Roman Letters Research Articles

Anglo-Saxon Literacy and the Roman Letters on the Franks Casket

The Franks Casket, a carved whalebone box from eighth century Northumbria, has attracted nearly continual interest since coming to light. 1 The Casket presents an endlessly fascinating riddle of wo...

Should all other biologists follow the lead of virologists and stop italicizing the names of living organisms? A proposal

As thousands of viruses were discovered over the years, they were given common names in English and in other languages. Then, about 20 years ago, the category “species” was introduced in virology and the vernacular names of viruses were adopted for use as species nomina and were italicized to indicate that they then referred to taxonomic entities. As a result, virologists should write that a patient was infected “with measles virus” but not “with the species Measles virus” nor with “the genus Morbillivirus”, since taxonomic classes cannot cause infections. In other fields of biology the great majority of organisms only have Latin species nomina, written in italics, and no vernacular name. As a result, it will be said that a patient was infected with Bacillus anthracis, as though that taxonomic entity were able to cause a disease. What is meant, of course, is that the infection was caused by a bacterium that is a member of the species Bacillus anthracis. Attributing the infection to a species instead of an organism arises because of the absence of vernacular names for many organisms. However, this logical muddle could be avoided if the writer would use the species nomina of the disease-causing organisms but wrote them in unitalicized Roman letters, as is done with viruses. To do away with logically ill-formed statements, we propose that the names of all biological entities for which there is no common name be derived from the species nomen but written in unitalicized Roman letters. The italicized style would then be reserved for the species to which the entity belongs.

Expertise with characters in alphabetic and nonalphabetic writing systems engage overlapping occipito-temporal areas

Parts of the left ventral visual pathway are engaged selectively during the perception of words, letter strings, and even single letters. While studies have shown overlap between activations for letters and characters across writing systems, they adopted group analyses with very limited spatial resolution, or used words and letter strings that have been shown to activate different regions from those activated by single characters. The current study compared activity within individual participants for the perception of single characters from different writing systems. Roman letters, Chinese characters, objects, and faces were presented to Chinese–English bilinguals and English readers with no Chinese reading experience. Individual subject analyses revealed a large overlap between Roman- and Chinese-selective areas in the bilinguals. In general, the activity in the Roman-selective area of the left hemisphere is associated with experience with the script, as non-Chinese readers showed lower activations to Chinese characters than to Roman letters. Further analyses found considerable variation within non-Chinese readers in the activation for Chinese characters: While the majority had no selectivity for Chinese characters at all, some showed activations for Chinese characters at locations similar to those selective for Roman letters. The results suggest that both stimulus properties and experience are important factors in determining the response to single characters across writing systems.

Written in stone: sculptors' patterns for Roman letters in inscriptions from the Italian Renaissance

Inscriptions provide both information and insight, as too they inform and reveal when approached as an artistic component of a work. This examination of Quattrocento lettering, mostly in sculpture, explores the use of patterns for forming letters, and, with that information, seeks to reconstruct sculptors’ working methods in planning and carving an inscription. In this context, treatises for the design of Roman lettering with the circle and square receive consideration as a new type of pattern book, updated with the application of geometry, and recast in the context of Roman antiquity, but with a practical role in the Renaissance sculptor’s workshop. Pattern or model books were a common feature of the artist’s workshop during the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods, providing figural and decorative visual material.

HEDONIC PRICING MODELS FOR VEHICLE REGISTRATION MARKS

Abstract. This paper attempts to link Chinese numerology to the determination of vehicle registration mark (VRM) prices in Hong Kong through the hedonic pricing analysis. The values of different patterns of the numbers and Roman alphabet letters are examined. We find that there is a very strong preference for the number ‘8’, that visually appealing patterns add great values to a VRM and that the non‐transferable VRMs are more expensive than transferable ones. We also show that their prices move in tandem with the Hang Seng Index. The findings suggest that the government can raise revenue by auctioning off intangible assets containing alphanumerical identification marks.

