Edward’s Diary Entry 87: The "I": One Symbol, Many Meanings…

Once upon a time, some 4,350 years after writing began, and 866 years before our time, something incredible happened to the letters of the Latin alphabet, the likes of which had never happened before, nor have they since…

Remember that oral transmission was used in ancient times, and writing was not that important. Bards and wise men exercised incredible powers of mind in retaining reams of information in their heads, and the people who listened to them were always delighted to hear their stories. Then writing and scribes came. And today… 140 billion emails are written per day by fully keyboard-competent human beings... Isn't that great? If the world "happiness rate" were on the same level as the world literacy rate at 86.3% (UNESCO), wouldn't that be lovely?

But when manuscripts were just that, i.e., written by hand, a series of conventions were used, and an “I” was just an “I”, a straight vertical line; or with an upper and lower horizontal stroke, as in Latin capitals, an “I”.

Our Latin letters came from Rome, through the Greeks, who borrowed their early forms from the Phoenicians. We eventually wound up with these 26 letters in English:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Way back in Roman times, the letter “I”, like all other letters, was mostly written in capitals, with simple strokes. It was called Latin Majescule writing, using square capitals and rustic capitals, and there was also a kind of cursive or book-hand. But the “I” was just a simple stroke in all cases.

The incredible thing that happened in the 12th century in Europe was that so-called Blackletter was invented, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura. This was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continues to be used in the German language today. Blackletter is sometimes called Old English (available in Word as a decorative typeface), which has nothing to do with the Old English language, just with the font.  In lower case, it looks like this:

That's pretty normal, but in UPPER case, things really change, unlike any other font:

Why do I say this new style of lettering was such an incredible invention? Because when I was searching for an appropriate reminder to "look within", thinking that I should find the right “I” to print out and hang on the wall, I suddenly began to wonder what these “Goths” were doing… and I flipped out...

(to be continued...)