I’ve been focussing on palaeography quite heavily recently, so naturally that was what attracted me in this image:
“Egyptian protesters gather for a demonstration at Tahrir Square in Cairo on the sixth day of angry revolt [AFP]”
(Taken from Al Jazeera, © AFP I guess..)
Anyway, so questions that interest me are things like “what bits do you need to make a letter/character?”, and “how can you tell a character is a certain character?”, and “what are characteristic (heh) features of characters?”.
In this light, it is interesting to see things like the banner in the above image. Features of interest:
– double “t” realized as majuscule letters, and ligatured
– “th” also ligatured, with the cross-stroke of “t” passing through the ascender of “h”
– “f” contains a loop – perhaps more usual in cursive scripts
– “g” raised above the line (descender and all) so that it is as high as letters with ascenders
Btw I do not intend this to be a comment on, say, the writing skill of those who native tongue is written in something else than the Roman alphabet (and in any case it is the native writers who do the oddest things – although I’ll have to come back to odd palaeographical details some other time). This post was obviously influenced by the ongoing events in Egypt, and is meant, in part, as a sign of solidarity. So glad to see very little violence and bloodshed. There’s too much of that in the world as is.