Re: Beyond inability to spell; is the Great Glyph Shift beginning?

2003-05-05 18:12:58, timpart@... wrote:

>Nicholas Bodley recently said:

>Some people have dyslexia, which can cause problems.

I tend to forget that. Whether it's related to dyslexia, I'm not
sure, but two-letter transpositions while typing drive me nuts.
"Lysdexics untie!"

I saw a photo ID badge worn by a fellow who worked at Boston's Logan
Airport that said "UNTIED AIRLINES".

Btw, I took some photos of the words "Dis" and "Did", mentioned in
the message with this Subject line.

>I do wonder about the influence of companies on spelling. English spelling
>allows many varients to have the same sound.

There's that wonderful poem: <http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html>

>Companies misspell words so that they can be used as a trademark.

People who have impaired perception or memory (quite commonplace) change
these back to the parent spelling. "Littelfuse" is a well-known trade name
in the electronics industry. Many times I have seen it respelled "Littlefuse".
It happens with names, too. Frederic Law Olmsted's last name very often
becomes "Olmstead".

>Graphic designers write the company name with distinctive letter forms to form a logo

and in some cases distort the letters so much that they can only be deduced from the
context.

I'm often looking at CJK and Arabic, among others, to see what graphic
designers do with those scripts.

>Sometimes letters from other scripts are used, especially from Greek, but
>the letters are used for their resemblence of a Latin letter rather than the
>true phonetic value.

The KIA automobile has a logo that is plainly KI[cap lambda]. Bothers me, a bit.
Toys [Ya] Us, anyone?

>Spelling is sometimes used to maintain a cultural distinction. For example
>the cOOl dOOdz style of spelling that was (is?) popular amoung some
>teenagers.

I'd be stubborn, and choose my own redefinitions. A Z would be replaced by a 3,
(keeping Cyrillic in mind); an ampersand by a 7 (Tironian), and a few others...

People are very sensitive about how their surnames are spelt.

I once got rather upset when a marginally-literate clerk tried hard to re-spell
my last name. She was pathologically committed to a total disconnect between
the spelling given and typing strictly from the spoken sound. I was ready to ask
why she was re-spelling my name.

>This even applies in Japan where people can prefer a particular graphical
>varient of the character representing their name.

Interesting.

>I would say that letter shapes have changed significantly in the past and
>that printing has helped to stablise them. Fonts don't vary much from the
>basic concept. (The lower case letter a has two different forms with the
>handwritten style mostly appearing in italic fonts.)

I made a casual attempt to count the number of distinct glyph forms of
letters and numerals in common use, and came up with about 50 or so, iirc.
(That's for the Latin alphabet.)

--
Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Mass.
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