Here is a sample:

http://www.dezcom.com/weimar/speakmoreslowly.pdf

I tested my font “Weimar Plakat 1923” using the phrase “Please speak more slowly” from the Omnoglot site. It even has Klingon!

ChrisL

This is very useful! Thanks.

Be warned though: based on what I see in the Armenian -three spelling mistakes and two suspicious [lack of] capitalizations- it probably needs some serious proofing.

You know where I’ve found the same text in-admittedly far fewer-
languages/scripts? The little battery-safety manual in boxes of Lego!
Plus it’s non-religious (unless you’re a member of the Order of Alkali).

hhp

What’s the Alkalinian bashing all about?

A struggle for the soul of America is under way.
The intensifying assault on the Alkalinians should be taken as a sign.

peace

No, no, no, not the Alkalinians. They’re a timid, peaceful people.
I’m talking about the Alkaloons, a tribe whose members have pillaged virtually every town and village between Upper Waziristan, Ingushetia, Baluchistan, and Trans-Dniestr, not to mention the eternally troubled Republic Formerly Occupied Ruthlessly By The Enemy, for one week short of 15 centuries today.

hhp

A little wine and a brief period as a Situationalist - it’s a dangerous mix…

peace

I love dogma. It is so malformed that a simple find and replace can do wonders…

peace

”...Be warned though: based on what I see in the Armenian -three spelling mistakes and two suspicious [lack of] capitalizations- ...”

Sorry Hrant, my meagor spell check never would have caught those :-)

ChrisL

Yes, it is too bad it is a biblical quote but at least it deals with language as a subject albeit in a naive way.

ChrisL

Hello Chris,

I opened your PDF in Acrobat 6.0, Dutch language and got this strange thing:
A mistake in the PDF of in the font?

Nice typeface though!

Pieter

if you use the german texts, please use the one named “Luther (1984)” - its by far the most modern german. and mind: in switzerland, we speak/write german but dont use the Sz-letter (at all, i dont even have one on my keyboard).

and if you need german texts, http://www.newmediadesigner.de is a good ressource (the story “Wortberge” always worked well for me).

Pieter,
The “strange thing” is actually why I made the page to begin with. I was testing my font to see if it could be used for every Latin based language. As you can see, Azurbaijani has a character which I did not put in the face yet. The upsidedown “e” (forgive me, I don’t know the real name for it) is set in Adobe Garamond Premier Pro so I could see what it was supposed to look like. There were also several Vietnamese glyphs which were not included, too many to show.

ChrisL

Thanks Thierry, that is a good resource too.

ChrisL

”...Order of Alkali”

I took Hrants comment as a joke based on alkaline batteries being a pun with the Lego “Battery Safety”.

ChrisL

>too bad it is a biblical quote

Why is that?

As this story is probably the first recorded effort to explain the diversity of languages, it seems particularly apt for this exercise.

“…Order of Alkali”
Diametrically opposed to the H’acidic :)

> Why is that?

Because preferential treatment of the bible is offensive to most of the world?
Some people even find the bible and/or its reverence offensive - an affront
to good, context-rich judgment.

> Diametrically opposed to the H’acidic

:->

hhp

“Diametrically opposed to the H’acidic :)”

I really got a charge out of that one :-)

ChrisL

> an affront to good, context-rich judgment.

That sounds like a good euphemism for relative values, which to me is one of the biggest problems facing an orderly society. That being said, I have found dialogue regarding religion and politics should be avoided in groups like this, as there are usually strong feelings and it can get out of hand.

Having moderators can help, but people often say things they wouldn’t say in person when they are relatively anonymous.

> one of the biggest problems facing an orderly society.

Relative values (by which we probably mean different things) never killed anybody. But really what I meant is that some people think it’s already hard enough to make good decisions in this world and age without recluses who died thousands of years ago telling us how to live. If you must take the word of an arbitrary document, at least use a contemporary one.

> should be avoided

Well, good going then!

> people often say things they wouldn’t say in
> person when they are relatively anonymous.

While I find that when people don’t say certain
things “in person”, it’s mostly out of weakness.

hhp

> without recluses who died thousands of years ago telling us how to live.

I’ll simply say that some things like truth cannot be improved upon.

> While I find that when people don’t say certain
> things “in person”, it’s mostly out of weakness.

That may be true in the sense that certain things, if said to someone’s face, might provide consequences like facial reconstruction.
: )

- If you must take the word of an arbitrary document, at least use a contemporary one.

I don’t think that a contemporary document is automatically more valuable than an ancient one at all.

The real problem with the Bible lies in interpretation. If you look at it like Joseph Campbell, like a myth (which for some reason has always been necessary in a society), you are not going to use it to harm. It actually contains some very nice metaphors.

In this case, blame the messenger, not the message…

peace

> The real problem with the Bible lies in interpretation.