Stanley Morison's Aldine Hypothesis Revisited

Admiration for the graphic vigor of the past brought historic fonts back into use in the modern period and renewed scholars' discus sions of stylistic influence in type design. In this context, the British type historian, Stanley Morison, proposed in the 1920s a hypothesis that was to alter the writing of typographic history in the twentieth century. Then at the beginning of his career, and busy scouring ar chives for examples of fine printing, Morison observed that, at origin, the French roman types of the early sixteenth century shared traits with the romans used by the Italian Renaissance publisher, Aldus Manutius. The observation was at variance with the scholarly opin ion of the period. Aldus was known for his Greek type, and for hav ing had Francesco Griff o cut the first italic in 1501. Aldus's roman, by contrast, was overlooked by historians as they assessed the influ ence of Italian fonts on later French ones. Nicolaus Jenson's 1470 ro man was heralded instead as the most likely model for the designs. Praise for Jenson's roman was rampant in the literature. The most recent volley had come in 1922 with the publication of Daniel Berkeley Updike's landmark study, Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use.1 Updike identified the strengths of Jenson's font as readability, its mellowness of form, and the evenness of colour in mass, and continued: Jenson's roman types have been the accepted models for roman letters ever since he made them, and, repeatedly copied in our own day, have never been equalled.... No other man produced quite so fine a font, or had better taste in the composition of a page and its imposition upon paper.2 Updike went on to characterize the Aldine roman as distinctly inferior to Jenson's.3 Even so, with little debate, Morison's Aldine hypothesis was quickly considered proven. It was supplemented by others, and is incorporated as fact in the modern literature on the history of typography. Scholars who work in the area, however, constantly encounter both the value of Morison's insight and the limitations of his construct. My work on some of the principal theorists and prac titioners of French Renaissance typography,4 for instance, has raised many questions about the utility of the hypothesis, suggesting that it needs to be rethought and, if necessary, revised. 1 Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use, A Study

A Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic * BY ARNE A. AMBROS and STEPHAN PROCHAZKA * The Nouns of Koranic Arabic Arranged by Topics: A Companion Volume to the 'Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic' * BY ARNE A. AMBROS and STEPHAN PROCHAZKA

Written in English, published in Germany with some Qurʾānic quotations in German, a dedication in Latin, and references to Syriac, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic and Persian, this is clearly the work of a linguist of remarkably wide scholarship. The late Arne Ambros (may he rest in peace) took his D.Phil in quantum physics, but studied Arabic as a hobby. He must have been good at it, because his career led him to become Professor of Arabic and Islamics at Vienna University, writing course materials on many other languages too, including Nabatean. In addition to his Arabic and Semitic linguistics and philology he was particularly interested in Persian, (Ottoman and Modern) Turkish and several other European and non-European languages (inter alia Irish, Modern Greek, and the Romance languages). He sometimes uses Greek grammatical terms in his explanations. The emphasis in his (altogether 392-page) Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic is on the ‘Concise’. A long list of abbreviations on p. 3 sets the tone and in the Foreword (p. 1) he explains that he has omitted any Arabic script because it would have increased the size of the book considerably while possibly inconveniencing some users ‘with only limited knowledge of the Arabic language’. He is thus dependent on transliteration for his (relatively rare) examples in the text, and this is done according to the German Oriental Society system (p. 7) that adds diacritical marks to single roman letters rather than representing the sound with two letters. This has its uses but means that a single letter (h, g or t for example) can be read as several different Arabic (and other Semitic) letters depending on the minute marks above and below it, which inconveniences those without a magnifying glass. Without the text, he is also very dependent on verse numbers, and he admits to using Flügel's concordance (critically) as a guide, as well as a CDROM of The Holy Qur’an with search facilities, so the references could well be confusing. While concentrating on words that occur in the Qurʾān he includes some (marked) classical Arabic words that do not. He also praises for its thoroughness (p. 11) Rudi Paret's German translation of the Qurʾān and admits that, apart from this, ‘only the translation by Richard Bell into English … was consulted … which gives more room to the translator's schooled intuition’ although ‘rather archaic’ in style. As most of the examples of translation in the Dictionary are extremely short, this does not seem to present much of a problem.

