Just a quick thought pre class, inspired by reading a workshop from Howard in a different class...
Does the sound, feel, essence of a letter/word embodied in the visual text of the letter/word? Like in sound...there are words that sound the very thing that they describe (I know there's a word for this but can't remember). Ooze sounds like its oozing. Squishy sounds squishy. Soft feels soft.
Can this same concept be transferred to the way words look?
This of course is a question to Western European languages. Where as in Chinese the entire language is predicated on the way the word looks.
In marketing they say that Round images are more appealing to women while angular or square shapes are more appealing to men. Though this might seem like a false binary, however, this does say that images produce socio-cultural significances. Does the angular A have a particular signifier that the O does not? Does the word COTTEN evoke softness because of the way it looks?
Just a quick thought.
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Yes, text is indeed an amazing creation! These unusual shapes, end-up carrying the meaning(s) for everything around us. We don't just use them to remember words, but as tools allowing us to participate in a discourse as well. However each culture/ language seems to have its own myth on how their specific characters have formed over teh centuries.
ReplyDeleteMost modern alphabets have evolved from earlier hieroglyphics or ideographs, hence having to coup with – at times frustrating shortcomings– their original forms. However, Hangeul (Korean Alphabet) was created with its visual form in mind, specifically to make it easy to read and write in Korea.
Some mistake the apparent similarity of Hangeul forms to ideograms (as seen in Chinese and Japanese scripts) however they are neither of these. In-fact Hangeul is unique in its formal (visual) characteristics, in that the shapes of the consonants are based on the shape that the mouth makes when the corresponding sound is made.
There are 24 characters (jamo) in the present Korean alphabet: 14 consonants + 10 vowels, and when written they are combined together into syllable blocks (from Chinese heritage). The shapes of the consonants ( g/k, n, s, m and ng ) are graphical representations of the shapes that the mouth/tongue must make when the corresponding sound is desired. Other consonants are then added using extra lines to the basic shapes.
Further more:
The shapes of the vowels are rooted in their visual representations, in three primary forms:
1) Man = vertical line
2) Earth = horizontal line
3) Heaven = a dot / short line
Ok. thats too uch info., I think!?