1.
Arial
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Arial, sometimes marketed or displayed in software as Arial MT, is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts. The typeface was designed in 1982 by a 10-person team, led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, the extended Arial type family includes more styles, Rounded, Monospaced. Many of these have been issued in multiple font configurations with different degrees of language support, the most widely used and bundled Arial fonts are Arial Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic, the same styles of Arial Narrow, and Arial Black. More recently, Arial Rounded has also been widely bundled, the overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance, in 2005, Robin Nicholas said It was designed as a generic sans serif, almost a bland sans serif. The designs of the R, G and r also resemble Gill Sans, the changes cause the typeface to nearly match Linotype Helvetica in both proportion and weight, and perfectly match in width. Monotype executive Allan Haley observed Arial was drawn more rounded than Helvetica, the softer and fuller. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, matthew Carter, a consultant for IBM during its design process, described it as a Helvetica clone, based ostensibly on their Grots 215 and 216. The styling of Arabic glyphs comes from Times New Roman, which have more varied stroke widths than the Latin, Greek, Arial Unicode MS uses monotone stroke widths on Arabic glyphs, similar to Tahoma. The Cyrillic, Greek and Coptic Spacing Modifier Letters glyphs initially introduced in Arial Unicode MS, IBM debuted two printers for the in-office publishing market in 1982, the 240-DPI 3800-3 laserxerographic printer, and the 600-DPI4250 electro-erosion laminate typesetter. Monotype was under contract to supply bitmap fonts for both printers, the fonts for the 4250, delivered to IBM in 1983, included Helvetica, which Monotype sub-licensed from Linotype. For the 3800-3, Monotype replaced Helvetica with Arial, the hand-drawn Arial artwork was completed in 1982 at Monotype by a 10-person team led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders and was digitized by Monotype at 240 DPI expressly for the 3800-3. There were initially 14 point sizes, ranging from 6 to 36, each contained 238 graphic characters, providing support for eleven national languages, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Monotype and IBM later expanded the family to include 300-DPI bitmaps, in 1989, Monotype produced PostScript Type 1 outline versions of several Monotype fonts, but an official PostScript version of Arial was not available until 1991. In the meantime, a company called Birmy marketed a version of Arial in a Type 1-compatible format, in 1990, Robin Nicholas, Patricia Saunders and Steve Matteson developed a TrueType outline version of Arial which was licensed to Microsoft. In 1992, Microsoft chose Arial to be one of the four core TrueType fonts in Windows 3.1, matthew Carter has noted that the deal was complex and included a bailout of Monotype, which was in financial difficulties, by Microsoft. Microsoft would later fund the development of Arial as a font that supported many languages. Version 2.76 or later includes Hebrew and Arabic glyphs, version 5.00 added support for Latin-C and Latin D, IPA Extension, Greek Extended, Cyrillic Supplement, and Coptic characters
2.
Times New Roman
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Although no longer used by The Times, Times New Roman is still very common in book and general printing. Through distribution as a computer font, it has become one of the most widely used typefaces in history. Times New Romans creation took place through the influence of Stanley Morison of Monotype and this matched a common trend in printing of the period. Morison proposed an older Monotype typeface named Plantin as a basis for the design, in particular, contrast between strokes was enhanced to give a crisper image. The new font was drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the department of The Times, with Morison consulting. The new design made its debut in The Times on 3 October 1932, after one year, the design was released for commercial sale. However, all the new fonts have been variants of the original New Roman typeface, in commercial sale, Times New Roman became extremely successful, becoming Monotypes best-selling typeface of all in metal type. Although Morison did not literally draw the design, his influence on its concept was sufficient that he felt that he could take credit for it as my one effort at designing a fount. In Times New Romans name, Roman is a reference to the style of a conventional serif font, or what is called its roman. Roman type has some roots in Italian printing of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Times New Roman has a robust colour on the page and influences of European early modern and Baroque printing. The design is slightly condensed, with ascenders and descenders. This style is sometimes categorised as part of the old-style of serif fonts, Morison admired this style for its solid structure and clarity. Other changes from Plantin include a straight-sided M and W with three terminals not Plantins four, both choices that move away from the old-style model. It has, indeed, more in common with the eighteenth century, Morison himself told Harry Carter that the italic owes more to Didot than dogma. Morison wrote in a letter of Times New Romans mixed heritage that it has the merit of not looking as if it had been designed by somebody in particular. The development of Times New Roman was relatively involved due to the lack of a specific pre-existing model – or perhaps a surfeit of possible choices. Walter Tracy, who knew Lardent, suggested in the 1980s that Morison did not begin with a vision of the ultimate type. During the project, Monotype and The Times examined research on legibility of type, Rhatigan has said that Lardents originals show the spirit of the final type, but not the details
3.
