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[–]Latter_Handle8025Scribe[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hello!

To be honest it's hard for me to get the time and piece of mind to do longer calligraphy pieces nowadays due to this war thing, so this is actually the last long-ish proper calligraphy exemplar I made, fall of 2022.

I wanted to show this exact one because it's non-latin and so it's not 'real' gothic or Fraktur per se, but something that showcases the flexibility I've talked about. Obviously, cyrillic gothic didn't exist, so any modern gothic attempts are, well, modern. Like, out-time-modern. The earliest I could find were from the end of 19th century and it's not exactly Fraktur, but what has become the 'Old English' script/fоnt.

What it means is that any cyrillic Fraktur is as good as the next one, there is no 'proper' one, so I decided to make my own, based on the one in the analysis and the one I use in teaching. And although you can't read it, I think you'll see that it's more rigid/vertical than latin, but that's the problem we have with our modern shitty leterfoms for cyrillic.

The verse goes something like this:

[...]

Love her in labour, in love and in war,

at this time when the weapons roar fire

Wholeheartedly love your country, Ukraine

and you'll be immortal, together.

  • Volodymyr Sosiura, 1944

[–]maxindigoMod | Scribe 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It’s very interesting that you consider this more rigid than the script rendering the Latin alphabet. To me - hardwired to the Latin letterforms - this looks graceful, fluid and more sinuous, less rigid.

You’ve written eloquently in the past about the way in which Cyrillic letterforms have been influenced by political and geopolitical forces. At the time it didn’t strike me that Irish effectively retired an insular miniscule script starting in the late 40s. It was a long process -I was taught Irish (the teacher was a psycho, so it didn’t take, to my regret) using the old script in the 70s.

So we are effectively living through profound changes in the way that alphabet affects how language is transmitted. I sometimes feel that we have a tendency to regard letterforms as immutably bonded to periods in time, rather than as part of a dynamic continuum.

Perhaps this something I should raise as discussion in the wider forum of the sub!

[–]Latter_Handle8025Scribe[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I can explain - in cyrillic we have an abundance of square-ish vetical letters like ншщцпдл - they are mostly just vetricals and horizontals, so the whole chunk of text on one hand becomes less flowy and more rigid, and on the other you have that famous 'russian cursive makes me cry' thing. The problem is (yes we already had a similar converstaion) is that those letters are 'artificial', they don't come from normal evolution and so they always look kinda out of place for the person fluent in type design. Roughly speaking, oval forms or m are change for the rigid forms of ш (they are not the same letter but to make a point). More adequate comparison would be n versus н. This becomes a challenge in scripts because scripts should not have that, and the script style comes before the letterform, but if you can play around things like ш and make them intwo a w, there's no way around н or нн. My idea of cyrillic Fraktur is to negate that as much as possible. In reality though most fоnts just use rotated latin letter or even mirrored strokes (mirrored strokes!!!).

we have a tendency to regard letterforms as immutably bonded to periods in time, rather than as part of a dynamic continuum.

one of my personal 'light bulb moments' was realizing that we tend to think about letter styles in time, but we also have to think about them in space and how geography/politics influenced them. Fraktur is actually the best example in this because with it the germans spread their culture, and the 'death' of it in most of Europe was signified by the fact that people couldn't read it anymore. On the far end of that process is also space, because in the end Shwabacher is a compromise between TQ and Rotunda, which coexisted in the same time, but in completely different parts of Europe.

[–]callibeth_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting comments about geographic/political influences. I took a class with Ewan Clayton that focused on German calligraphers after WWII. Blackletter had such a deep German heritage, but it was poisoned by Nazism. So what was were calligraphers to do? They struck off in new directions. Werner Schneider went gestural, and Karlgeorg Hoeffer's type designs seemed to owe much to the brush, for instance.