Alphabet 26 combines the “best” upper and lowercase letters into an alphabet using only 26 symbols.
The impetus for Alphabet 26 was provided in 1949 as he watched his young son labor over his first reader. As he watched, he made a discovery. His son was able to read the first sentence, “Run Pal,” but stumbled over the second sentence “See him run”. Obviously the boy was confused because the symbol R in the first sentence became a totally different symbol ‘r’ for the same sound in the second sentence. Results: Learning to read is that much more difficult. The act of reading is that much slower…A graphic symbol, or for that matter any trademark worth its salt, to be efficient, should be constant.”
Chris
on 28 Feb 07I find it interesting that none of the write-ups on the four pages of the linked site used Alphabet 26 for the text.
gillico
on 28 Feb 07it’s odd that none of the characters have ascenders or descenders other than the Q—from everything I have learned about typesetting, I understood that it is easier for the human eye to recognize patterns of lowercase letters with their ascenders and descenders than it is when they the characters are all the same height…. Also, Emigre sells a typeface somewhat similar to this called Filosofia Unicase.
Kevin
on 28 Feb 07Here’s a font inspired by alphabet 26.
Noah
on 28 Feb 07Ok so we should dumb down the language so people can learn it easier? We lose expression then. Besides why bother with this when ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ARE DIFFERENT AND EASY TO USE, THEY ALREADY EXIST IN MOST TYPE FACES AND THE PREMISE OF USING ALL CAPS FOR READABILITY IS ALREADY OUTLINED IN MOST PLACES. HOWEVER THE LACK OF VARIATION ACTUALLY MAKES IT HARDER TO READ QUICKLY. READERS OF MOST LATIN ALPHABET BASED LANGUAGES USE THE VARIATION OF LETTERS IN ADDITION TO PUNCTUATION AND THE SHAPES OF WORDS TO WORK THROUGH TEXT MUCH FASTER. DON’T YOU LOVE READING THIS ALL CAPS TEXT?
Jamie Stephens
on 28 Feb 07I had the same initial reaction as Noah, except that it isn’t really dumbing down the language, it is dumbing down the script for the language. The languae remains the same.
And after more thought, why not? Writing and text are just tools that act as symbols for language. We should continue to improve them and let the best tool win, like we do with everything else. If it doesn’t work well, it will die and we won’t have to worry about it.
f5
on 28 Feb 07Noah: I think the point is that it’s NOT all UC or LC, but a mixture.
It think it’s also worth pointing out that these basic concepts have been arrived at separately by others many times before, at least in how people sometimes alter their own handwriting ‘preferences’. I’ve employed the techniques of ‘no ascenders/descenders’ to keep the top and bottom line contours even, and choosing to use UC or LC based on which letterforms work best and look best to keep the lines even.
However still great to see someone craft a digital font set.
Scott Raymond
on 28 Feb 07I’d be curious to know if the basic thesis here (“A graphic symbol … to be efficient, should be constant.”) was actually tested by research, or just assumed to be true.
I suppose you’d have to define “efficient” first. My gut tells me that this alphabet could be learned more quickly than our regular alphabet, but that the regular alphabet would allow people to read faster. Written and spoken language is filled with redundancy (read: inefficiency) on multiple levels (grammar, orthography, phonetics, semantics). You’d think that redundancy it would make communication more efficient, but it doesn’t. Having multiple glyphs per letter (especially when they have significantly different shapes) makes reading harder to learn, but ultimately much more efficient.
Alan Bradford
on 28 Feb 07@ kevin: thanks for the link. I’m gonna try this font out to see how much it hurts my eyes. I’m a designer at heart and love to see new things, especially if they improve a situation.
Ethan
on 28 Feb 07I write in capital letters and I just switched to writting e and a like the alaphbet above.
John Wesley
on 28 Feb 07Interesting take on the alphabet, though I don’t know of many people who have big letter memorization problems. I guess it makes it easier for beginners. Good luck getting everyone to convert!
Ted
on 28 Feb 07Pardon my lack of citation, but I think there’s actually some research that shows there is no difference in speed or comprehension between all upper-case, all lower-case, sentence-case (first letter of sentence capped), title-case (first letter of each word capped)—but only once you compensate for familiarity. In other words, for the present, most people read better in sentence-case because that is how they are used to it. It dioesn’t have to do with the human perceptual or cognitive systems, just plain old habit.
Over time, that could change if a different system became widely used, but it’s likely that the short-term difficulty would make it untenable for wide application.
Mike
on 28 Feb 07Thanks for this post. At first, I thought it was kind of stupid until I read the explanation re. Run Pal and See him run. My four year old son is learning to read and now I can kind of relate to some of his confusion thanks to the explanation. Good stuff!