The Renaissance Letter and the Encounter with the "New" World

Renaissance scholars such as Jacob Burkhardt, Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and José Antonio Maravall have amply demonstrated that a program of letters (studia humanitatis) led, in the Renaissance, to a meditation on humanity. This article looks at the import of Renaissance letters in the more prosaic sense of alphabetic letters. 
 
 The printing press is of course the most obvious emblem of a new approach to alphabetic letters, and it is doubly important because it underscores the deep bonds between the philological program that reformed the study of Classical letters and a new means of textual transmission. This last has been the object of much good work by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Henri-Jean Martin, and Roger Chartier, among others. My concern here is more narrow.
 
 I pose the question of how European attitudes toward the alphabetic letter related to the Renaissance meditation on humanity in the 15th and 16th centuries and I speculate on the implications the European conceptualization of the letter had for the confrontation with, and assimilation of, New World culture, particularly as it was found in Mexico. In this article, I move to a consideration of what resulted when the Spanish encountered a textuality -- the textuality of Meso-America -- that was not based on the letter.
 
 
 Renaissance reformations of letter types reacted against the animated (to borrow Laura Kendricks' term) and corporeal medieval letter that stretched human and animal forms into letters (Giovanno de Grassi's alphabet is a representative instance). Against the monstrous medieval manuscript letter was pitted the Roman letter that, as 16th-century treatises proposed, deserved to become a model of rational order and symmetry. Fra Luca Pacioli (1497-1509) and Sigismondo de' Fanti (1514), for example, promulgated treatises on letter types, though Geoffroy Tory's great theoretical work Champ fleury (1529) stands out as the most sustained attempt to harmonize letter forms with the idealized human body as well as with Classical culture. For Tory, all letters are based on the form of the human body, as he demonstrates one by one from A to Z, using -- in typical Renaissance fashion -- a perfect, nude male form as his model. All of the letters are also simultaneously mapped onto a 10x10 grid, giving them a mathematical perfection. And all letters are combinations of the perfectly symmetrical "I" and "O", the "I" containing (for reasons Tory explains) the nine muses and Apollo while the "O" houses the seven liberal arts.
 
 Tory's treatise therefore makes Roman letter types a key link between dignitas hominis and the program of studia humanitatis. In a similar manner, Thomas More, when he meditates on a utopian society, conceives it as having a more perfect set of alphabetic letters than European ones, the letters being set out at the beginning of the first two editions of his Utopia (1516) along with an example of Utopian literature written in the script. More's alphabet is even more perfectly ordered than Tory's Roman alphabet, as all of More's utopenses litterae are formed from the perfect geometrical forms of the circle and the square. A superior humanity corresponds to a superior alphabet (the equation can also be run in reverse).
 
 What, then, are the implications of the European encounter with the New World, and, in particular, with the non-alphabetic culture of Meso-America? Meso-America, after all, was neither a culture without writing - a kind of "blank slate" Europeans could overwrite with letters - nor a lettered culture. Rather, it had a highly-developed pictogrammic system of writing that allowed it to produce texts that recorded, at one and the same time, historical accounts, tribute accounts, legends and calendars. The answer, to which I work, is that, for the Europeans, the textuality of the Meso-American empire needed to be brought under the reins of lettered European textuality just as their political territory needed to be conquered. The result was the creation of the mestizo codices that reproduced many elements of Pre-Columbian pictographic texts but organized them according to the exigencies of the European paginated book. In examining this phenomenon I argue that what was radically "other" was reduced to, and imported into Europe as, the radically "new," and I examine the relationship between alphabetic/non-alphabetic textualities and the European debate regarding the humanity of the Amerindians.

