a-lettristic

Thanks to Language Hat for this piece of alphabetic fun by Simon Whitechapel. It consists of a set of rotating glyphs as stand-ins for Latin alphabet letters. Where possible, the glyphs distinguish minimal pairs (p vs b, etc) by the direction of rotation for the same shape. Vowels tend to be very simple shapes, consonants more elaborate. Drives you nuts.

The joke of course is that moving letters are illegible, even if you were to simply rotate the members of your normal alphabet. So they abolish the purpose for which they were created. Language aspiring to the condition of cinematics, as it were.

Andrew Joscelyne
European, a language technology industry watcher since Electric Word was first published, sometime journalist, consultant, market analyst and animateur of projects. Interested in technologies for augmenting human intellectual endeavour, multilingual méssage, the history of language machines, the future of translation, and the life of the digital mindset.

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