Typography is everywhere, except where there is none, anymore
Example of Mongolian Script.
Typography is now facing the whole world: in-between lies perhaps a promising hinterland, we could call the Word Wide Web.
Typography is Latin-centric, just as Mercator maps are Europe-centric. But, we live in a time of globalization, and the new Gutenberg galaxy fosters this “global village” effect. Far is near, there is no such things anymore as “remote borders” we could afford to ignore.
Guillaume Pauthier, De l’origine et de la formation des différents systèmes d’écritures orientales et occidentales, 1858.
Jo De Baerdemaeker’s work aims at making advent the living memory of Tibetan and Mongolian scripts in our digital world. That is why he talk (8 May 2012) at the Semaine de la Mongolie to present the state of his research on Mongolian typography. Jo already explored metal, wood, printed Mongolian typography. He is now revisiting the digital frontier of Mongolian typography.
After 60 years of sovietico-cyrillic domination, a typographic recovery is at sight for today’s Mongolia. Mongolia represents nowadays what India stood for in 1970s: a remote, unrecognized land meaning exoticism and freedom. Mongolian typography is challenging in a way that Latin typographers and type designers ignore because of inner functioning of Latin writing system and also because we stand “on the shoulders of giants”, as Newton once said.
All the more reason to seizing this historic opportunity of rising up and going see the world. Then we will achieve greatness, if not gigantism.
Twentieth anniversary Khumuun Bichig newspaper.
Links
→ Jo De Baerdemaeker website
→ Mongolian Type project website
Bathrobe
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Good to see some interest in Mongolian typography! I've done a couple of quite functional pages on the Mongolian script from the learner's point of view in case anyone is interested: Making sense of the Mongolian script (http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/mongolalpha.html); How to look up a dictionary in Mongolian traditional script (http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/mongolalphadict.html); comparison of handwriting and typeface (http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/mongolalphaconvert.html).
Mongolian calligraphy is extremely beautiful. In Mongolia itself they still adhere to a classical form (straight vertical lines with those beautiful flourishes to the left and right) whereas in Inner Mongolia there seems to be influence from Chinese, with a more tangled, 'woollier' look that resembles Chinese characters.
Jo De Baerdemaeker
Monday, September 03, 2012
Hello Hussein, although researches are still in debate on the exact origin of the Mongolian script, it is generally accepted that the script is derived from the Uyghur system of writing.
You can read more on this subject at http://mongoliantype.com/2011/05/01/uyghuromongolscript/
I would also recommend reading ‘Books of the Mongolian nomads’ (Kara, György, 2005) or "Aramaic scripts for Altaic languages" in ‘The world’s writing systems’ (1996, pp 536–558)
Hussein El-busaifi
Sunday, September 02, 2012
At first glance I thought it is Arabic, I directly jumped to see the link.
It look like arabic written vertically. maybe they are affected bye it when it they conquered abbasids in Bagdad.