letter a old english old english font period

After all, those fonts are based off of classic “Blackletter” scripts, which is the word we use to describe these styles of scripts developed during Medieval times. You’ve probably heard these terms at some point and perhaps mental images of newspaper headlines come to mind. “Blackletter”, “Gothic”, “Old English”, etc. So what led up to that? And what about “Blackletter”?

Sure, that was over 400 years ago, but in the grand timeline of calligraphy, it wasn’t actually that long ago. Copperplate and Spencerian scripts, as we refer to them today, derived from the Roundhand style of calligraphy in the late 16th century. For most, it’s likely to be that elegant style of cursive we all know and love. When the average western layperson thinks of calligraphy, there is no doubt many visuals come to mind. This knowledge will be help inform your studies of flat-pen and/or Blackletter calligraphy and make your journey more purposeful. That is why the word ye, as in “Ye Olde Booke Shoppe,” is an archaic spelling of the.In this article, you’ll learn about the four core styles of Blackletter scripts, how to distinguish the nuanced differences between each of them, and how they came to be historically after centuries of typographical development. So, thorn was dropped and Y took its place. In the Latin alphabet, the Y was the symbol that most closely resembled the character that represented thorn.

Here’s an example: in Old English, a letter called thorn (þ) represented the th sound (as in that) in Modern English. (Our trusty alphabet isn’t the only part of the language that has changed- October used to be the eighth month, and September the seventh.) What is the letter thorn? The ampersand was part of the alphabet? Discover the story behind the symbol here.Īs Modern English evolved, the Old English letters were dropped or replaced. But for some time, the alphabet included the letters of the Latin alphabet, some symbols (like the ampersand), and some letters of Old English. The region they inhabited became known as “Angle-land,” or England.Įventually, Christian missionaries introduced the Latin alphabet, which began to take ahold around the sixth century, and ultimately replaced Anglo-Saxon. The Angles and Saxons came from Germany and settled in Britain in the fifth century.

English was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, also known as Anglo-Saxon. How old is the alphabet?īefore we get to the history of specific letters, let’s talk a bit about Old English. The English alphabet, as you likely know, is made up of 26 letters.īut it wasn’t always that way.

Letter a old english old english font period