The Importance of Accuracy

With this issue of the Journal, we are pleased to introduce Statistically Speaking—a new department that provides a forum for the editor for statistics and evaluation and other invited authors to offer highlights and guidance from the world of statistics. We often take for granted the minor miracles that today’s computer power and statistical software perform for us in mere seconds—tasks that were not even possible 10 years ago. These advances, however, come with several little-understood consequences. I focus here on 3 considerations to help guide the ongoing content of this column. First, although we have software programs that will happily produce results once the button is pushed, we often don’t completely understand the applications, assumptions, and interpretations of the more advanced methods (e.g., hierarchical linear models, generalized linear mixed models, structural equation modeling, graphic information systems). Through a series of articles, special issues, and friendly ongoing advice in this column, we hope to make these methods both less mysterious and more aptly applied and interpreted. Second, because these “higher level” analytic methods are now so readily accessible, many of the appropriate simple analyses are often set aside, making the digestion of the content and meaning of many of our articles more difficult. Unfortunately, this tends to then limit the dissemination of potentially important public health findings. Although we hope to help make these higher-level methods interpretable by a greater number of readers, we also urge our authors, as space and appropriateness allow, to proceed analytically from the simple to the complex—but only to the degree of complexity necessary to answer the question at hand. Unnecessary complexity can be an obstacle to understanding. The best analysis is the simplest one that directly addresses the question of interest (think more Occam’s Razor, less Rubik’s Cube). Third, our reliance on point-and-click computer analyses often means that we take whatever is printed on the output as gospel and transfer it verbatim to the tables in our articles. One aspect of this practice has resulted in an administrative change in our “Instructions for Authors”: The Journal will now adopt a uniform practice for reporting results from regression analyses. Although several computer programs produce regression coefficients with the label “Beta,” it is incorrect to refer to these as such. On our output are estimates of the population parameter (β), not β itself, regardless of what the software labels say. In our text and tables, these should be termed “parameter estimates,” denoted by the roman letter b, or “standardized parameter estimates,” denoted by the roman letter B, as appropriate. Although these changes may seem minor, they are important distinctions and are essential to our understanding of statistical inference. Our goal is to maintain the highest standards in the quality of contributions to the Journal, and excellence starts with careful attention to important details. We begin with these. We hope you continue to support our ongoing efforts and tune back in to this column for more analytic updates and suggestions.

The influence of environmental print on preschoolers’ literacy development in a two-alphabets’ society

Children in Greece are exposed to a unique literary situation as they live in a monolingual society which uses two different alphabetical systems: the Greek alphabet and the Roman alphabet. Since the school curriculum of preschool education does not include the teaching of Greek or non-Greek letters, environmental print is mainly responsible for primitive hypotheses about letters. In this research 504 preschoolers were tested regarding their ability to differentiate between the two alphabets which circulate widely in the Greek urban print environment. It was showed that preschoolers, although unable to read, were able to differentiate between texts written with Greek or Roman letters. This gives strong evidence for the conclusion that, apart from the major role that visual language plays in the reading of environmental print, information about actual letters is also absorbed by preschoolers.

Font Tuning Associated with Expertise in Letter Perception

Font tuning (FT) occurs when observers recognize a sequence of letters presented in the same font faster than in different fonts (Sanocki 1987, 1988 Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance 13 267-278; 14 472-480). Here, we test the hypothesis that FT is associated with expertise with a specific writing system. We developed a systematic search task allowing the measurement of FT over a large number of letters and generalized the finding of FT from English readers viewing Roman letters to Chinese readers viewing Chinese characters. Non-Chinese readers did not show evidence of FT for Chinese characters in this search task. We also used a simpler 3-letter identification task to directly compare novice and expert readers, and to explore FT for different aspects of font such as fill, slant, and aspect ratio. We found that experts tune to aspect ratio but not to the other font changes. These findings reveal that letters are not processed visually in the same manner as shapes, and suggest an explanation for the cortical specialization obtained in the visual system for letters.

Letter processing in the visual system: Different activation patterns for single letters and strings

One would expect that a lifetime of experience recognizing letters would have an important influence on the visual system. Surprisingly, there is limited evidence of a specific neural response to letters over visual control stimuli. We measured brain activation during a sequential matching task using isolated characters (Roman letters, digits, and Chinese characters) and strings of characters. We localized the visual word form area (VWFA) by contrasting the response to pseudowords against that for letter strings, but this region did not show any other sign of visual specialization for letters. In addition, a left fusiform area posterior to the VWFA was selective for letter strings, whereas a more anterior left fusiform region showed selectivity for single letters. The results of different analyses using both large regions of interest and inspections of individual patterns of response reveal a dissociation between selectivity for letter strings and selectivity for single letters. The results suggest that reading experience fine-tunes visual representations at different levels of processing. An important conclusion is that the processing of nonpronounceable letter strings cannot be assumed to be equivalent to single-letter perception.

