The Writing Revolution

by Amalia E Gnanadesikan

  The type was housed in the pigeon holes of wooden cases, the less-used capital letters above, in the upper case, and the minuscules below, in the lower case. The letters were not arranged alphabetically; rather the more used letters were placed within easy reach. Nevertheless, ideas differed as to the ideal arrangement, and it was some time before type cases were standardized within countries (they continued to vary from one country to the next, as the frequency of letter use – and even the set of letters used – varied with the language).

  The job of laying out the text belonged to the typesetters or compositors, who would assemble individual pieces of type into a form held together by a frame or chase. They would then justify the type by filling up the white spaces so as to keep the type rigidly fixed in the chase. The filled form was placed on the bed of the press and inked. A piece of damp paper was placed on top of it, and the metal plate – the platen – of the press lowered to squeeze the paper firmly down onto the ink. Later improvements added a parchment frisket that covered the margins of the paper to reduce inadvertent inking, and a tympan of felt or flannel placed on top of the paper to add a little “give” that would compensate for slight discrepancies in the height of the type. Forms grew to include several pages of type (printed on a single large sheet), and a counterweight was added to the press to make raising the platen easier. Despite these improvements, the basic technology of printing did not change greatly for several centuries. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced pressmen could print a single sheet (containing several pages of text, depending on the size of the resulting book) in 20 seconds.

  Fifteenth-century books from the infancy of printing (known as incunables or incunabula after the Latin word for “cradle”) are hefty volumes of impeccable workmanship. When Gutenberg set out to mass produce books, his idea of what books looked like was naturally based on the extant manuscripts of the time. Those books were what he wanted to mass produce. And so his Bible looks handwritten. It uses the same Gothic script and the same abbreviations and ligatures that a scribe would use. Rather than the mere 24 letters that Gutenberg’s alphabet recognized, he used over 400 different sorts to better imitate scribal practices. Like any copyist of the time, Gutenberg sent his books out to the illuminators to be illustrated by hand. Only when production reached a level where the illuminators and rubricators (those who added the initial capitals in red) could not keep up was this practice abandoned.

  Gutenberg’s type was of a Gothic style, like the handwriting current in Germany at the time. As printing spread south to Italy, however, printers were exposed to other types of handwriting. In their zeal to resurrect their classical past, the Italian humanists had developed a new style of handwriting based on Carolingian Minuscule, the script of the surviving (parchment) manuscripts of their revered ancient authors. This style of handwriting became the model for roman type styles of the kind we still use today. At first roman type was used only for printing classical works, but its use for Latin, the international language, gave it an international presence.

  A cursive and more space-efficient form of the new humanist hand was the inspiration for italic type. Under the direction of the great humanist printer Aldus Manutius, the first italic font was cut in 1,500 to print small-sized editions of the Latin classics. Thus italic and roman were originally cast as separate fonts: a printer would use one or the other for a work. Eventually, however, the more spacious, rounded look of roman type won out, with italic used for special purposes. This conflation of the two type styles led to the development of tilted, or swash, capitals for the italics. Originally, capitals had been a separate script style – their own version of the alphabet. But Gothic manuscripts had over the preceding centuries led to distinctively Gothic-looking capitals; the humanists had reverted to the old Roman capitals as found in classical inscriptions such as Trajan’s Column. As long as roman and italic type were used in different books a single set of Roman capitals could serve for both, but once they were put together, italics clearly needed their own set. And so the alphabet came to be thought of as a double list, with each letter having capital and minuscule forms, both of which should be represented in any type style.

  Early books imitated handwriting, but printed text brought with it a new authoritative feel. It exuded rigidity and changelessness in a way that handwriting had not. Ever afterward, handwriting has largely imitated type (even to the extent of being called “printing” when not in cursive), but with a instead of a being a common exception and g for g even more common. The authoritative aura of print is so strong that the standard shape of the roman letters has changed very little in the last five hundred years.

  The German-speaking countries continued to use Gothic type, however, evolving a style known as Fraktur, which was used for German-language publications, while the international roman was used for Latin works. Handwriting imitated Fraktur as well, in a form known as Kurrentschrift. As other countries abandoned the use of Gothic scripts, Fraktur came to be seen as particularly German. Nationalists and internationalists debated the wisdom of retaining this typographical idiosyncrasy; but when the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, Fraktur was embraced as part of the distinctive German heritage. As the Nazis began to conquer peoples who could not easily read Fraktur, however, the regime had a change of heart: Fraktur suddenly became a Jewish invention foisted on the innocent German people, who would hereafter use roman. Today Germany continues to use roman, while Fraktur is perceived as old-fashioned or even suspect, still stigmatized by the Nazis’ early support.

