Re: Labelling Vai Keyboards

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <grammatim@...> wrote:
> >
> > But nothing to do with bringing printing to India!
>
> The Jesuits printed Tamil books in India in the 16th century! I
> don't know about the other languages because they were not my
> area of interest.
>
> Kircher, a Jesuit, had fonts for Devanagari and Bangla in 1667,
> so I would think that a little more reading by anyone interested in
> this topic might just turn up further details. I think that it would be
> worth investigating this further to see if it was not, in fact, the
> Jesuits, rather than the British, that brought printing to India.

Athanasius Kircher was one of the most fascinating figures of the
Renaissance. He pops up all over the place, but has not yet had a
full-scale biography. The musicologist (and all-round Renaissance maven;
he translation of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was recently published and
more recently reprinted in paperback) Jocelyn Godwin published a thin
coffee table book about him quite a while ago, but that's about it. (His
last year as a Cornell grad student was my first as an undergrad, when I
hung out in the Music Department a lot, so I knew him slightly.)

Are you sure his examples are typeset and not (see below) engraved?

But anyway, he didn't bring printing to India.

> Anyway Diderot and Alembert had fonts for many Indic scripts in
> 1750.

No, the illustrations in the Encyclopédie are all engravings. (My AOS
paper this year was about them.) The text is not particularly explicit
about where the letterforms came from; it does say they had hoped to
receive more up-to-date materials from the French factories in India but
apparently they didn't arrive in time.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...