Peter Cooper
on 28 Feb 07Unfortunately, yhe problem is not our alphabet, but our language. The amount of sounds in our language is extreme and varied. The same group letters in English can have ten or more sounds.. for example, ‘ough’, in ‘rough’, ‘cough’, ‘borough’, ‘through’, ‘trough’. The complexity of these sounds is at least an order of magnitude more than just having two variations of each letter.
It has been shown that dyslexia is almost unheard of in Spanish and Italian speaking cultures due to the phonological simplicity of these languages. English is both a good and bad language. It’s very expressive, but a bitch to learn.
Tim
on 28 Feb 07The lowercase “g” is the most beautiful letter in the alphabet.
It’s unfortunate the author thinks the capital “g” is more elegant.
Splashman
on 28 Feb 07I’ve taught my two daughters and a niece to read, all before they were 5. While a modified alphabet is an interesting experiment, I consider Alphabet 26 to be a solution in need of a problem.
The real problem here is with the “reader” that Brad Thompson chose for his son. It’s ridiculous to start kids with mixed upper & lowercase. The workbook that I use begins with all lowercase, and only in later stages introduces capitals. That’s a logical progression: start simply, add complexity later.
I don’t pretend to know for sure whether Alphabet 26 would cause confusion at some point in the learning process, but I suspect it would. The child learns Alphabet 26, then, at some point in time, has to learn very different rules (normal uc/lc).
In any context, it’s just not a good idea to look at a problem and devise a solution without researching existing solutions. I’d call that intellectual arrogance.
Karl N
on 28 Feb 07This is terrible typographically, as has been mentioned. The reason lowercase is better than uppercase is because the ascenders and decenders lend different shapes to each word that the eye can interpret immediately. TYPING IN ALL CAPS LEADS TO BLOCKY WORDS and makes you read slower.
This is one of those ideas where the whole context isn’t really considered. If anything, we would just abolish the caps!
Patrick McElhaney
on 28 Feb 07The other day my 5 year old son was reading to me when he stumbled on a word, or rather, a letter. He didn’t recognize the letter g, because, well, it didn’t look like the lowercase g he was taught to write and read. It had a closed loop at the bottom.
Since then, I’ve noticed that every reader he brings home uses a different font. One book used a font in which the lowercase L and the uppercase I were exactly the same.
How is a kid supposed to learn to read if the shapes of the letters keep changing? It drives me crazy.
Patrick
Long Time Listener Repeat Caller
on 28 Feb 07While I do agree that LC possesses shapes which are easier for people to make out quickly in theory, most signs for international / national use often stick to just UC letters.
And to everyone complaining about multiple fonts and how it is hard for kids to learn and etc etc… Please! Like we had it worse when we learned to read? I think not. Besides, languages restricted to the Roman Alphabet have it much better than countries which do not. Look at Japanese! They learn the Roman Alphabet, plus 2 phonetic structures of their own, and kanji! And they manage just fine.
Andrei Herasimchuk
on 28 Feb 07Great idea! Let’s make everything in our lives so its easier for five year olds to learn as our measuring stick. Why bother to force anyone to get past a kindergarten education level or mental capacity?
Learning 45 symbols is hard for a five year old? God forbid those poor kids try to learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Russian.
Ethan Poole
on 28 Feb 07I would just like to point out that most of the letters in the Cyrillic alphabet are the same in lowercase and uppercase.
Steve
on 28 Feb 07This is ridiculous.
My 2.5 year old knows his “big letters/little letters” just fine. No, he can’t read words in the adult sense, but he does recognize word patterns, in both mixes of cases.
Alphabet 26 is interesting typographically for book/magazine design, sure, but as a primer for children? No.
A solution in search of a problem, indeed.
Tiago
on 28 Feb 07@Patrick “How is a kid supposed to learn to read if the shapes of the letters keep changing?”
Well, haven’t you learned it? And how about all the kids that speak arabic, which is far away more difficult to learn?
And I agree with Noah: alphabet 26 dumb down not only the language, but also the “script” and all the kids that are now learning how to read and write.
Mimo
on 28 Feb 07You just have to learn it. iF wE wOUld Write like this we WOuld LEarn it. Or like this 3$”/$””. It is all Symbols, pictures we have to learn.
Mimo
on 28 Feb 07You just have to learn it. iF wE wOUld Write like this we WOuld LEarn it. Or like this 3$”/$””. It is all Symbols, pictures we have to learn.
Scott Meade
on 28 Feb 07There are some good ideas behind Alphabet 26, but other efforts at improvements such as the Dvorak keyboard have shown that simplification and even performance improvements are no incentive for most people to stray from the familiar.
My five year old daughter can read print, but not cursive. I am sorry to say she will be spending time in school learning cursive.
A note about Alphabet 26 for those that might have missed it. It does still retain proper case. In the graphic Matt posted the top two rows are the “capital” letters while the bottom two are “lower case”. Alphabet 26 retains indicators of sentence start and proper nouns.