Letter case
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Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger upper case and smaller lower case in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper and lower case have two sets of letters, with each letter in one set usually having an equivalent in the other set. Basically, the two variants are alternative representations of the same letter, they have the same name and pronunciation. Letter case is generally applied in a fashion, with both upper- and lower-case letters appearing in a given piece of text. The choice of case is often prescribed by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline, in mathematics, letter case may indicate the relationship between objects, with upper-case letters often representing superior objects. In some contexts, it is conventional to use only one case, the terms upper case and lower case can be written as two consecutive words, connected with a hyphen, or as a single word. These terms originated from the layouts of the shallow drawers called type cases used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing. Traditionally, the letters were stored in a separate case that was located above the case that held the small letters. Majuscule, for palaeographers, is technically any script in which the letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all. By virtue of their impact, this made the term majuscule an apt descriptor for what much later came to be more commonly referred to as uppercase letters. The word is often spelled miniscule, by association with the word miniature. This has traditionally been regarded as a mistake, but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard or variant spelling. Miniscule is still less likely, however, to be used in reference to lower-case letters, the glyphs of lower-case letters can resemble smaller forms of the upper-case glyphs restricted to the base band or can look hardly related. There is more variation in the height of the minuscules, as some of them have higher or lower than the typical size. In Times New Roman, for instance, b, d, f, h, k, l, t are the letters with ascenders, and g, j, p, q, y are the ones with descenders. In addition, with old-style numerals still used by traditional or classical fonts,6 and 8 make up the ascender set. Writing systems using two separate cases are bicameral scripts, languages that use the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Adlam, Varang Kshiti, Cherokee, and Osage scripts use letter cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Other bicameral scripts, which are not used for any modern languages, are Old Hungarian, Glagolitic, the Georgian alphabet has several variants, and there were attempts to use them as different cases, but the modern written Georgian language does not distinguish case
4.
Letter (alphabet)
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A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters also appear in abjads and abugidas, letters broadly denote phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. Written signs in writing systems are best called syllabograms or logograms. Letter, borrowed from Old French lettre, entered Middle English around AD1200, letter derives from Latin littera, which may have derived, via Etruscan, from the Greek διφθέρα. The Middle English plural lettres could refer to an epistle or written document, use of the singular letter to refer to a written document emerged in the 14th century. As symbols that denote segmental speech, letters are associated with phonetics, in a purely phonemic alphabet, a single phoneme is denoted by a single letter, but in history and practice letters often denote more than one phoneme. A pair of letters designating a single phoneme is called a digraph, examples of digraphs in English include ch, sh and th. A phoneme can also be represented by three letters, called a trigraph, an example is the combination sch in German. A letter may also be associated more than one phoneme. As an example of positional effects, the Spanish letter c is pronounced before a, o, or u, letters also have specific names associated with them. These names may differ with language, dialect and history, Z, for example, is usually called zed in all English-speaking countries except the U. S. where it is named zee. Letters, as elements of alphabets, have prescribed orders and this may generally be known as alphabetical order though collation is the science devoted to the complex task of ordering and sorting of letters and words in different languages. In Spanish, for instance, ñ is a letter being sorted after n. In English, n and ñ are sorted alike, letters may also have numerical value. This is true of Roman numerals and the letters of other writing systems, in English, Arabic numerals are typically used instead of letters. Letters may be used as words, the words a and I are the most common English letter-words. Sometimes O is used for Oh in poetic situations, in extremely informal cases of writing individual letters may replace words, e. g. u may be used instead of you in English, when the letter name is pronounced as a homophone of the word. Nearly all alphabets in the world today either descend directly from development or were inspired by its design
5.
Old English
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Old English or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid 5th century, Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain, Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the standard of the later Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule, Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is different from Modern English. Old English grammar is similar to that of modern German, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms. The oldest Old English inscriptions were using a runic system. Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is a process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections. Perhaps around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic dialects from the 5th century. It came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England and this included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, Norse was also widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century, the oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmons Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century, with the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, a later literary standard, dating from the later 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham. This form of the language is known as the Winchester standard and it is considered to represent the classical form of Old English
6.