  Early printed books were simply mechanically produced manuscripts, using the same conventions as books written by hand. Over time, however, the possibilities inherent in the new technology began to assert themselves, and books began to take on a more modern look. Ligatures and abbreviations were reduced, as the need to save scribal effort was gone, replaced by a desire to save trouble cutting extra punches. The open, legible roman type began to be used for all sorts of texts. More white space was included between chapters and between paragraphs. The text was presented in one column per page rather than two. Title pages were added. Page numbers were invented, leading to one of the greatest pre-World Wide Web inventions in information science, the alphabetically ordered index. Books became smaller in size and hence both more portable and more affordable. In sum, books became much easier to read, and more and more people read them. Even the bourgeoisie could have their own small libraries. Reading books for private pleasure rather than aloud became more popular.

  The results of printing were many. One of the most significant was to turn the religious reform movement started by Martin Luther into the full-scale propaganda war that was the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. At first the religious authorities had been favorably impressed with printing. Monasteries and bishops invested in their own presses; churchmen bought printed liturgical works and editions of the church fathers. And the church hierarchy discovered that presses could produce huge numbers of letters of indulgence, which could be used to raise money for projects such as rebuilding St. Peter’s basilica in Rome.

  The problem with printing, as the Catholic church soon realized, was that it was very hard to control. If it helped spread good ideas, it could equally spread bad ones. Martin Luther was not the first to attempt to reform the church, but he was the first in the new age of printing. If the Ninety-Five Theses attacking indulgences that he nailed to the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg in 1517 had remained handwritten, it is possible that not much would have happened – at least not at that particular moment. However, Luther translated his theses into German and had them printed and disseminated throughout Germany. The demand for copies helped to convince Luther that the time was ripe for his ideas. The ecclesiastical system really was in need of reform, and Germans were furthermore tired of being dictated to by the Italian papacy. Luther also became convinced of the power of the press. He began to write pamphlets, sermons, and books. Two printers put their pr
esses exclusively at Luther’s disposal, and many others published him as well. Luther wrote in German, reaching as wide a lay audience as possible, and emphasizing his split with the Latin church. The German people loved it; over a third of German books sold between 1518 and 1525 were by Luther.

  Luther turned his hand to translating the Bible into German. In so doing he did much to set the standards for written High German. Like any vernacular language, German existed in innumerable dialects. Arguably it could have been considered two separate languages: High German, spoken in the southern highlands, and Low German, spoken in the coastal lowlands. But High German won the race to become standardized in print, partly because of Luther. Others before him had written in German, both High and Low, and they had attempted to write in as dialectally neutral a way possible, so as to reach a wider audience. Luther, writing in High German, continued this trend. On the one hand he strove to avoid regionalisms (even those of his own native Lower Saxon dialect), while on the other he used words from a wide variety of dialects, searching for those that would most precisely translate biblical concepts. His use of language decisively shaped the standard German language.

  Editions of his Bible sold like hotcakes. By mid-century a million copies had been printed, and an even larger number followed in the second half of the century. Other reformers were quick to seize the power of the press: Geneva became an important printing center publishing the theology of John Calvin – and, frequently, smuggling the product back into Catholic France, where Calvin had come from. Antwerp, Leiden, Basel, and Strasbourg became important Protestant publishing and smuggling centers. Inside France printers and booksellers tended to be Protestant (the Reformation was, after all, very good for the book trade), but as the Catholic Counter-Reformation got underway they had to be very discreet – or pay for it with their lives.

  Other printers found business on the Catholic side of the fence. If the Reformers could publish posters and pamphlets denouncing Catholicism, Catholics could return the favor – and printers benefited either way. In a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to control the power and spread of the printed word, the church issued a list of banned books in 1559, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The index meant work for printers, especially as it needed to be continually updated. In France, a royal edict required all books to be licensed and for a while in 1535 King François I even forbade the printing of any books at all. In 1551 the king forbade the import of any books from Geneva or from Protestant countries. In 1529 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (also Charles I of Spain) ordered all copies of Luther’s works burned. But banning books only increased the demand for them – and made work for printers.

  Printing and bookselling were business in a way that manuscript copying never had been. When the furore of the Reformation died down, printers had to look around for cheap projects that would bring in cash. The Bible had been done; devotional works like the Book of Hours had been done; the classics had been done. The obvious place to turn next was to books in the vernacular languages. Produced by living authors, these would continue to be in ready supply.

  And so it was the economics of the publishing trade that brought the literary languages of modern Europe to maturity. In the process, printers had a significant effect on how these languages came to be written – with what typefaces, with what spellings, and even with what letters.

