A love of letters

With the start of the Winter Olympics, not only am I loving the snowboarding commentary (a whole new language!), but I’ve been reminded of how much I like the Cyrillic alphabet … let me explain …

In my first year as an undergraduate, I did a Russian language course for a year. I was absolutely rubbish and I don’t think I really learnt to say anything useful. I’m not sure if that was down to the rather uninspired grammar-translation style course or more likely, just me being a sulky, disinterested teenager!

The only part of the course I did enjoy was learning the Cyrillic alphabet.  Like any alphabet, the printed text is slightly different from the handwritten form, so as part of our studies, we had to do handwriting practice. I spent many a happy hour neatly copying out words and phrases into my little workbook – about the only part of the course I had a talent for!

I also loved the aspect of learning to decipher a kind of secret code. I still get excited when I manage to work out the pronunciation of something written in Cyrillic – especially if it’s a name or something else I recognise. Which brings me back to Sochi, or rather should I say СОЧИ, because in Cyrillic, the ‘ch’ sound has its own character, Ч, which has a certain neatness that appeals too. And then there’re the exotic, curly Ж (zh) and Щ (shch)… or maybe it’s just me …

Letters

An article about typefaces and fonts just caught my eye on the BBC website - "Do typefaces really matter?" The article itself though was less interesting to me than the graphic that accompanied it, below:

It's not that choice of font doesn't interest me - I know it's very important and a fascinating area - it's just that I'm far more attracted by physical letters somehow. So, I thought I'd share a few that I have around my office:

A large cardboard Q on the stairs

A curly, lower case 'g'- the style I use in my own handwriting rather than the more conventional handwritten 'g'

Some of my own wooden printers' blocks - I won't spell out the full word here for fear of causing offence!

Rather annoyingly, this blog doesn't display in the font I create it in, so you can't see the distinction between the two g's I typed above. I really must go into the settings and get it changed some time ...

ella minnow pea

I've just finished the most wonderfully lexico-nerdy novel - ella minnow pea by Mark Dunn. It's about an island nation where people gradually lose the right to use letters of the alphabet and, of course, those same letters gradually disappear from the novel itself. It's a fascinating concept but one which could lead to a rather pretentious bit of clever-clever literature. I love writers who play with language - I was totally captured by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas - but I'm also wary of writing that tries to be too clever - I hated Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller and gave up on Will Self's Book of Dave. But ella minnow pea has a totally compelling story, with wonderful characters which sweeps you along towards a gripping ending. It's a great little novel, that I'd recommend to anyone - language geek or otherwise!