“Thanks to Unicode and OpenType, modern fonts are overcoming the limitations of traditional European typography. The size of the countries on this map does not correspond to their geographical area, but to the foreign language level of their official languages in Unicode – in this instance FontFonts (FF). A standard OT font from the FontFont library covers the yellow regions, FF-Pro fonts also support CE languages, including Turkish, Romanian and the Baltic languages (green). Well-equipped FF-Pro fonts also include Greek (pink) and/or Cyrillic (pink) characters. The legend shows a selection of typical characters for these languages.”
If you think fonts are for baptisms, or more generally, if you’re not into typography, the above paragraph might as well not have been translated from its original German. Some vocabulary, to get us up to speed:
- Font: a complete set of letters, numbers and other characters that would be needed to typeset any text. A font is specific as to size (e.g. 10 or 12 points) and style (e.g. upright, bold, italic). Courier 12 point italic is a different font from Courier 10 point bold.
- Typeface: a ‘family’ of one or more related fonts. The aforementioned fonts belong to one typeface, Courier.
- Typography: the art of designing and arranging typefaces, the artists being graphic designers, typesetters, lay-outers, etc.
- Unicode and OpenType: computer industry standards encompassing most of the world’s alphabets, thus allowing for consistency in the representation of scripts other than one’s own.
- FontFont:a major library for digital typefaces, the name of each of them starting with with FF-.
- ASCII: short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a coding standard consisting of 94 printable characters, based on the English alphabet and much in use on the internet, for example.
This map, quite simply put, distorts the size of countries proportionate to the ‘distance’ of their writing systems to ASCII code. Countries with a lot of ‘exotic’ characters are biggest, while countries adhering closely to the ‘regular’ western (i.c. English, i.e. Latin) alphabet, are normal-sized. The legend on the left of the map shows some of the diacritical signs and special letters ‘added’ to the ASCII (English) alphabet in other European languages. Each diacritical sign and special letter has a story to tell. Here are just a few of those:
The Icelandic letters eth (ð, Ð) and thorn (þ, Þ), both also occurred in Old Anglo-Saxon (where they were used interchangeably). An Icelandic eth is a voiced dental fricative similar to the modern English th-sound (in ‘them’, for example), while thorn is a voiceless dental fricative as in ‘thick’. The letter eth disappeared from English around 1300, the thorn holding out until about 1500.
The cedille is a hook-shaped appendage, most familiarly used under a -c- (ç), representing (in French, Portuguese and Catalan) an s-sound where a written -c- would otherwise presuppose a k-sound. Its Spanish name – cedilla – is a clue to its curious origin, as a Visigothic zed minuscule: cedilla means little ceda (zeta). C-cedille is also used in Albanian, Kurdish and Turkish (plus related languages) to represent the voiceless postalveolar affricate ch- as in ‘church’.
Remarkably, the map not alone provides an Atlantic alphabet (identical to Greek), it also shows an outline of Atlantis itself — a very oblique way of announcing its oft-posited existence (most recently earlier this year, when Google’s new ocean-surface viewing service Google Ocean turned up a submarine grid of surprising regularity).
The map is dominated by Russia, due to its original size and the distance between Russian and ASCII, and, by extension, Eastern Europe. Western European and Scandinavian languages apparently deviate less from ASCII. Another font-giant is Greece, which is ironic: the Greek at the origin of all European alphabets, be they Latin, Cyrillic or otherwise. One could rightly consider those as deviations from the original Greek alphabet (the two first letters of which are still called alpha and beta).
Many thanks to Derek Jensen for sending in this link to Fontblog, a German-language typography page.
[...] Europe beyond ASCII — A very strange map from Strange Maps. [...]
Pingback by [links] Link salad for a Xi’an Monday morning | jlake.com — April 12, 2009 @ 10:59 pm
Strictly speaking, modern Greek alphabet is not exactly the source of modern Latin alphabet; early Greek alphabets had eastern and western forms both were based on Phoenician alphabet; The eastern form became the modern Greek alphabet and the western form the modern Latin alphabet…
Well I’m not an expert and all of my info came from the marvellous book
http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/dp/0195079930
and Wikipedia. So please correct me if there’s an expert. See e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Greek_alphabet
Comment by yuji — April 12, 2009 @ 11:20 pm
Oh dear. The German cartographer seems to have forgotten about Welsh.
Comment by James D — April 13, 2009 @ 1:26 am
>The map is dominated by Russia
If so it would be a wrong map. Rather the map is dominated by Cyrillic alphabet used by many languages (and not only Slavic).
Comment by Ukrainian Boy — April 13, 2009 @ 3:14 am
The interesting thing about thorn (þ) is that, as its usage died out, it was often replaced in printed things by the similar-looking letter y. So the definite article “þe” came to be written “ye” which is why we still see “ye olde…” on occasion.