I find it is more a case of the hardness of men’s hearts.

http://www.adhesiontext.com/ — has English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic. It isn’t text meant to be read, but it was designed specifically for the type design testing process.

This is what I get when I try and use it:

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I.

Never mind. It appears that selecting both uppercase and lowercase causes an error. With just lowercase I get a wonderful celebration of verbal intoxication:

A idic annie yam tern, vip ado, math. Mamie, ramon a greed, a aid. Win, ha unglassy vicugna, chai teak, anno overdiscouraged rug, nazism rove resolute ben, cue. Goric bareboned, hi defuzing. Nonopprobriously lenticonus anthos, ufo, while purity, chithe, saga my skirters, hind, scopiferous comdt a subtilis by ye. Wennish grin tut yam miswern mastooccipital mode hobo, fascicles, besmut headboards. Emerods, ardure, ok, highs on cloudy allethrin mom a droukit, lanital reacclaim a be, hoe, jets. Muddify rest, presignal. Oops, nymphish, rompy ya inclinatorily, prop blacksmith, glaik myops, an, em tribromacetic. Peristomium, pegger subordinationism boldfacing, charwomen, hoc crystallin, hip em maintopmen a twos resourcelessness olycook, clansfolk, hi timber ox. An, postulate as sny estuosity trikaya. If, minuends sum. Androidal, moots, a ore, a tad, helio, mind a alien. Professordom, limy, fig few, madrih tv juntos, olympia, dearth herohood, lend fort. Tv seadog pee a tawie, bus boil shun, startles both, funs briza, oolly but, me, intermammillary ups. Full unmorally a or, truff, rerow monarchical nematic bicaudal, salat. Ramet, respliced, waffly propertyship, are, ten my mop. Waubeen, lactant, dogwood, or, inventable spirituality tel, pots trio remeasures, alose adversariness forehearth. Rode cheekbones piemag, spay cryptoproselytism, ok, baidak bolo, pea phengite ebullate snit daubing gaper circination purree lee us dziggetai crotesco. Xylyls, ya side, levities catnapped file ajari, incompletion, exomphalus a tab be, rape duret say, bacchanals. Ax linky, pile, sot anderun, zeal, or, waxiest aneled, stairbeak. Um hyalobasalt postdates, teat embayed, baler fed reinstatements rarest hemiekton to. Yam april, odes, prosequitur pungi, of, my comprehensibly, we, fins. Ben, perishes, seacock resolutest, aricin sob, holostome. Lew, saw, nave a pen inorg, gibe. Age a gaveler enamor, sub, alderman clio exec spec, faq, a faded, naivete, hemihydrated. Cadded crabbing comal acherontic unbankably, in fare, stud, amargoso kid, at, coated a troy. Soapy resurrectible, a.

Looks very poetic :-)

ChrisL

AdhesionText rules.

> I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I.

Looks like instead of a bug it has a mouse.

hhp

>Because preferential treatment of the bible is offensive to most of the world?

Hrant over half the world is either Christian or Islam, and both revere Genesis, though they would disagree about its interpretation and even correct text.

In any case, the Tower of Babel text is here not cited reverentially—“explanation” is in quotes.

Lighten up.

Bookmarked in case I ever decided to actually finish a typeface instead of just mucking about in Illustrator.

> over half the world is either Christian or Isam

Only by birth. Like me. But you won’t catch me suggesting foreign policy, education, or really anything else important, based on it. To me the usefulness of christianity ends outside the realm of preserving my culture and ethnicity. And we’re a special case - most people need it way less than that.

> Lighten up.

OK, but only if you promise to not become a cartoonist.

hhp

> the realm of preserving my culture and ethnicity.

Since apparently no topic is too far off topic here, I’d like to inquire about something I heard; I was told that due to DOJ crackdowns over the years, the main force in organized crime has shifted from the Italian mafia, to the Armenian mafia (not sure that is the right term).

Do you know if this is true? It seems unlikely since I have run into that many Armenians. If true, can you offer an explanation?

The main Armenian I knew (sort of) was a guy named Don Manasian (sp?), who had quite a temper, which caused a big turnover in the sales force he was in charge of. One buyer told me that they had six different salesman in 18 months, and she didn’t know who the current one was. This allowed me to make big inroads for my company back in the early 80s. (As is usually the case, I’m told he really was a sweetie at heart)
: )

Can we bring the discussion back to resources for language examples that type designers can use?
If anyone wishes to continue a discussion of the religions, traits, or underworld connections of any ethnic groups, I would hope that they might find another more suitable place to do it.

Thank you for your kind understanding,

ChrisL

sorry…
peace

What we need is a single “Lorem ipsum...” text that covers all scripts?
Well, maybe not.

The difficulty is that with the Babel or UN texts (thanx for that link too Chris), one doesn’t know how much text is required to get the full character set.

