Outdated Symbols
Pictograms can be useful for conveying information without text. But they can also go out of date pretty quickly. Such outdated symbols often outlast the very objects they are modeled on. Here are five...
Tagged: glyphs
Top 5 Stick Figures
Stick figures are one of the simplest forms of art imaginable, but there is a lot of history and meaning behind the simple stick man. Throughout the ages, these minimal line drawings have had...
Odd Punctuation Marks
Punctuation marks are a fairly modern phenomenon. From antiquity up through the Middle Ages, words were written together in great long strings, with little spacing or punctuation. These kind of texts were meant to...
Lost Letters: New Alphabets
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve looked at letters of the alphabet that didn’t quite make the cut. Some of the these letters were added to the alphabet and later dropped. Others were...
Lost Letters: Modern Spelling Reforms
Over the centuries, many spelling reforms have tried to add new letters to the alphabet. Given that the Emperor Claudius couldn’t pull this off, you might think that no new letters have been added...
Lost Letters: Old English Letters
In previous installments of this series, we’ve looked at letters of the alphabet made and lost in the days of ancient Greece and Rome. Now let’s look at some of the Old English Letters...
Lost Letters: The Claudian Letters
Last week, we looked at some of the letters dropped from the Greek Alphabet — letters that never even made it into Latin. This week, we’ll look at the Claudian Letters, three new letters...
Lost Letters: The Greek Alphabet
Why does the English Alphabet have 26 letters? There’s nothing magical or important about that number. In fact, there’s nothing special about the 26 letters we ended up with. It’s just an accident of...
Media and Writing Systems
I’ve noticed that writing systems are affected by the media on which they are written. This explains a lot from the shape of specific fonts to the form of entire writing systems. Let’s take...