Comment by rickterp — April 13, 2009 @ 3:15 am
@James D, Cymraeg (Welsh) pretty much uses the ‘regular’ Latin alphabet, so doesn’t need an entry on the map seperate from Great Britain (Großbritanienne).
Comment by Stephen Moore — April 13, 2009 @ 3:34 am
Additional Finnish alphabets seem to be incorrect. Last two should not be there and one is missing…
Comment by Peter — April 13, 2009 @ 7:05 am
@Peter, the Finnish alphabets are correct, the last two are used in a few loan words (like šakki for chess and maharadža for maharaja) to keep the written and spoken forms the same (saying ’sh’ ‘zh’ vs. ‘ʃ’ ‘ʒ’). You probably meant å which is used only in Swedish (the second language, and that’s why it’s in the keyboard).
Comment by Janne — April 13, 2009 @ 11:34 am
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Pingback by Europe Beyond ASCII « comebackonwednesday — April 13, 2009 @ 11:47 am
alas, there are more interesting unicode challenges just off the eastern and southern edge.
where is the world map version?
Comment by upyernoz — April 13, 2009 @ 1:23 pm
Welsh uses the infamous w-circumflex, which is definitely not in standard ASCII.
Romanian you can debate about too — officially there are accented consonants s-comma and t-commma, but they’re almost always written s-cedille and t-cedille.
Comment by Edmund Schluessel — April 13, 2009 @ 1:41 pm
Minor nitpick: “Greek (pink) and/or Cyrillic (pink) characters”.
Shouldn’t that be “Greek (purple)”?
Comment by Miguel Farah — April 13, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
If the author wanted to include Atlantis, he should do some research first. True, Plato wrote about the island in Greek, but he never claims that they were using the Greek alphabet! Quite the opposite – he mentions that Solon has translated the barbarian (!) names of Atlantis’ citizens (and the whole story) to Greek from Egyptian, and that the Egyptian version was already a translation. So, if Atlantis ever existed, it had its own language and alphabet. Or perhaps they had no writing system at all.
Maybe i’m looking to deep, but what’s the deal with including Atlantic alphabet if the information is not correct?
Comment by ArCgon — April 13, 2009 @ 2:14 pm
The cartographer seems to have not taken into account any regional languages (this is specially notorious in that he lists the characters for Andorra, which is a catalan-speaking country, but not catalan itself, or at least include them in “Spanien”).
As per regional languages go, asturian (spoken in Asturias, in northwestern Spain), has some extra characters as well: Ḥ and Ḷ (U+1e24 and U+1e36).
Since asturian is a relatively minor language, those two aren’t supported in ISO8859-1 (but are included in Unicode). Keyboard support is VERY poor – only the proposed pan-iberian keyboard layout has them, and that’s because *I* made it and took the effort of including them.
(if you want to look at it, it’s at http://www.farah.cl/DistribucionesDeTeclado/PaniberN_es.html )
Comment by Miguel Farah — April 13, 2009 @ 2:22 pm
More regional languages: no dalecarlian (Y̨, å+ogonek [1]), no sami (Ʒ, Ǯ), etcetera. Also, slovenian seems not to list the double-grave-accent (ȁ, ȅ, … ).
This map is VERY interesting, but if it took into account regional languages, it’d be even better.
Comment by Miguel Farah — April 13, 2009 @ 2:31 pm
“eth (ð, Ð) and thorn (þ, Þ), both also occurred in Old Anglo-Saxon (where they were used interchangeably).”
Not true! Anglo-Saxon distinguished between eth and thorn for many centuries.
And of course they also appered in Middle English as well, quite commonly and sometimes with the distinction maintained.
Comment by ASod — April 13, 2009 @ 5:32 pm
A cedilla is a cedilla in English and not a cedille or a cédille.
Comment by Joe Clark — April 13, 2009 @ 6:14 pm
How can any countries be normal-sized if the map distorts the size of countries proportionate to the ‘distance’ of their writing systems to ASCII code?
Comment by EJ — April 13, 2009 @ 7:02 pm
What is the blue island to the southwest of the Iberian peninsula? I can’t make its name out.
Comment by George — April 14, 2009 @ 5:26 am
well the reason Estonian language has Š and Ž is because we can’t pronounche many foreign words without them. Things like chocolate, we need to change the CH to Š and in gillette the G turns to Ž, because if we spell it with G, it sounds completely different. C, W, F, X, Z, Q and Y are foreign letters as well, we only use them to write foreign placenames as New York etc. On the other hand, Õ, Ö. Ü and Ä are commonly used in real Estonian words.
