English Calligraphy

Old English Calligraphy history is by far an intriguing story

The Roman alphabets is the alphabet used for the English language. In the history of Old English writing Calligraphy, its alphabets origons goes way back to pictography. Pictography is believed to have been the first writing system. Pictography, is drawning simple pictures that represent images of real life object or beings.

 

The phonic alphabets is developed from pictography. The phonic alphabet influenced the Greek alphabet, then the Romans developed there alphabets from the Greek alphabet, which is used in the English writing system till this day. Since then there has been many developments and improvements to the Roman alphabets system, and it evolved over time in visual form and legibility as well as techniques and materials used.
The Greek alphabets were developed using phonic alphabets in around 2500BC. Not so directly was the Roman alphabet learnt from the Greek alphabet but learnt from the Etruscans who learned from the Greeks alphabet.
The Roman alphabet In the first century AD had the alphabet letters j, v and w added.
During the end of the Roman empire the Papyrus scroll was replaced by the codex books.

 

In the fourth century AD the Romans developed a script called the 'uncials script'. This developed and aloud for a new script influenced by the 'uncials script'(3rd to 7th century) called the 'half-uncials script'(3rd to 9th century) This script was a cursive styled script and there was developments from the ascenders and descenders of this script from the last 'uncials script'.

Roman Origins = pictography to phonic alphabet to Etruscans alphabet to Greek alphabet to the Roman alphabet.
Some other type of letter scripts used in old English calligraphy was the Gothic and Medieval calligraphy. Gothic calligraphy is also known as black letters. They are a sans serif script of the middle ages which originated from the British Northan France. Gothic script was heavily used during 11 to 16th century Britain. The medieval calligraphy was used in Britain mainly during the periods.

English calligraphers to look at: Edward Johnson, Ken Brown, Peter Bales, Hermann Zapf, Zapf Chancery, Neil Macmillan, Robin Dodd, Quentin Crisp and Humphrey Lyttelton.