I have been thinking about letter shapes recently and realized that there are really only 3 ways in which English alphabet are written: with diagonal lines (/ or \ ) straight lines ( - or | ) or some type of curved line. All letters are only purely these shapes or some type of combination of these lines. I decided it would be fun to make a little ven diagram of these letter shapes - please see here:
Obviously, this is no perfect science, I’m sure the letter lines would be different depending on the font (or handwriting). For example, the little tail on a Q would a lil squiggly, thus making it a curve-only shape. And J is one of those weird letters that can be curved only or curved and straight depending if you put the little hat on top (for the diagram that I created, I did include the hat). So there really can be variations between the letters, depending on the person.
For some reason, it’s a little comforting seeing all the letters grouped by letter style. The Curves, the Diags, the Straighs - then the curvy straights, the diag straights, and the curvy diags, and then the ultimate letter R.
I’m not going to make a ven diagram for lowercase letters because I think there tends to be more person-to-person/font-to-font variation between the lowercase letters, but as you would probably imagine, there are way more curvy-straights, I would guess around 65%. I wonder why the lowercase letters tend to be more curvy? Also, I have no idea where I would classify the “dot” on the i and the j. They would have to be pure outliers.
Back to our diagram - I find something subliminally beautiful as R being the ultimate letter using all three line shapes. It makes sense for Q to be in its own box as the only curvy-diag because Q is an oddball letter all around, but R being this master of the lines just speaks so much about it as a letter and the role it plays in the alphabet.
Another thought that I had in this project is the number of lines in each shape. Here are the letters organized by number of lines:
1 Line: C I O S U
2 Lines: D G J L P Q T V X
3 Lines: A B F H K N R Y Z
4 Lines: E M W
I find it fascinating how all over the curve only shapes are also all of the one line shapes. I would love to see a shape that’s two curves (This would be a Q with a squiggly tail). Most shapes benign 2 to 3 lines makes sense, but imagine if there was a 5 line letter in the English alphabet? Or a 6 line letter?
This project made me ask a lot of questions, more than I have answers for. I wonder if all the global alphabets would have a similar distribution. Would there be new unique line shapes? I wonder what other letters in global alphabets will join R as an all-line category? And about 42% of the Roman letters have a curve - I wonder which alphabets are the most curvy (I feel like the Thai or Tamil alphabet might fit this role, which is Ironic as both THAI and TAMIL have 0 curvy letters in how they are written in english) and which alphabets are the most straight? Is there an alphabet where the upper case letters are more curvy than the lower case letters? Basically I just wonder about alphabets, they are such curious systems.
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