  Vernacular writing had begun some time before, but it had not yet settled into standardized forms. As the Roman alphabet came to be used for its daughter languages, the letters had to do different work than they had done in Latin. Where Latin had originally pronounced C as [k], the descendant languages used [s] (as in French cinq, “five”) or [t∫] (as in Italian cinque) before the front vowels [e] and [i]. Latin [kw], however, had become [k], reintroducing that sound before front vowels. To spell it, the letter K was retrieved from the dustbin, passed on to the Germanic languages (hence English king, kid, and kitten), and then replaced in the Romance languages with QU under the conservative influence of the humanists (and hence French and Spanish qui, “who”).

  The Spanish language had turned doubled Latin LL and NN into palatal sounds, [λ] and The former is still spelled ll, but the typography of the latter enshrined one of the many scribal short forms. The double N had been written with one N above the other, the smaller top N degenerating into a wavy line. Thus is spelled ñ in Spanish; similarly, the tilde is used over vowels in Portuguese to represent nasalization (originally caused by a following N).

  Another fossilized short form is the cedilla, the symbol at the bottom of ç. It was originally a z (hence the name, from zedilla, “little zed”) written below the c and was used to represent the affricate [ts] in medieval Spanish. Later the affricate was simplified to [θ] or [s]. As the French language struggled for recognition in the early years of print, Geoffroy Tory proposed improving the writing of French with the cedilla for cs that were pronounced [s] where [k] would otherwise be expected, along with vowel accents to distinguish the various additional French vowel qualities, and the apostrophe to show the elision of unpronounced letters. In German, a ligature of the “long s,” and z became which is used in place of a double s.

  The French were not alone in adopting vowel accents. The Germanic languages faced challenges adapting the relatively impoverished set of

  Latin vowel letters to their richer vowel inventories. German adopted the umlaut, as in ü, to depict extra front vowels, while the Scandinavian languages created å and ø for their non-Latin vowels.

  Most shorthand symbols and a number of nonstandard letters (such as the yogh, 3) went by the way, probably because cutting punches for additional symbols was much more work than casting a few more of a smaller set of sorts. Nevertheless, using the Roman alphabet for the various languages of Europe required considerable adaptation. Some languages (such as post-Norman English) chose combinations of letters for distinctive sounds (such as wh, ch, sh, th), while others chose to add diacritical marks to create new variants of the Latin letters. Only Icelandic, at the very periphery, dared to retain nonstandard and

  A letter could end up standing for quite different things in different languages. The sequence ch, for example, is [t∫] in English, [k] in Italian, [∫] in French, the velar fricative [x] in Dutch, and either [x] or the palatal [ç] in German, depending on context. Overall, the tendency has been not to expand the Latin list of basic letters but to modify letters with diacritics where necessary. In some cases the modified letters are considered new letters, while in others they are merely adorned variants of the original ones. In French, é, è, and ê are all considered variants of e and alphabetized as such, but in Swedish, å, ä, and ö are letters of their own and take their place (as additional letters so often do) at the end of the alphabet, after z.

  One ligature that survived – and altered the list of Latin letters – was the w. A doubled v (or u) had been used for some time: once the Latin consonantal V had hardened into a fricative, there was no way to spell the [w] sound that the Romans encountered in Celtic and Germanic names. A double V spelling came into being around the first century ad and was later embraced enthusiastically by the Normans (who, with names like William, found it very convenient). Overlapping the letters as a w was not at first considered necessary to do in print. But in the fifteenth century handwriting was still the norm, and so w made its way into print. With the authority of print behind it, it was soon considered a letter of its own. The w was not accepted in the Romance languages, however, where even today it is only used in loanwords. The use of World Wide Web URLs (uniform resource locators) prefixed by “www.” has brought the w to new prominence in these languages.

  Another change that eventually affected the list of letters was the distinction of i/j and u/v. I and V were the formal versions that got inscribed on stone, and J and U were handwritten forms. When printing first started, v and j were often used as initial letters, with u and i later in a word; so the early printers cast type for both. Thus use would be printed
vse and love would be loue. The use of v and j for consonants and u and i for vowels was first suggested in 1465, first used in 1492, and then gradually adopted over the following centuries. For some time, however, i and j, and u and v, were still considered the same letter. In Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (according to the abridged version of 1756) the letter V is defined as having “two powers, expressed in modern English by two characters, V consonant and U vowel, which ought to be considered as two letters; but as they were long confounded while the two uses were annexed to one form, the old custom still continues to be followed.” The entry for voyager is followed by up. Similarly, the pronoun I is followed alphabetically by the verb jabber. In Noah Webster’s 1806 dictionary, however, the letters were finally separated, with the vowels preceding the consonants.

  Ever since then English speakers have considered the Roman alphabet to contain 26 letters, but this idea is a rather parochial one. The ancient Roman alphabet did not have 26; and one look under the “Insert Symbol” command in Microsoft Word, where characters required for various languages are displayed, should be enough to convince anyone that the Roman alphabet in fact exists in much greater variety. There is also great variety in the sounds that the letters represent. There is no longer one Roman alphabet, but many.