Written & Painted by Laura Maaske, MSc.BMC, Medical Illustrator & Medical Animator| e-Textbook Designer

Earliest Human Impulses to Create an Alphabet

With the weather getting colder, I’ve been taking my daughters to parks a lot less. Recently, as an after-school activity, I talked with my daughters about the alphabet, how each character makes a unique sound, and what can happen to the integrity of letters when they are re-copied or mis-recalled. I talked about how strong, memorable, and unique letters must be, and how concerns like that might shape an alphabet so that certain shapes endure. I asked them if they wanted to make their own alphabets. My younger daughter drew letters that closely represented our own Roman alphabet, with a few extra flourishes and tails. My older daughter drew a set of unique doodles, but when I took the sheet away and asked if she could repeat any of them, she couldn’t. They might be too young for this question.

But I found myself carried away. I took out ink and brush and with images of the 26 letters in my head, lowercase and uppercase, I responded to each as if I were asking questions of them: “Isn’t this your essence?” or, “Don’t you mean this?” or, “Wouldn’t this be more precise?” or, “Wouldn’t you rather this?”. And then, after that, I began to ask, “How come you never thought of this?”

The pencil drawings belong to my 9-year-old.

Those are arrogant questions for someone who has so little background in the history and evolution of the three-thousand year-old alphabet (if tracing to Greek, the first true alphabet). And yet, the energy I brought to those questions goes back to my earliest memories, as a toddler, being puzzled by the forms as I saw them around me and held brightly colored magnetic pieces in my hands. These same characters are next to my laptop now as I type. I thought they looked strange and… well… not quite right. Although I thought making words was magical, I mistrusted the letters more than I’m sure they deserve. In fact, I’ve known many people, my own mother included, who adore the alphabet and trust it implicitly. If there is an essence to be revealed there, an Aleph, but we each take our own course, and I might only be able to see its beauty by rebelling first.

I spent an unrestrained hour in a feverish flourish, as my daughters became bored and wandered on to other paintings. In that time I made 78 forms and filled a scroll of rice  paper. I thought each letter I’d made was unique until I cut the sheets and laid them out on the carpet. As I rotated and flipped sheets over backwards, I realized that I had drawn many of the forms several times, as horizontal or vertical mirrors. In fact, I’d drawn one “letter” seven times, in different orientations. Every character I drew had a single stroke, except for one. A few letters had kinks.

The result of this simple reduction was an alphabet with 34 characters. I stacked the sheets and laid them out in a sequence that seemed to reveal the evolution of the forms. It was an easy and natural exercise, with few incongruities, and took only ten minutes to complete. However, I had the feeling that the linearity was not necessary, and I felt that one particular letter was the central form from which all evolutions arose, as if my alphabet was, in fact, a cross or a star.

A day later, reflecting on the letter sketches, it might be that what has bothered me most, all these years, about the Roman alphabet is that letters are created with more than one stroke. What’s wrong with that? I’m not so sure I can say. But it has to do with reduction.

“X”, the only two-stroked character, is at the end of this alphabet, as if to say, “What’s next?”

I want to add certain letters, and remove some that look like duplicates (particularly, several letters are essentially the Greek alpha). But I will not to make any alterations until I’ve taken more time to reflect on what it is I might might truly be seeking, as the “ideal” alphabet.

Is this a common exercise for typography students? I didn’t find anything about it in a Google search. What alphabets have you created and what do they mean to you?

To see a slideshow of these forms, go to this page.