Scott Meade
on 01 Mar 07.... meant to add that Alphabet 26 simply tries to take the “X” and “x” approach to all letters where lowercase is simply a smaller version of uppercase.
kangarool
on 01 Mar 07I count 52 characters. 26 small, plus 26 large. Yes, the kid doesn’t have to learn that R/r distinction, but he still has to learn all 52 characters and when to use which.
So with the erroneously named ALPHABET26, I would still need to learn the rules of when to use which of those 52. So I’m still having to learn and distinguish 52 individual letters. So it’s all back to where we are now.
ALPHABET52 is more like it
Oleg Andreev
on 01 Mar 07Okay, lets altogether learn toki pona because there’re only 14 letters and 118 words. Very easy to learn, huh :)
PS. ALL CAPS are not more readable than Normal Caps. It’s true for both paper and anti-aliased screen fonts.
Killian
on 01 Mar 07Why are the letters different colors? It seems random and distracting to have three different colors… any ideas?
Scott Meade
on 01 Mar 07The colors are just for reference to illustrate which letters are unchanged because the lower and uppercase already are the same (blue), which letters are represented in A26 by the lowercase version (green), and which are represented by the uppercase version (black).
Martin Olsson
on 01 Mar 07I think this is a perfect example of “simplifying too much” which is something I like exploring for fun at http://smpl.se. If you take a complex problem (such as conveying meaning using written language) and come up with a solution that is too simple you end up with something trivial that redefines the problem instead of solving it.
Example: removing the vowels from ‘simple’ gives you ‘smpl’, but the simplification actually makes it harder to read and understand.
Example 2: removing the brakes and gears of a bicycle gives you a simpler bike, but one that requires more skill to use.
Sometimes simplifying the problem gives you a better solution, but in many cases it gives you something trivial rather than sublime.
catherine
on 01 Mar 07THe QUICK BROWn FOX JUmPeD OVeR THe LaZY DOGS. WeLL OKaY IT’S nOT QUITe THe Same SInCe THe LeTTeRS aRen’T THe Same SIZe BUT I TeLL YOU WHaT, IT’S SLOW TO TYPe THIS WaY!
Scott Meade
on 01 Mar 07Martin – good points about removing vowels as an inneffective attempt at simplification. Just watch though – as more and more kids start text messaging at younger and younger ages, they are going to start to think that all these extra vowels they see us old folks using are just archaic and wasteful. :)
Justin Bell
on 01 Mar 07OK, I’m going to go on somewhat of a rampage here, as I had expected better from other 37signal readers than this.
Tim:
Beauty is subjective, and readability is more important than beauty in terms of what basic letters should look like.
Karl N:
Seems as if you have ignored the underlying concepts and only criticised a possible bad implementation of the idea. I suggest you re-read it.
gillico L
Actually, that font appears to be the opposite of that Alphabet 26 intended: It has 2 different forms for some characters, and they are all the same height, which makes it harder to learn, not easier.
Steve:
Well, that’s obviously good news for your kid! But not all kids are like yours, you know. Some of use are dyslexic, and even have trouble with mapping the words “left” and “right” to their real-world perceptions as quickly and reliably as others.
kangarool:
No, he doesn’t have to “learn all 52 characters” as the uppercase is same as the lowercase. All the kid now has to learn is when a letter should be uppercase vs lowercase, and not also have to remember if this is one of those letter that likes to completely change form when its case changes.
Martin:
Are you really trying to compare the removal of all vowels from the language, and the removal of breaks and gear from a bike to the removal of some of the differences between the forms of upper and lower case letters?
Lets not forget than many of the upper and lower case letters actually look very similar. Why is that? Do some of these letters required more differentiation than others? Perhaps what we need is an typeface were “o” and “O”, “p” and “P” also look completely different? Or why not slightly redesign the problematic ones. Perhaps this is exactly what Alphabet 26 has done or attempted to do?
To me, it seems as if you have simplified your own argument too much, hence giving us a trivial point, rather than something to actually think about.
Chris Coyier
on 01 Mar 07“His son was able to read the first sentence, “Run Pal,” but stumbled over the second sentence “See him run”.
So then, teach the boy that “R” and “r” are the same letter. Its a valuable lesson and a good introduction to an abstract concept.
Sort of like teaching him “Stoves are hot” and “RuPaul is really a man”.
Weixi Yen
on 01 Mar 07alphabet26 = trying too hard to be original
Lou
on 01 Mar 07While it may aid in the learnability in the alphabet, in the long wrong, a mixture of UC and LC letters probably makes for much faster reading.
Read more on this topic here
—
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Stephen
on 01 Mar 07With my handwriting this still allows for confusion between B,8 & I,1 & Z and 2. Lower case b can be confused with 6 so I think a greek “beta” would be better.