An early electrophysiological response associated with expertise in letter perception

Expertise with print is likely to optimize visual processes for recognizing characters of a familiar writing system. Although brain activations have been identified for words and letter strings in contrast with other stimuli, relatively little work has focused on the neural basis of single-letter perception. English readers and Chinese-English bilinguals participated in an ERP study and performed a 1-back identity judgment on Roman letters, Chinese characters, pseudofonts, and their string versions. The Chinese-English bilinguals showed an enhanced N170 for both Roman letters and Chinese characters relative to pseudofonts. For the non-Chinese readers, the N170 amplitude was larger for Roman letters relative to Chinese characters and pseudofonts. Our results suggest that changes in relatively early visual processes underlie expert letter perception.

A generic method for determining up/down orientation of text in roman and non-roman scripts

This paper presents a method for determining the up/down orientation of text in a scanned document of unknown orientation, so that it can be appropriately rotated and processed by an optical character recognition (OCR) engine. The method analyzes the “open” portions of text blobs to determine the direction in which the open portions face. By determining the respective densities of blobs opening in a pair of opposite directions (e.g., right or left), the method can establish the direction in which the text as a whole is oriented. We first describe a method for determining the up/down orientation of roman text based on the asymmetry in the openness of most roman letters in the horizontal direction. For non-roman text such as Pashto and Hebrew, we provide a method that determines a direction that is the most asymmetric, and therefore the most useful for the determination of text orientation, given a training data set of documents of known orientation. This work can be adapted for use in automated mail processing or to determine the orientation of checks in automated teller machine envelopes, scanned or copied documents, documents sent via facsimile, and digital photographs that include text (e.g., road signs, business cards, driver's licenses), among other applications.

The relation between learning Mandarin Pinyin or Zhuyin and L2 (English) production

This study investigates the relation between early written first language learning experience and the perception and production of speech in a person’s second langauge (L2). It compares the English pronunciation of native Mandarin speakers who have had different sound-annotating learning experiences (Pinyin versus Zhuyin). We predict that native Mandarin speakers who used the Pinyin system will produce some English sounds as their Pinyin counterparts if the same Roman letter is used as a pronunciation symbol both in English and in Pinyin system. However, because Pinyin and Zhuyin are not the primary written form for Mandarin, and are extensively used only in the first years of school, and because L2 learning involves exposure to speech as well as reading, we expect only moderate differences between the two groups’ perception and production abilities. We will examine the interaction for Pinyin and Zhuyin learners between (Mandarin) L1 learning experience, age effects, L2 experiences, and the establishment of English phonetic categories for the English monophthongal vowels and consonants /r/, /z/, and /l/.

Arabic International Phonetic Alphabet

Since the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in 1886, it remains the only alphabet that can represent all the sounds of world languages. However, the IPA symbols are based on the Roman letters. This means that speakers of languages which possess different orthography are not able to use them. For example, Arab linguists and researchers find it almost impossible to use IPA when they write in Arabic script; Arabic orthography differs in shape and direction of writing. In addition, IPA does not have symbols for the emphatic sounds: / ,/ط/ ,/ض/ ,/ص ظ/ /. To make it possible for Arab linguists and researcher who work on language sounds, a new alphabet has been designed. This paper is to present Arabic International Phonetic Alphabet (AIPA). AIPA consists of symbols that are based on Arabic orthographic system. It covers all the symbols in IPA in addition to some Arabic sounds which do not have representations in IPA. AIPA has been designed and now is available as Fonts. The AIPA fonts can be used in typing and entering linguistic data to computers. AIPA symbols differ from Arabic orthography in terms of independency; each symbol is not connected to the adjacent symbols. So, an Arabic word such as صوتية is written as: .\صاوتئ2ياه

