John Savard

I would think it's obvious why the breve and the kratka are drawn differently.

In most Cyrillic languages, the only letter to which the kratka is applied is I, and this yields a postfix vowel-modifying consonantal y. In Belarusian, it is also applied to U to get W.

In both cases, the resulting letter is not treated as an accented letter; it's treated as a full separate letter of the alphabet in its own right. Obviously, an element of the letter itself is something you don't want to get confused with an accent.

John Hudson

I always try to find contemporary professional (scribal) writing, engraving, and/or lithographic lettering when looking at historical type, especially in periods of transition where new styles are emerging. That 1735 date for the introduction of the kratka is significant, because it is in the period where writing masters and engravers are producing lettering that features lachrymal or ball terminals and very fine hairlines, so exactly the context in which one would expect this kind of form to emerge.

Possibly, the cursive form with the ball on the left and a thin tail comes first, in written and engraved copy books, and the shape shown here is a formal derivative to fit in the context of the more static upright letters.

Typography, prior to the 20th Century, exists within a broader culture of text production that includes a huge amount of scribal writing, and other means of reproduction. So I wouldn’t presume that a shape like this necessarily originates in a punch-cutting process, or something like ‘improvising a missing sort’.

But on the sheet of additional sorts, cut mainly for Lepsius's linguistic alphabet and Sjögren's alphabet, other Cyrillic letters carry an ordinary Latin cup-shaped breve. So one and the same academic press was drawing these marks differently: a canonical form for the Russian alphabet, but no consensus about Cyrillic as a whole.

The Lepsius and Sjögren alphabets are predominantly Latin, aren’t they? and only supplemented with some Cyrillic characters for Slavic languages? So in that context is makes sense that the Latin form of breve is used.

John Savard

I've heard of Lepsius. And perhaps his alphabet was predominantly Latin. But I did a web search for the Sjögren alphabet. What I found was an alphabet he created for the Ossetian language. This language was not Latin; it was as Cyrillic as the Russian alphabet is. It had one letter in it with a Latin breve, the one that looked like y, which I assume to be U.

None the less, I agree with Sjögren's decision because i kratkoye was not present in that alphabet. I don't know the precise function of the letter with the breve is in that Ossetian alphabet, but it's entirely possible that the mark had a different function from the case in the Belarusian alphabet. Even if that was not the case, just the fact that this alphabet was designed at an early date, perhaps before the purpose or use of i kratkoye was settled, would still make the decision of Sjögren or his punch-cutter entirely reasonable for the date.

But nowadays, the purpose and nature of i kratkoye is settled.