Middle English
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This stage of the development of the English language roughly followed the High to the Late Middle Ages. Middle English developed out of Late Old English, seeing many dramatic changes in its grammar, pronunciation and this largely forms the basis for Modern English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. Middle English was succeeded in England by the era of Early Modern English, by that time, a variant of the Northumbrian dialect was developing into the Scots language. During the Middle English period many Old English grammatical features were simplified or disappeared, noun, adjective and verb inflections were simplified, a process that included the reduction of most grammatical case distinctions. Middle English also saw an adoption of Norman French vocabulary, especially in areas such as politics, law. Everyday English vocabulary remained mostly Germanic, with Old Norse influence becoming apparent, significant changes in pronunciation took place, especially for long vowels and diphthongs, which in the later Middle English period began to undergo the Great Vowel Shift. Little survives of early Middle English literature, most likely due to the Norman domination, poets wrote both in the vernacular and courtly English. It is popularly believed that William Shakespeare wrote in Middle English, the latter part of the 11th century was a period of transition from Late Old English to Early Middle English. The influence of Old Norse certainly helped move English from a synthetic language towards a more analytic or isolating word order and it was, after all, a salutary influence. The gain was greater than the loss, there was a gain in directness, in clarity, and in strength. The change to Old English from Old Norse was substantive, pervasive and it is most important to recognise that in many words the English and Scandinavian language differed chiefly in their inflectional elements. The body of the word was so nearly the same in the two languages only the endings would put obstacles in the way of mutual understanding. In the mixed population which existed in the Danelaw these endings must have led to confusion, tending gradually to become obscured. This blending of peoples and languages resulted in simplifying English grammar. There are also many Norman-derived terms relating to the cultures that arose in the 12th century. Sometimes, and particularly later, words were taken from Latin, giving such sets as kingly, later French borrowings came from standard rather than Norman French, this leads to such cognate pairs as warden, guardian. The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not, of course, change the language immediately, the general population would have spoken the same dialects as before the Conquest, these changed slowly until written records of them became available for study, which varies in different regions. Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, Early Middle English has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, but a greatly simplified inflectional system
7.
Icelandic orthography
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Icelandic orthography is the way in which Icelandic words are spelt and how their spelling corresponds with their pronunciation. Icelanders call the ten letters, especially thorn and eth, séríslenskur. Eth is also used in Faroese, and while thorn is no longer used in any living language, it was used in many historical languages. Icelandic words never start with ð, which means the capital version Ð is mainly just used when words are spelled using all capitals, sometimes the glyphs are simplified when handwritten, for example æ may be written as ae, which can make it easier to write cursively. The alphabet consists of the following 32 letters, deleted letter The letters a, á, e, é, i, í, o, ó, u, ú, y, ý, æ and ö are considered vowels, and the remainder are consonants. The letters C, Q and W are only used in Icelandic in words of foreign origin, otherwise, c, qu, and w are replaced by k/s/ts, hv, and v respectively. The letter Z was used until 1973, when it was abolished, however, one of the most important newspapers in Iceland, Morgunblaðið, still uses it sometimes, and a secondary school, Verzlunarskóli Íslands has it in its name. It is also found in proper names, and loanwords such as pizza. Older people, who were educated before the abolition of the z sometimes also use it. While the letters C, Q, W, and Z are found on the Icelandic keyboard, they are used in Icelandic, they are used in some proper names of Icelanders. The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from an established in the 19th century. It is ultimately based heavily on a standard created in the early 12th century by a document referred to as The First Grammatical Treatise. The standard was intended for the common North Germanic language, Old Norse and it did not have much influence, however, at the time. The most defining characteristics of the alphabet were established in the old treatise, Use of the acute accent, Use of þ, also used in the Old English alphabet as the letter thorn. The later Rasmus Rask standard was basically a re-enactment of the old treatise, with changes to fit concurrent North Germanic conventions. Various old features, like ð, had not seen much use in the later centuries. Later 20th century changes are most notably the adoption of é, which had previously written as je. This section lists Icelandic letters and letter combinations, and how to pronounce them using a narrow International Phonetic Alphabet transcription, Icelandic vowels may be either long or short, but this distinction is only relevant in stressed syllables, unstressed vowels are neutral in quantitative aspect
