Bibliography: Fonts and Typefaces (between 1450-1700)

Burke, James. The Day the Universe Changed. London Writers Ltd., 1985. Burke describes the life of Gutenberg and his printing press then the development of standardized print type that followed. The humanist influences on style are described and the creation of "italic." I found this book in the bibliography of the Wikipedia article History of Western Typography.

And That's a Wrap- Rosetta Stone

When I considered "Reinventing Knowledge" as part of my class schedule this semester I felt like I had some idea of the typical things that I would be asked to do. You know, the usual readings and some reports and other regular assignments. I can say almost with ease that most of the things that we have been asked to do this semester have been quite the complete opposite than what I had imagined. Starting with blogging on a regular basis all the way to scribing Cuneiform. That's a great thing! I feel that just as we have been and are studying and researching transitions within knowledge and mediums and languages, at the same time we ourselves are going through a transition of sorts in how we go about learning. At least that's how I feel about the recent events and things that have been done.

Thank you, Dr. Ricks!

   Thanks to this man, the Roman group was able to translate their scroll. This Blog is dedicated to him because if it weren't for him, we would have never figured this thing out.
    I went to the JFSB knocking on every Hebrew or Arabic professor's door because, well.... I'm embarrassed to say they wouldn't answer my desperate emails.... So I became frantic. But thanks to this man, who graciously opened his door and let me into his office, our group has a translation! He said the Arabic was illegible... but he Hebrew he read just fine! He insisted that the direct translation was this: "When his Lord hear the words of his wife saying something like 'make me your servant or slave' he became angry." As I was writing his translation down I asked, "Something like?" and he said "Yes. Something like." So I wrote that down! Straight from the authority himself!
     Now, all that needs to be done is to carve it into our wax tablet! You'll see the final product tomorrow!

Hand me a Q-Tip, We're making Diptychs!

  
diptych:  device with two flat plates attached at a hinge
Plus, let me explain my awesome joke in the title:  Q-tips....ear wax... wax tablets.... 

A Riddle

   "Of honey-laden bees I first was born,  
     But in the forest grew my outer coat;  
     My shoes from tough hides came.  An iron point   
     In artful windings cuts a fair design, 
     And leaves long, twisted furrows, like a plow...." 
                    (Riddle 32:  Pitman 18-19)

The Greatest Treasure

      The TV show Meet the Anscestors had a special episode (yah, it was on BBC Television... a favorite cable channel of mine...) called "Our Top Ten Treasures"--British experts voted on the most important treasures found in Britain. Among the top ten treasures  was a chess set from around 1150 A.D., a solid ceremonial gold cape from 1900-1600 B.C., and a gold cup from about 1700-1500 B.C. 



 Some of the Vindolanda Tablets--Britain's Greatest Treasure

   
    The Greatest treasure, however, was the Vindolanda Tablets--they are estimated to have been written in the late first century A.D. They are considered the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain. They are wooden tablets with ink on them. They were made from birch, alder, and oak--there are nearly 500 of these, though most of them are broken and somewhat indecipherable.

      So, basically, I just want to highlight some of the most interesting tablets found in the Vindalonda Tablets and what we learn from them.

Why did Plato write??

Medieval portrayal of Socrates and his greatest pupil, Plato.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them."

A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.39

    If you think about philosophy, it's about as dependent on writing as math. Formulating thoughts in the air is nearly impossible for me, and certainly impossible  for anyone else to understand (just think of how much harder it is to spell a word out loud than to write it down-- in a spelling bee I'd be thinking,"I could do this if i had a pen and paper..")

      However, we do know that Socrates didn't write a line of his thoughts, and he's considered the father of Greek philosophy and modern thought! We only know the things he said indirectly, kind of like how we have the teachings of Jesus Christ though we don't have his direct account--in this way the two have often been compared, because it has only been through the records of others that we know anything of them.  

     The written word, to Socrates, was as a child without a father: unable to protect itself. He said that writing is deceptive like a painting-- paintings portray things that are falsely living and can't answer questions, just as books can indicate things but cannot give further explanation or answers to questions. Once a man writes down his thoughts, he loses control of them, soon his words become a toy for everyone to play with--written words are vulnerable to having their true meaning lost to them. Socrates had no school, no books, he preferred to a "living" philosophy made of conversation with people he met on the streets. Philosophy was to be made in common with others, the research was made orally. So, even though in our minds philosophy is often represented by great literary works (Kant, Hegel, Descartes...), philosophy is not so clearly related to literacy.

     If Socrates was so opposed to writing, as we talked about in class, and he indoctrinated that belief into his greatest pupil, Plato, why, then, did Plato write?? 

The Roman Calendar

Epigraphy: the study of inscriptions, found on buildings, altars, bricks, plaques or tablets of various materials, tiles, mosaics, pottery--anything you can think of that people write on

From the first three centuries of the Roman Republic (500-200 B.C.), relatively few inscriptions survive. There is no way of knowing what type of role and how big writing/inscribing things played in Romans' lives at that time, but we can assume that what we do have only represents a small fraction of what they used. Ancient literature we have today refers to other works of literature and inscriptions that no longer exist, so it's easy to imagine that we have a limited portion of what ancient people had.

"An impressive variety of texts," however, has survived from the centuries that followed (200-100 B.C.)1 . We have many more inscriptions from this particular time period in the Roman Republic, including calendars!

The Roman Writing System

(as a note before you begin, know that when I use "//" to set apart a letter or two letters, I'm using those slashes to indicate that you make the sound within the slashes: Don't say the name of the letter inside them. For example, when you see /ks/ think of  the ksssss sound that x makes , don't say "kay. esss." to yourself.)

 

  No offense to the letter C but.... I've always had a certain amount of disdain for it. Yah I respect it for what it does for my last name, I mean without it I'd be Alyssa Ardon, which is no where near as cute as Alyssa Cardon, but I could just as easily be Alyssa Kardon and I think the kuteness would be fairly komparable.  I guess my problem with the letter C stems from the fakt that we kould easily live without it and have a 25 letter alphabet rather than a 26 letter one-- who wouldn't go for that??? In all seriousness, though: C steals the sound from S and K and really the only new thing it kontributes to our writing system is the "CH" sound in "churro" and quite honestly I think that sounds a lot like a J anyway so I honestly don't know why we don't jhange it.