2018.06.30 23:55 Obversa From an artist / designer perspective: I think the Voynich Manuscript is an early example of a "Lorem ipsum" / "example text"; possibly linked to Venetian scholar and printer Aldus Manutius
In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a placeholder text, commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document, without relying on meaningful content (also called "greeking" - see below). Replacing the actual content with placeholder text allows designers to design the form of the content before the content itself has been produced.The writing, or "language", used in the Voynich manuscrupt may also be an early form of asemic writing:
The "lorem ipsum" text is typically a scrambled section of "De finibus bonorum et malorum", a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.
A variation of the ordinary "lorem ipsum" text has been used in typesetting since the 1960s or earlier, when it was popularized by advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets. It was introduced to the Information Age in the mid-1980s by Aldus Corporation, which employed it in graphics and word-processing templates for its desktop publishing program PageMaker.
"Greeking" itself is a style of displaying or rendering text or symbols, not always from the Greek alphabet. Greeking obscures portions of a work, for the purpose of either emphasizing form over details, or displaying placeholders for unavailable content.
The name is a reference to the phrase "Greek to me", meaning something that one cannot understand, so that it might as well be in a foreign language.
Greeked text is used in typography to evaluate a certain typeface's appropriateness, overall style, or type color. Because a viewer can be distracted by meaningful content, greeking unimportant text forces the viewer to focus on layout and design.
Greeking is also used when a design is being developed, but the content is unfinished. One example might be the layout of a magazine article which has photographs, but no text; initially, a "lorem ipsum" text is used, and then the nonsense text is replaced with draft versions as they become available.
This allows design and layout to be carried out in parallel with content revisions.
As in typography, greeking involves inserting "nonsense text" or, commonly, Greek or Latin text in prototypes of visual media projects (such as in graphic and web design) to check the layout of the final version before the actual text is available, or to enhance layout assessment by eliminating the distraction of readable text. Text of this sort is known as "greeked text", "dummy text", or "jabberwocky text" [referring to Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll's tendency to make up words for his books, i.e. "jabberwocky"].
"Lorem ipsum" is a commonly used example, though this is derived from Latin, not Greek.
Asemic writing is a wordless, open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content," or "without the smallest unit of meaning."Asemic writing also includes false writing systems:
With the non-specificity of asemic writing, there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art. Where asemic writing differs from abstract art is in the asemic author's use of gestural constraint, and the retention of physical characteristics of writing, such as lines and symbols.
Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing, or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur across linguistic understanding; an asemic text may be "read" in a similar fashion, regardless of the reader's natural language.
Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work; that is, asemic writing can be polysemantic, or have zero meaning, infinite meanings, or its meaning can evolve over time.
Asemic works leave for the reader to decide how to translate and explore an asemic text; in this sense, the reader becomes co-creator of the asemic work.
Asemic writing exists in many different forms. It is often created with a pen or brush, but can range from being hand drawn in the sand with a stick, and documented by photography, or to works on canvas, paper, computer images, and animations.
The key to asemic writing is that, even though it is traditionally "unreadable", it still maintains a strong attractive appeal to the reader's eye. Various asemic writing includes pictograms, or ideograms the meanings of which are sometimes suggested by their shapes, though it may also flow as an abstract expressionist scribble which resembles writing, but avoids words.
Asemic writing, at times, exists as a conception or shadow of conventional writing practices. Reflecting writing, but not completely existing as a traditional writing system, asemic writing seeks to make the reader hover in a state between reading and looking. Asemic writing has no verbal sense, though it may have clear textual sense.
Through its formatting and structure, asemic writing may suggest a type of document and, thereby, suggest a meaning. The form of art is still writing, often calligraphic in form, and either depends on a reader's sense and knowledge of writing systems for it to make sense, or can be understood through aesthetic intuition.
True asemic writing occurs when the creator of the asemic piece cannot read their own asemic writing. Relative asemic writing is a natural writing system that can be read by some people, but not by everyone (e.g. ciphers, wildstyle, etc.).
[...] Asemic writing occurs in avant-garde literature and art, with strong roots in the earliest forms of writing.
False writing systems are artificially constructed alphabets or scripts used (sometimes within the context of a false document) to convey a degree of verisimilitude. Examples of this include alien dialogue in comic strips, animated cartoons, and graphic novels (such as Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Valérian and Laureline series). The script in Luigi Serafini's 1981 Codex Seraphinianus was confirmed by the author to have no occult meaning.Particularly, in the case of Luigi Serafini's 1981 Codex Seraphinianus, and the artist's confirmation of the language to have have "no occult meaning", this also concurs with "false texts" created, and designed, by professionals like MinaLima.
The Voynich manuscript, a mysterious work on which the Codex Seraphinianus was likely based, uses an undeciphered writing system that some speculated to be false. (Wikipedia)
"Do the writings and symbols used on character's wands, and in the newspapers, etc...you create for the franchise have any particular meaning?"To which Miraphora Mina responded:
"No. The writing is just done for aesthetic design. If you look closely at some of them, like the newspapers, the speech is purposefully generated, or written in gibberish."From Satu Kaikkonen, a contemporary asemic artist/writer from Finland, had this to say about asemic writing:
"As a creator of asemics, I consider myself an explorer and a global storyteller. Asemic art, after all, represents a kind of language that's universal, and lodged deep within our unconscious minds. Regardless of language identity, each human's initial attempts to create written language look very similar and, often, quite asemic.
In this way, asemic art can serve as a sort of common language—albeit an abstract, post-literate one—that we can use to understand one another regardless of background or nationality. For all its limping-functionality, semantic language all too often divides and asymmetrically empowers while asemic texts can't help but put people of all literacy-levels and identities on equal footing."
There are only a few words in the manuscript, written in a seemingly Latin script. On the last page, there are four lines of writing written in rather distorted Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the late 14th and 15th centuries, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.The "lorem ipsum"-style script has also been docmented to have been in use since the 1500's, and the Voynich manuscript vellum was supposedly carbon-dated to be from anywhere from 1405-1430's:
Also, a series of diagrams in the "astronomical" section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France, northwest Italy or the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added later.
It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for two different "languages" (investigated by Currier and D'Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme. (Source - more information listed here)
"Lorem Ipsum" is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type, and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing "Lorem Ipsum" passages, and more recently, with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of "Lorem Ipsum".
1914 translation by H. Rackham of the "Lorum Ipsum":
"But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness.
No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.
To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.
These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains." (Source)
Cursive was the norm for everyday handwriting in Venice, but at the time, published works only contained block lettering. Manutius commissioned typefaces designed to look like the handwriting of humanists, both in Latin and Greek, in order to uphold the manuscript tradition (Fletcher III 1988, pp. 77–82) (Schuessler 2015).Manutius also preferred larger capital letters, and commissioned them for his printing typeface as a part of his will, matching the larger capital-letter typeface in the Voynich manuscript.
By creating a cursive typeface, Manutius could make the works he published feel more personal. In the New Aldine Studies, Harry George Fletcher III, Pierpont Morgan Library's curator for printed books and bindings, describes his belief for Manutius' typeface, "his principal intent, I am convinced, was to make available in type a face comfortable for its readers (Fletcher III 1988, p. 5)."
Manutius hired the punchcutter Francesco Griffo of Bologna to create the new typeface. The handwriting reproduced for the many Aldine Press typefaces is a topic of conflicting opinions by scholars; the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica suggests Petrarch's handwriting (Symonds 1911, p. 624) while the New Aldine Studies presumes the scribes Pomponio Leto and Bartolomeo Sanvito were the inspiration for the typeface (Fletcher III 1988, p. 77). Other scholars believe the first Greek typeface was derived from the likeness of Immanuel Rhusotas, another scribe during the time of Manutius (Baker 2016, p. 81).
Despite the uncertainty, the Aldine Press commissioned the first Greek script designed "with accents and letters cast separately and combined by the compositor (Baker 2016, p. 81)." The typeface was first used in publishing Erotemata by Constantine Lascaris in 1495. The Roman typeface was finished later the same year, and Pietro Bembo's De Aetna was the first book published in the new roman script (Baker 2016, pp. 81–86). (Wikipedia)
Aldus Pius Manutius (/məˈnjuːʃiəs/; Italian: Aldo Pio Manuzio; 1449/1452 – 6 February 1515) was a Venetian humanist, scholar, and educator. He became a printer and publisher in his forties, when he helped found the Aldine Press in Venice.
Manutius is known for publishing rare manuscripts in their original Greek and Latin form. Before Manutius, publishers rarely printed volumes in Greek. Manutius commissioned type cutters to create fonts in Greek and Latin, resembling humanist handwriting of his time.
Mantius himself grew up in a wealthy family during the Italian Renaissance, and in his youth, was sent to Rome to become a humanist scholar. In Rome, he studied Latin under Gaspare da Verona, and attended lectures by Domizio Calderini in the early 1470s. In 1475 to 1478, Manutius studied Greek in Ferrara from Guarino da Verona (Fletcher III 1988, p. 1).
[...] Giovanni Pico's family supplied Manutius with funds for starting his printing press, and gave him lands in Carpi (Symonds 1911). Manutius determined that Venice was the best location for his work, settling there in 1490 (Symonds 1911).
*Manutius' fonts would be the first known model of italic type. *Manutius also popularized the libelli portatiles, or portable little (specifically) classic books: small-format volumes that could be easily carried and read anywhere.
Aldus Manutius changed the face of publishing as we know it.
Venice, in the 1400s, was a hub of printing revolution. Aldus and his printing press, Aldine Press, were right in the middle of it all. By today’s standards, the amount of monumental change that the printing industry underwent there would rival today’s Silicon Valley. Basically, Aldus Manutius is to modern books as Steve Jobs is to the iPhone.
Aldus’ first achievement involved font choice. He was the first to use an italic font—which mimicked human handwriting—and in doing so, replaced the heavy Gothic print most printers used at the time. He used this italic typeface for the first time to print Virgil in 1501, and countless other books to follow.
It’s estimated that the Manutius family printed over 1,000 editions over the course of 100 years.
In all of these printings, Aldus kept his use of colons and semicolons consistent in each edition, standardizing punctuation for the industry.
Out of all of Aldus’ many accomplishments, however, one has impacted everything, from large trade publishing to your trip to the beach.
Before Aldus, books were luxury items, kept in monasteries or collections. They were large, cumbersome and expensive—not at all accessible to the public.
Aldus used his press to print books small enough to be carried around for study or pleasure, calling them libelli portatiles (Latin for “portable books”). This opened up the literary world to the general public, allowing more to be able to enjoy both classic and modern books. Aldus single-handedly shaped the sharing of ideas and communication as we know it today.
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