Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 17:55:14 -0000, Richard Wordingham
><richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
>
>
>>More seriously, what about comparing paper and palm leaves as writing
>>mediums?
>>
>>
>
>I found it intriguing to learn that, iirc, the curved letterforms of some
>scripts were needed because straight strokes would cut into palm leaves.
>Imho, the results have often been beautiful. (I'm particularly fond of the
>Tamil i, which reminds one a bit of the @ sign.)
>
>That explanation puzzled me. Would "cross-grain" straight strokes also
>cut? Or am I imagining that palm leaves (something I only rarely see) have
>a "grain"?
>
>

I seem to recall something similar was at work with the forms of some of
the runic letters: they avoid horizontal strokes because they would be
hard to see when carved into wood (since the grain usually runs
horizontally, as they used it), so there are all these diagonals. And
curves are likewise avoided, since they're hard to cut. Same thing with
the preference of V in monumental scripts, since it was easier to carve
(well, and also older than U).

Some questions along similar lines have been asked about the alphabet
invented for Klingon, which, I admit, is astoundingly ugly and very hard
to believe, in the sense that it does not seem to be well-adapted to
writing with a pen or other stylus, so it's hard to see how it would
have evolved (http://www.kli.org/tlh/pIqaD.html). Perhaps, some
suggested, it was stamped out by holding one's hand in various positions
or something. The earlier "Klinzhai" style font looks more like it was
stamped by frozen steaks.

The nature of the writing materials and how they were held had a huge
effect on the development of cuneiform. In addition to dictating the
kinds of strokes and points, somewhere along the line scribes started
holding their tablets sideways and so all the symbols rotated 90°.
Arabic obviously developed under the influence of extensive pen-and-ink
writing, as opposed to lapidary applications. The whole Aramaic branch
of the alphabet was apparently peculiar in not having much of a lapidary
tradition for a lot of its history. This led to the development of the
non-final letters in the Hebrew alphabet as we know it today (since the
long strokes at the ends of the letters would bend up in preparation for
the next letter, except word-finally. The final MEM is another story,
and an interesting one). And of course, a lot of Latin typography is
derived from particular kinds of writing, even when they were carving
serifs into rock, it was in imitation of the serifs you get as your
writing-brush sort of turns back at the end of the line. Japanese
students I think are taught to distinguish clearly between a stroke that
comes to an end before the brush is removed from the paper and a stroke
that trails off the paper; each is to be used in particular places when
drawing symbols.

~mark