How to design Serbian Cyrillic PART 2 — True Italics

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.