Geek of All Trades

Exoticized lettering: Arabic- and Urdu-styled Roman

Here are a couple more for the exoticized lettering series (and here's the archive category collecting all such posts).

First, a very pretty example from the website of Ahiida, a company that sells the "burqini," a modest bathing costume.  Ahiida's logo is the Roman characters "ahiida" styled to resemble Arabic calligraphy.  It's a really lovely sample, amazingly evocative - those ascenders are reminiscent of minarets.

Then, John of bradshaw of the future keeps finding the best examples - he sends this gorgeous poster that says "Marudanaayagam" in Roman letters styled to look like Naskh-style Urdu.  John found this in Street Graphics India, published by Thames & Hudson; click on the picture for a bigger version.

And thanks to Manish of the excellent and thought-provoking Ultrabrown for the link. 

Tamil-styled Roman and more Urdu-styled Devanagari

Here are two more installments in the exoticized lettering series, both discovered by John of bradshaw of the future. 

Firsts, John presents the the cover of an album called Autoditacker by Mouse on Mars, in which the band's
name is written in Roman characters styled to resemble Tamil script (here's a sample of Tamil for comparison):

Then, in email, John sent me another wonderful example of Urdu-ized Devanagari that he found in a book on Hindi sign-making (a book I'd love to see some time):

This says "lailaa majnuu" - लैला मजनू - which is the title of a legendary Persian love story that is often cited in romantic Hindi film songs.  This beautiful sample, like the Umrao Jaan example of Udru-ized Devanagari that started this whole collection, is characterized by the absence of a rekha (the overhead line connecting contiguous letters in ordinary Devanagari), by long, stylized curved descenders on the letterforms and vowel matras, and the addition of meaningless dots that add to the Urdu feel of the lettering. 

Stay tuned!  More to come. 

Cyrillic-styled Roman and Tibetan-styled Chinese

The collection of exoticized lettering began when I emailed my sample of Urdu-styled Devanagari to Prof. Bill Poser in response to his Language Log post with this example of Cyrillic-styled Roman lettering from the Vancouver Sun:

After Prof. Poser put the Urdu-ized Devanagari on Language Log, I discovered this excellent post by Joel Martinsen of Danwei, with glorious examples of Tibetan-styled Chinese lettering like this one from a movie poster:

Stay tuned for more examples.

Geek of type and lettering

After my first post on exoticized lettering got mentioned on Language Log, many more examples of the form  - lettering in one script stylized to resemble a different script - have started to pour in via comments on this weblog and links on other people's weblogs.  There seems to be a great diversity of such stylized scripts, both Roman scripts styled to resemble non-Roman scripts and, perhaps even more interesting, one non-Roman script styled to look like another non-Roman script.

I think all of these fascinating samples need to be gathered in one place on line, and after talking it over with bradshaw of the future I've decided to set up a new category here to collect them.  Over the next couple of days I'll post all of the examples (with links to sources of course) that I've seen so far, and I encourage you all to please send along any others you find. 

I've called the new category "Geek of Type and Lettering," and I'll use it both for the exoticized letterings that inspired it as well as for other observations I've made about typefaces and lettering styles.  But the truth is that I am not really a Geek of Type and Lettering - I'm interested in the subject but I don't yet know much about it.  I hope this new category provides an opportunity to learn more. 

Exoticized lettering

Prof. Bill Poser, one of Language Log's regular contributors, posted yesterday about the word "nyet" written in Roman characters stylized to look like Cyrillic.  It reminded me of my post of about eight months ago where I wrote about Devanagari lettering (I mistakenly called it typeface) styled to look like Urdu, and other stylistic exoticizations.  I emailed Prof. Poser, and before I knew it he had posted on Langauge Log a link to me.

Language Log has tens of thousands of regular readers - 1400 of them have visited me in the last 12 hours or so.  That's quite a traffic spike for this humble little blog, that hums along ordinarily at less than 40 page views a day.  Thanks to Prof. Poser for the hat tip.

