Tai Cossich

“Marks of elision on the literary page” examines the othering effects of the practice of adding extra-alphabetic symbols to non-standard orthography in English Literature.

The study consists of using text markup to engage with graphic variations that emerge from certain respelling strategies known as eye-dialect. This kind of respelling is commonly found in English literature, specially from the nineteenth century on.

The point of departure was a set of well-known texts (ranging from Charles Dickens to D.H. Lawrence) in which the authors’ respelling strategies include marking elision (the dropping or omission of letters) with the apostrophe <’> to convey a “different kind of English”. In the study, all instances of <’> were highlighted. The outcomes are a series of visuals in which it is possible to recognise certain characters based on visual patterns generated by the way they speak (centripetal outcomes of markup practice) and a series of re-workings of the books used in the study (centrifugal outcomes) as audiobooks and textile-books.

This text markup study discusses typography as a material-linguistic resource. Text markup techniques are used to highlight the typographic resources available to Christian missionaries who, from the 16th Century on, devised Latin-based orthographies for languages around the world. Many of the orthographic features introduced by missionaries, according to the technologies available to them in different historical periods, still cause typographic problems for communities today.

Text markup study “Marks of difference on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” interrogates the limits of Unicode—the promise of a universal character encoding standard—within the wider failure of Human Rights rhetoric.

A font was develop to draw correspondence between each character in the text and the Unicode block to which it belongs. The font is composed of thirteen versions: The first version shows all the characters of the “Basic Latin” block, leaving the other characters blank; the second version shows the characters from the “Latin-1 Supplement” block; the third version shows the characters from the “Latin Extended-A” block; then “Latin Extended-B” block; “Latin Extended-C”; and so on. It includes all blocks of the Latin script, and IPA extensions. By overlaying various instances of the same text, each layer being assigned a different version of the font and colour, the result is a graph that colour-codes the text in relation to the Unicode blocks. In this project, the font is used to display the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in different languages. It displays the frequency of “special characters” (characters coming from blocks other than the “Basic Latin” block) in each language.

“We are faced with two paradoxical and disturbing conclusions and a very demanding challenge. The supposed historic triumph of human rights is leading to an unprecedented degradation of the expectations of a decent life for the majority of the world's population. Human rights have ceased to be a conditionality in the context of international relations; thus, rather than subjects of human rights, individuals and peoples have, at best, been reduced to objects of human rights rhetoric. As for the challenge, it can be phrased in the following terms: Is it still possible to turn human rights into living ruins, a tool for turning despair into hope? I certainly think so.”

Toward new universal declaration of human rights (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 2020)

Extra-alphabetic symbols in colonial orthographies (Nahuatl and Otomi, New Spain, 16th–18th century)

Faced with the challenges of devising orthographies for native American languages, Catholic friars serving the Spanish conquest from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century were not indifferent to the typographic aspects of their undertaking. On the introductory notes, licences to print, forewords, errata and in other sections of the various grammars, thesauri and texts of the Christian doctrine produced in native American languages to advance the Catholic faith, there are references to problems related to the limits of typography, as well as passages that indicate the friars’ awareness of typographic processes, their efforts to facilitate printing and reading, and even some concerns about the visual effects of their orthographic choices. Such considerations made by the friars make up a history of typographic problems, the heading under which I have been discussing the relationship between typography and orthographic choices and the othering effects of adding extra-alphabetic symbols to orthography.

Chapter 4. In “Voiceless characters: A social approach to the practice of adding extra-alphabetic symbols to orthography” (Kollontai Cossich Diniz, 2022).

Please search the research repository of the Royal College of Art for Tai's PhD thesis.

Extra-alphabetic symbols in uniform and universal orthographies (Lepsius, 1855;1863 and Pickering, 1820)

Typographic problems are present in the various attempts to create universal phonetic transcriptions, standard alphabets and uniform orthographies that proliferated during the nineteenth century. For example, Pitman and Ellis, inventors of the Pitman-Ellis phonetic alphabet of 1847, whose symbols would later feature in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA Alphabet), fell out because of disagreements on whether to add new symbols to their spelling system (Albright, 1958:23). While Pitman was in favour of creating new symbols, Ellis rejected them on the basis of the costs of type-founding (Ibid.). The first appearance of the IPA Alphabet itself, in 1889, was also embroiled in typographic problems. Its publication was delayed due to printing costs, and the addition of new symbols postponed for the same reason (Albright, 1958:54). A series of provisional symbols, to replace the preferred ones, had been used in an earlier version of the alphabet to circumvent the cost of production (Ibid.). The projects of this period represent a milestone in the development of phonetics as a science and an important background to the establishment of the International Phonetic Alphabet at the turn of the twentieth century (Kemp, 2001; Albright, 1958). It is clear that their proponents were well aware of typographic issues.

Chapter 5. In “Voiceless characters: A social approach to the practice of adding extra-alphabetic symbols to orthography” (Kollontai Cossich Diniz, 2022).

Please search the research repository of the Royal College of Art for Tai's PhD thesis.