But it’s good having a lot of text, because you get to see different character combinations.

Another useful resource are the newspaper sites in the various languages. These are easy to find and copy text from: Le Monde, Die Zeit, etc., etc.

Indeed, pangrams for every script (at least the ones with
non-huge sets) would be equally useful... although only
to type designers I guess. :-/

And don’t forget the BBC’s multilingual, multiscript coverage!

hhp

Please note if anyone wants to *really* get off topic, I have activated my e-mail in the contact section of the personal info page. (I thought it was on before)

the main reason i stopped using lorem ipsum is because i read (and, after testing, believe myself) that latin has a different text-color than german. an because of that, you cant really tell how a page will look in german if you work with lorem ipsum before.

if everybody wants to have such texts - why not try to collect them here? start a thread where everyone can throw in sentences in his mother tongue with as many glyphs as possible (different glyphs).

swiss-german isnt that interesting, just lots of ä, ö und ü, but if its wanted i can add one, too (and, if im talking about it already, swiss-german doesnt even have a fixed grammar because before email and sms came, it nearly was a spoken language only).

The upsidedown “e” (forgive me, I don’t know the real name for it)

The usual name among English speakers is ’schwa’.

This leads me to the juvenile IPA joke that this letter with a palatalized hook should be called ’shwing’.

Because preferential treatment of the bible is offensive to most of the world?

Offensive? Most of the population of the planet are not Tibetan Buddhists, but that hardly means that they find citations from or translations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to be offensive. Similarly, most of the population of the planet is not Moslem, but that doesn’t mean they find quotes from the Qur’an offensive. Just because you don’t subscribe to something doesn’t mean that you find it offensive.

If you are offended by the application of e.g. a fundamentalist protestant interpretation of the Bible to US foreign policy and domestic education policy, that is all the more reason to welcome the presence of scripture within genuinely humanist (in the traditional sense of the word) and scholarly contexts such as the Omniglot website. Trust me, that last thing you want to do is to push the Bible out of public discourse and into a ghetto where it is read and interpreted only by sectarian fundamentalists.

Please note the “preferential treatment” bit.
The specimen of a [general-purpose] typeface that
relies on text from one religion is not balanced.

hhp

”...why not try to collect them here? start a thread where everyone can throw in sentences in his mother tongue with as many glyphs as possible (different glyphs).”

That is a great idea Thierry! (and perhaps it will steer us back to the purpose of this thread).

Here it is:

http://typophile.com/node/19010

ChrisL

“The usual name among English speakers is ‘schwa’.”

Thanks John! is it only Azerbaijani or are there other languages that use it?

ChrisL

A related question: Is there an online source where I can download the glyph set in text of every language?

ChrisL

Chris, I believe John is referring to the name of the character in IPA. Scroll down to Schwa Symbol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa

Tim

Chris, the schwa represented by the upside down e is I believe used in the phonetic alphabet for the English sound of the ’e’ in ’the’, when it is pronounced before a consonant: ’the pear’. (In ’the apple’ it becomes a long ’e’.)

The name for the sound I believe comes from Hebrew, which has the same vowel sound in it as the English schwa. (In modern Hebrew it is pronounced schva, though.) In the Hebrew system of vowel points the sound is represented by two dots arranged vertically under the letter. The same sign can also be silent—which way to read it is dictated by complicated rules.

EDIT: I cross posted with Tim. The Wikipedia article has more than you ever wanted to know about the schwa!

Thanks Tim and William! and they said it was as easy as A-B-C! :-)

ChrisL

A little off topic but I found this useful site where you can query to find which glyphs are required/important to each latin-based language, eg. finnish.

Thanks Geoff! That is an intriguing way to approach it.

ChrisL

The Armenian schwa: Ը ը
(Probably didn’t work for everybody...)

hhp

You might have to post a GIF Hrant. All I see are 2 question marks.

ChrisL

Since the first schwa symbol and the name come from a vowel symbol developed for and used in the Hebrew Bible, and of course all religions are offensive and all religous people are overbearing fanatics, we should change the name ’schwa’ to another less offensive word. I would suggest ’the hrant’ :)

Chris: well, it wasn’t that important, but since you asked...

William: Hebrew? “Siempre hay un chino que lo dijo antes.”

hhp

Please, can we keep this thread on topic (or at least light hearted) and avoid any more confrontational diversions?

ChrisL

> light hearted

Well, in fact that Castillian expression is
one the funniest things I’ve heard in my life!

hhp

“Always there is a Chinese who said it earlier” Is that what the Spanish says, Hrant?

In this case, no. Chinese doesn’t have a schwa among its sounds, at least in Mandarin.

The fact is that ’schwa’ is a Hebrew word originally. My point here—relevant to your and Chris questioning the propriety of using a Biblical text—is that religious texts, including the tower of Babel story, are a part of our cultural heritage, and often they are not religious or sectarian in their connotations—such as the word ’schwa’.