Connections Between Teacher and Student Attitudes Regarding Script Choice in First‐Year Japanese Language Classrooms

Abstract: This study investigates connections between teacher and student attitudes related to the delayed (or immediate) introduction of Japanese script in the Japanese language classroom. Two groups of students completed questionnaires concerning their attitudes toward the immediate or delayed introduction of Japanese script and the use of romaji (romanized Japanese) in the Japanese as a second language classroom. The first group was introduced to Japanese script immediately, and romaji was not used in their textbook. The second group used a romaji textbook and was introduced to Japanese script at a later time and a slower rate. Teacher attitudes were also assessed using a questionnaire and interviews. Relationships were found between teacher attitudes regarding script use and several aspects of students' attitudes. For both groups, student responses corresponded well with teacher responses in terms of degree of satisfaction with the writing system used to teach Japanese in class and the use of an alternative script to study Japanese (romaji for the first group and Japanese syllabaries and kanji for the second group). Teacher and student attitudes toward the textbook were also related for the second group. Questionnaire and interview data indicated a clear teacher influence on student attitudes related to script choice in the Japanese classroom.

Egypt in Greco-Roman History and Fiction

more than a representation. In his 1971 survey of the subject, C. Froidefond characterized Greek views of Egypt as a mirage, an imaginative vision that had as much to do with who the Greeks were as it had with who the Egyptians were.1 Edward Said's 1978 landmark work on orientalism traced how that Egyptian mirage developed and endured over the years in response to Europe's own evolving identity, and his book made a strong case for what has become a key idea in cultural studies: Power follows knowledge, and the seemingly objective and scientific study of other cultures is often an accessory to the crimes committed by empires in the name of civilization.2 The enormous-and often nasty-controversy that swirled around the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena, with its accusation of racism in the conduct of European historiography, particularly in the treatment of the relationship between Europe and Egypt, has dealt a devastating blow to the pose of objectivity in the conduct of scholarship.3 Despite this controversy, or perhaps because of it, the peculiar position of Egypt in the imaginations of the Greeks and Romans and its role in the classical world continue to be a subject of the greatest interest. I wish to contribute to this discussion by looking at the role Egypt plays in the so-called Greek romances, prose narratives of love and adventure that were composed during the Roman empire. I will begin by selectively sketching ideas about Egypt in Greek and Roman letters as a context for my remarks.4

Visual discrimination learning of group-housed goats at an automated learning device

Abstract. A general purpose computer system for behavioral conditioning experiments, the "Fields-Monitor", was developed and has been in use for several years. The set-up allows flexible stimulus presentations and rewards for different kinds of learning behavior in animals. It enables training and testing of animals even under group housing conditions which prevent the social isolation and possible distorting influences resulting from the experimenter or from the time of the day (the test animals visit the learning device whenever they want). Thus, it eliminates most of the stress factors known to decrease learning success. Using this device, 160 dwarf goats were trained for visual discrimination of four stimulus patterns (simple geometric figures, Roman letters) presented simultaneously. One of these patterns was rewarded with a small portion of water after each correct choice. A comparison of mean learning curves in the three consecutive tests showed that in the second and third test successful learning started earlier and reached a higher level (70–80% correct choices as early as the 5–6th Test Day) than in Test 1 (about 60% correct choices at the 10th Test Day). The coefficient of variation of average learning success for 10 days was 28.4, 18.7, 16.8 % in Test 1–3 respectively, indicating great differences between the animals. All animals could use the learning equipment voluntarily over several weeks, without any social deprivation.

New development of Chinese lexicon

By way of relevant examples, this article introduces the problem of Chinese language modernization and the absorption of foreign and new technological words into Modern Chinese. It is suggested that the use of Pinyn in the People’s Republic of China has opened the door to the use of Roman letters in weird words which combine Chinese characters with Roman letters. As China moves further into the computer age, the paper speculates on the superior efficiency of phonetics scripts and the dilemma they will present to Chinese authorities in choosing between tradition and modern efficiency.