roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (10/31/86)
reid@DECWRL.DEC.COM (Brian Reid) writes: > I wasn't aware that there was such a thing as italic Greek. > Isn't that kind of like asking for German French or for red green? I'm not a typography expert, and I don't know the Greek language any further than being able to recognize and name (most of) the letters. With that warning aside, let me jump in and possibly make a fool of myself. Why can't there be italic Greek? At least to the layman, italic means slanted letters. A real typographer might cringe if he heard me refer to Helvetica-Oblique as "italic Helvetica", but we all "know" that's what it is. Why couldn't you design an alphabet which has the same relationship to the Greek letters you get in the LaserWriter's Symbol font as Times-Italic has to Times-Roman? I'll take that one step further; Greek-Italic *does* exist, and I've seen it. One of the advantages of living in New York is that by simply looking at the newspapers people are reading in the subway, eventually you'll see an example of type in every language ever invented. While I can't read the Greek newspapers, I can certainly recognize the letters. Whether you want to call it that or not, I've seen Greek-Italic. You may want to call it Greek-Oblique, but I think that sounds silly.
CAB@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU (Chuck Bigelow) (11/05/86)
[Pierre MacKay, who at least occasionally read the mailings on this list, would be the right person to respond to the question of italic Greek, but he probably knows too much to take the bait. Since he has remained sagely silent on the matter, I'll contribute the following, which may prompt an actual informed response.] Brian Reid is right, "italic Greek" is a contradiction in terms, since italic refers to Italy and Greek to Greece. Of course, the Greeks had a word for such a self-contradiction; they called it "oxymoron", which was itself the very kind of contradiction it signified (recursive rhetoric from 400 B.C.), meaning "sharp-dull" and referring to wit or intelligence, and the lack thereof. The Greek rhetoricians used oxymoron consciously for effect, and thus were more on the "oxy-" side of it. But today we more often use such terms unwittingly and thus wind up on the "-moron" side of it. A term like "italic Greek" can occur because the original generic meaning of the English word "italic" was extended to a kind of writing used by humanist scribes and their successors during the Renaissance. This Humanist cursive writing was inclined or slanted, and hence the term was extended to mean any slanted variant of an alphabet, including a slanted Greek. Indeed, the early Greek types cut in Italy in the late 15th century were cursive or slanted in the lower-case, but the caps were upright. Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer of classical Greek works, was very proud of the Greek types cut for him by Francesco Griffo. I don't know what he said about them in Greek, but in Latin he wrote a poem comparing his italic type (the first of its kind) to his earlier triumph of his Greek type that resembled the cursive Greek handwriting of Byzantine scribes. In grammatoglyptae laudem. Qui graiis dedit Aldus en latinis Dat nunc grammata sculpta daedaleis Francisci manibus bononiensis. "In prase of carved letters. Behold, Aldus who gave sculpted letters to the Greeks, now gives [them] to the Latins by means of the Daedalus-like hands of Francesco from Bologna." Note that he didn't call the stuff "type", but "carved letters" and "scultped letters". "Type" from Greek "typos" (a blow or strike) was a much later term. Just as the English don't call spin on a billiard ball "English", so the Italians, of course, never called slanted writing "italic", and never called upright letters "roman". They called italic "corsiva", or `running' style, from the Latin word currere, `to run'. Roman and italic were English terms, used at a far remove from the cultural centers of Italy by a backward bunch of Saxons still steeped in gothic delusion (to paraphrase a possible Italian view of the time). There have been many kinds of cursive writing. The Chancery cursive is the main one that came to be called Italic in English. Cursives are usually slanted, but that is not a necessary condition. Some are upright or almost so. The curviness and wiggliness (these are not technical terms) are more diagnostic. Thus, both an upright and an inclined Greek lower-case are cursive. They evolved in the Byzantine middle ages from the Greek capitals. The Monotype typeface catalog shows many different kinds of Greek typefaces; some vertical, some slanted. There is no easy way out of the nomenclatural problem in English. Monotype called the upright ones "upright" and the inclined ones "inclined". This is easy to understand, logically straight-forward and free of mystification and pretension. It is a good solution, but it lacks the slight connotation of the exotic provided by terms like "roman" and "italic". For those of us who like the exotic and enjoy mystification, the Linotype corporation used to call their italic (oops!) Greek faces "`Ellenika kurta" (this is a crude ad hoc transliteration from the Greek) or `Hellenic cursive'. " `Ellenika" is clear, but "kurta"? We need the services of a Greek scholar or a speaker of Modern Greek to reveal its meaning. It might be cognate to Latin "curtus", `cut short', but I doubt that it is related to Latin "currere", already explained as the ancestor of "cursive". --Chuck Bigelow ps: For sheer enjoyment of oxymorons, let us not neglect all the instances of "Times Roman Italic" that we hear or read.
jaap@mcvax.UUCP (Jaap Akkerhuis) (11/19/86)
Thanks Chuck for the historical and cultural background (is that an oxymoron as well?). Eric Gill (the designer of the Gill sans-serif) has also some interesting remarks about the use of ``Greek'' characters in typography. As far as I remember, he flames about typographers mixing Greek (or mathematics) symbols with ``Latin'' typefaces, while they are completely separately designed. It was a couple of years ago that I read it but he writes about this and other interesting subjects, in ``An essay about typography'' published around 1936. I don't have it myself, but when anyone is interested I could look up a reference. jaap