One Language Log reader followed up with his own interesting post on the same subject:  Chinese characters stylized to look like Tibetan.  Tibetan script is lovely; it's a descendant of Devanagari that I once mistook for Bengali.  Here is a sample of Tibetan script and one of Bengali script.

A script map

Isn't this lovely?  It is a map of South Asia, with the name of each region written in the dominant script of the region.

It has some errors, noted in the Language Log post by Bill Poser from which I discovered it. 

When I heard Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar speak at Harvard, Shabana ji said, "A script is not a language," and Javed sahib agreed.  This map highlights this fact, as many regions that share scripts do not share languages.  Marathi-speaking Maharashtra, Nepali-speaking Nepal, Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh, and Kashmiri speaking Jammu and Kashmir, just to name a few, all use Devanagari; how many languages are represented by the Arabic/Persian scripts to the north west?

The map also makes my brain tingle at the thought of what to learn next.  I've had a little book on Urdu script for months but I've been intimidated by it.  Bill Poser is intimidated by the Sinhalese; I bet he can read Urdu.  I've got to start catching up! 

Faux exotic typefaces

[UPDATE: If you are interested in exoticized lettering, please see the new Geek of Type and Lettering category I have created for collecting samples I have found since this post was mentioned on Language Log.]

Not that long ago I wrote about the preservation of typeface features across different scripts.  Here's an observation of a different cross-script typeface phenomenon.  You are undoubtedly familiar with typefaces that provide Roman characters in a style that is evocative of other, non-Roman scripts. For example, on a Chinese food container, you might see a typeface like this one:

There are typefaces that evoke Hebrew characters, like this one from the cover of an album of Klezmer music:

Other typefaces are designed to resemble Arabic script, and even Devanagari, the script in which Hindi is written.

I actually hate these faux exotic typefaces.  They strike me as too cutesy, an ersatz fetishization that bastardizes the true beauty and diversity of the world's writing systems. 

But I noticed a very interesting use of these faux exotic typefaces on the posters for the recent Hindi film Umrao Jaan.  The film takes place amidst the Muslim elite of mid-19th century Lucknow, a golden age of Urdu culture and literature.  Urdu is written in an adapted version of the Persian script, which is itself an adaptation of the Arabic script.  So it is no surprise that on posters that display the film's name in Roman script, an Arabic-styled Roman typeface is used:

Indeed, during the film's title sequence (and on its official website), these words are animated to appear letter-by-letter on the screen from right to left, as if they are being written by an Urdu scribe. 

What is particularly cool, though, is that posters that display the film's name in Devanagari also use an Arabic-styled typeface, this time an Arabic-styled Devanagari typeface!

Compare this to the film's name written in plain, unstylized Devanagari:  उमराव जान.  In the poster's Urdu-ized version, the upper line that joins the letters (called the "rekha," line) has been removed.  That line is a very strong distinguishing feature of Devanagari (and its siblings) - indeed, the rekha is what gives the  "namaskar" sample above its distinctly Indic feel.  Yet in the poster, it has been removed, and the immediate effect is Devanagari that looks a lot less like Devanagari.  The addition of the curving extensions of the lower strokes on some of the letterforms, as well as the meaningless dots beneath some of the letters, completes the Urdu-ization of the typeface.

(Fans of Hindi films should feel free to insert at this point their own jokes about Umrao Jaan without its Rekha.)

(Although Devanagari has a rekha-less sister script, Gujarati, given the centrality of Urdu to the setting of Umrao Jaan, it is clear that the intent of the poster is clearly Urdu-ization rather than Gujju-ization.  Just for fun, though, here's "Umrao Jaan" in Gujarati:  ઉમરાવ જાન) 

Even though I dislike these pseudo-exotic typefaces, it is fascinating to see the exoticization process play out between two scripts, neither of which is Roman.