Our history is intertwined with the history of religions and religious texts. Type history in particular is intertwined with the printing of the the Bible, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew,and many other scripts and languages. So using the Tower of Babel passage to illustrate different scripts is beautifully apt, and not in the least sectarian or offensive.

> are a part of our cultural heritage

A part that needs to be balanced against other things, not be
given special treatment, as is most likely your own life purpose.

> not in the least sectarian or offensive.

You don’t get to decide for everybody. Neither does your god.

—

If one must use text from a single religion, the considerate,
gracious person would do so from a religion other than his own.
Preaching one’s faith in an arbitrary document is offensive to
a great many people. It is no different than... what I happen
to be doing now! :-) But the key thing is that I realize and
admit it, and am not being manipulative.

hhp

Hrant, what in the world are you going on about?

I didn’t put up the Omniglot site. This fellow did, and I’m sure from his bio that proselytizing was the furthest thing from his mind. He was just using the oldest familiar story on the origin of many languages to illustrate many languages. He wasn’t endorsing it.

The Tower of Babel story is only directly critical of the Babylonian religion, and that is long, long gone. As its overt target is antique in the extreme, people normally read story as a warning against arrogance, or trying to be a god yourself, or something like that. It is not particularly sectarian, and in fact at least three different religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—claim Genesis as their own. Since this particular story doesn’t preach in favor of any sect it is inoffensive to almost everybody, including those like me who take it as myth or legend.

The Tower of Babel story is only directly critical of the Babylonian religion, and that is long, long gone. As its overt target is antique in the extreme, people normally read story as a warning against arrogance, or trying to be a god yourself, or something like that.

Yes, so it is indeed a deeply offensive story to the very many people on the planet who acknowledge no authority beyond themselves.

Yes, so it is indeed a deeply offensive story to the very many people on the planet who acknowledge no authority beyond themselves.

These sorry people probably get offended by a lot more than just Biblical stories.

Ah, I see the conclave is now in full swing.

> acknowledge no authority beyond themselves.

Ever heard of Agnosticism, John? (Oh yes you have.)
“Authority”? What a self-serving farce.

> probably get offended by a lot more than just Biblical stories.

Is this continued misrepresentation a result of manipulation or insecurity?

Yet once again: what’s offensive isn’t the story, it’s focusing a
type specimen on the text of a specific religion. Outside of one’s
little village, it’s plain ugly.

hhp

>Authority

Well the point of the story is not to get above yourself, and think you run the world. Religious or not, it seems to me that modesty is a becoming garment.

Being a rationalist, as well as religious, I do not take any text as infallible authority, including any religious text. I like to think that a true religiousity, acknowleging the awesome and mysterious powers that sustain us and the universe, will engender an appropriate humility. And often this is the case. Unfortunately, some religious people have interpreted and still do interpret their texts as infallible instructions to persecute others. However, the abuses by some religious people is not a reason to censor and banish religious references from public discourse.

So, three guys go into a bar and the first one says . . .

ChrisL

>the text of a specific religion. Outside of one’s
little village, it’s plain ugly.

There are at least three things wrong with this argument.

First, you are reacting as if the author of the web site is proselytizing for religion, or that any quote of a religious text has to be for the purpose of proselytizing, which is just ridiculous. Many people, including myself, quote religious texts from many religions as well as anti-religious texts, to make points clear and not endorse the views.

Second, as you repeatedly ignore, but is fact, this text is not of one specific religion, but of at least three. Those familiar with this text as a result of being raised in societies with widespread Judaism, Christianity or Islam constitute not a little village but over half of humanity. And if you focus on those peoples who use alphabetic texts—the point of the exercise—it is probably three-quarters of this group. As an English language site, practically everyone will be familiar with the story.

Finally, your dark hints about ’one religion’ and ’little village’ seem to allude to the fact that this is from the Hebrew Bible, and hence Jewish. The idea that this guy has the purpose of proselytizing for Judaism—and I doubt he is Jewish—is laughable. What is “just plain ugly” are your dark hints that quoting anything Jewish is offensive.

>So, three guys go into a bar and the first one says …

And one of them wants to pick a fight. And this other idiot is fool enough to oblige...

William, your persistent distortions of what I say, and
your self-serving, paranoid interpretations are pitiful.

> fool enough to oblige…

It is, after all, why you are really here.

hhp

>paranoid interpretations

Ok, what ’specific religion’ and ’little village’ were you talking about?

Is there another tiny religion originating in the Hebrew Bible? Were you talking about the Samaritans?

I would be glad to be wrong about this, so do explain yourself.

“And one of them wants to pick a fight. And this other idiot is fool enough to oblige…”

LOL!!!

ChrisL