Comment by h2ppyme — April 14, 2009 @ 5:46 am
[...] 375 – Europe Beyond ASCII « Strange Maps "This map, quite simply put, distorts the size of countries proportionate to the ‘distance’ of their writing systems to ASCII code. Countries with a lot of ‘exotic’ characters are biggest, while countries adhering closely to the ‘regular’ western (i.c. English, i.e. Latin) alphabet, are normal-sized. The legend on the left of the map shows some of the diacritical signs and special letters ‘added’ to the ASCII (English) alphabet in other European languages. Each diacritical sign and special letter has a story to tell. Here are just a few of those:…" (tags: typeface type typography map geography language fonts ASCII-must-die-to-be-reborn) [...]
Pingback by Notional Slurry » links for 2009-04-13 — April 14, 2009 @ 6:01 am
Hi George (19),
the blue island is Atlantis :-)
Comment by ecco — April 14, 2009 @ 6:26 am
I agree with EJ (comment #18): none of the “Western” (i.e. yellow) countries seem to be distorted, while the number of extra-ASCII characters is different for each one (and sometimes bigger than that of some green countries: e.g. Portugal should be much bigger than Moldova).
Besides, the author of the map ignores that Italian has both è and é (with different sounds; some publishers also use í and ú).
Anyway, that’s a very interesting map!
Comment by Paolo — April 14, 2009 @ 10:10 am
Comment #16, ASod, is wrong. Edh and thorn were used interchangably in Old and Middle English, as the blog post suggests. This is easier to understand when we consider that Old English did not have a phonemic distinction between the two sounds, and was only introduced in Middle English due to French influence. Even today it remains a minimal contrast (which is why spelling them both as “th” leads to minimal confusion – “thigh” and “thy” anyome?)
Comment by Rory — April 14, 2009 @ 10:40 am
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Comment by onlineeasyincome — April 14, 2009 @ 10:58 am
What about Austrian?
Comment by Terry — April 15, 2009 @ 10:40 am
[...] 375 – Europe Beyond ASCII « Strange Maps [...]
Pingback by igorbrejc.net » Fresh Catch For April 16th — April 16, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
[...] auf eine Mail warte, die Informationen für den nächsten inhaltlichen Beitrag liefern soll. Über Strange Maps gefunden: Eine Karte mit einer Übersicht über Sonderzeichen in den Zeichensätzen europäischer [...]
Pingback by Jenseits von ASCII « [ʃplɔk] — April 20, 2009 @ 12:19 pm
Although interesting there are a few weard and wrong things in the map:
-43 Atlantis??? Are you kidding me?
-ü and Ü are not currently Portuguese characters. In the beginning of the XX century they where still used, but in the orthographic agreement of 1945 the Umlaut was abolished.
Comment by Ray — April 22, 2009 @ 9:19 am
Thorn and edh are both indicate interdental fricatives, not dental ones.
ArCgon,
When Plato calls the Atlantean names “barbarian”, all that he means is that they are not Greek. “Barbarian” didn’t gain its current meaning and connotation until it was borrowed by the Romans.
Incidentally, the Atlanteans seem to have most likely spoken Tartessian, which had its own script. Because any fonts for this script would have to use Unicode’s Private Use Area, Atlantis would end up occupying almost the entire map.
Comment by Sergei Andropov — April 23, 2009 @ 10:38 am
Actually, “barbarian” came from the Greek immitation of the words of other peoples. All they heard was “bar bar bar,” much like the adults in Charlie Brown. Certainly that suggested a lack of civility which carried over into Roman times.
Comment by v334 — April 23, 2009 @ 6:51 pm
Russia looks like the king :)
Comment by Brian — April 25, 2009 @ 1:05 am
“Romanian you can debate about too — officially there are accented consonants s-comma and t-commma, but they’re almost always written s-cedille and t-cedille.”
Officially there is no difference between “t-comma” and “t-cedille” … the comma in t-comma si just a more stylish cedille. The “official” rumour was started by some very intelligent but not very well informed engineer from Holland that started to make lobby for a “Romanian” encoding because he thought the “cedille” has something to do with Turkey.
The map is ****it … Rumanian and other Central European alphabets have less deviations from ASCII than the French one … they just counted the differences between latin1 and latin2 …
Comment by Emil — April 26, 2009 @ 7:50 pm
v334,
Naturally non-Greek often meant savage, but that was because of the Greeks’ attitude towards others, not the meaning of the word. They also referred to such greats as the Romans and Persians as “barbarians”, sometimes quite neutrally.
Comment by Sergei Andropov — May 6, 2009 @ 9:10 am
Why is Estonia in the green bloc, when it only contains characters that are already present in the yellow bloc, eg. the Finnish extraš + Ü and Õ, which is found in Portuguese?
Comment by Kristian Järventaus — May 8, 2009 @ 1:28 pm