At 08:24 PM 1/16/2003, Phillip Driscoll wrote:

>It's been over twenty years since I looked at Hugh Schonfield's
>book _The New Hebrew Typography_. I was just looking again
>recently. In his proposed designs for a new Hebrew alphabet,
>I find his capital letters reasonable, but his lowercase seems
>ill-conceived and quite unnecessary. But I don't speak any
>language which is written in Hebrew letters, so I'd be interested
>in others' thoughts on Schonfield's proposals.

An historical oddity. An unnecessary idea, as the subsequent history of the
Hebrew script as the writing system of a living language has shown: I
encourage you to take a look at contemporary Israeli font catalogues to
gain an appreciation for how vibrant Hebrew typographic culture has become
without any artificial reform of the script.

Most writing systems have their pros and cons, and all have at least one or
two problems or imperfections, but the idea that these can be cured by
adopting the conventions of another, alien writing system and applying them
willynilly without regard to the factors, e.g. writing tools, that
influence or govern the development of scripts, is quite dangerous. I'm
very grateful that Schonfield's ideas, like similar proposals for the
Latinisation of Arabic, have entirely failed to catch on. The Armenian
script has not been so fortunate, and in contemporary type styles it has
lost most of its cultural individuality. Greek is also often
over-harmonised to Latin type styles.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@...

A book is a visitor whose visits may be rare,
or frequent, or so continual that it haunts you
like your shadow and becomes a part of you.
- al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals