Re: Latin chi and stretched x

From: Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com>
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2012 00:15:07 +0100

On 6 Jun 2012, at 08:55, Szelp, A. Sz. wrote:

> but it's Michael himself who's recognized that "Teuthonista suffers from a good deal of extraordinarily bad typography", which shows us, that the different stroke weight distribution is actually just "bad typography".

This is incorrect. Teuthonista clearly stretched a Latin x. This is obvious from the way that it has one or two long legs, with or without hooks or curls. Teuthonista did not use a greek chi and deform it with a short leg and with hooks and curls. Bad German/Austrian/Swiss typography attempting to render (in lead type) Teuthonista's stretched x sometimes substituted Greek chi for it because printers had those in their sorts. But Teuthonista's stretched x is just that -- a Latin x, stretched -- and it is not a Chi, either a Latin Chi or a Greek Chi.

So, the stretched x must be taken out of the equation. Then you are left with Lepsius curly Greek chi with a giant capital, and the IPA's Times-like Chi with chi-weight and not x-weight. Those two should and could be unified. And disunified from Greek chi.

> — actually quite similar to something we've seen with Cyrillic reform orthographies (eg. the gha derived from a handwritten old q, which got encoded misnamed as "OI") of the 20-30ies and the chinese tone letters derived from numbers/latin/cyrillic type.

This is also incorrect. The OI/GHA character is distinct from q in Cyrillic orthographies. it's not just a badly-drawn q. They designed it as ƣ on purpose.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Received on Wed Jun 06 2012 - 18:18:18 CDT

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