Luke
on 01 Mar 07It’s interesting that he chose that particular form of the letter ‘a’. My mum is a primary school headteacher, and she’s forever hunting for fonts that don’t use that particular form of the letter ‘a’ as nobody writes their ‘a’s that way when writing by hand, with most people actually writing them like this:
http://www.vendian.org/howbig/UnstableURLs/letter_a.gif
This makes it very confusing for children when reading written text, as they actually have to learn THREE different forms of the letter. The capital, and the two variations of the lower case letter. (if I new more about type and fonts, I could probably throw some more appropriate terms into this post)
Bill P
on 01 Mar 07I don’t know of the value for teaching children to read. My gut feel would be that showing kids as many varied fonts and typefaces as possible at an early age would be better for them in the long haul…
BUT I appreciate any attempts to make a script (upper or lower case) that eliminates confusion between letters.
It sounds dramatic, but there are times (I’m thinking Technical, Military, or Engineering) where a misplaced letter or symbol could mean disaster.
After watching an Italian friend do it, I took to writing my zeros and ‘Z” with slashes through them (forward and horitzontal respectively) and find it comforting to read old letters and be able to deccipher my chicken-scratch with fewer mistakes.
SM
on 01 Mar 07Justin Bell’s got a point – readers of svn (and any blog really) should actually read the articles, papers, or websites to which the blog author links before commenting on them, especially when posting negative comments. It seems most people don’t.
Chrisooya
on 01 Mar 07To me this seems equivalent to proposing to expunge all synonyms from a language in order to make life easier for kids learning vocabulary.
I was surprised among a group of designers that there was not more criticism of what would be an immense loss of freedom of expression in terms of how we use lower and uppercase letters to deliberately change meaning and tone.
Simplifying is not always a good thing.
There is a clear tendency to want to simplify in order to make things easy to learn. The problem is that human beings are actually amazingly good at learning. (Look at generations of Japanese children who have managed to learn and master hundreds of Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana.)
It is laziness, not necessity, that pushes us to want to avoid learning. It is impatience, not need, that leads us to seek immediate gratification.
When you place convenience on a pedestal, there is always a trade-off.
matthew
on 01 Mar 07“I consider Alphabet 26 to be a solution in need of a problem.”
Bradbury Thompson’s resume should have convinced you otherwise, but that’s assuming you read it.
SM
on 01 Mar 07I need to stop- I have some sickness that prevents me from restraint. But when we see comments like “we use lower and uppercase letters to deliberately change meaning and tone” from Chrisooya it is clear that people comment on things they don’t understand. I’m not saying that A26 isn’t a silly idea – it is – but did Chrisooya even read the A26 commentary for answers to his or her criticisms?
Eric
on 01 Mar 07Thompson’s idea isn’t new. Several Bauhaus designers, like Herbert Bayer, were exploring unicase fonts in the 20s. 80 years later the idea still hasn’t caught on.
And actually our alphabet used to consist entirely of capital letters. Lowercase letters, or minuscules, didn’t evolve until much later, and the merging of the two later still. So you could argue that unicase fonts are actually a regression in terms of the evolution of type and how we write.
Bill
on 01 Mar 07Thought experiment time.
Suppose we had all learned Alphabet 26, and western civilization had essentially always had one character per letter. Now some crazy, post-modernist trouble-maker wants to force us to use an additional 19 characters.
How would everyone feel about that issue? Anyone want to rethink their position?
Secondly, suppose 7 of our standard arabic numerals had alternate versions that had to be used, say, when it was the first digit in a number (I realize that we already have variant digits: 9 can have a straight line or more like a J curve, 4 can be open or closed at the top, 3 can be curved or angled on top, etc. But these are variants, not requirements).
I suspect that both of these ideas would be considered radical, crazy, impractical, a solution in search of a problem, a plot by the NEA, etc.
Generally, I like to take the “that’s the way it is”, “built-in resistance to change”, inertia factor out of the picture. Or, at least separate it from the underlying question. That way, we might determine that something is a good concept, but not practical (like changing everyone over to the Dvorak keyboard), rather than assuming that impractical means bad concept.
Drew
on 01 Mar 07It’s interesting to me how many folks here missed that Alphabet26 does have both lower and upper-case letters, it simply limits the difference between the upper- and lower-case letters to size alone. Some of you made this point already, but it seems like most of you didn’t get it.
Personally, I think that these responses indicate that the biggest challenge in reading comprehension in the internet age is the “skim and comment” mentality.
David
on 01 Mar 07I don’t know about the merits or drawbacks of such an alphabet, but how is it so different than using smallcaps on any font already existing?
Splashman
on 01 Mar 07Not sure why several commenters assume I (and other detractors) either skimmed or didn’t read the material at the link. I read every word twice. I simply disagree that the “problem” Thompson cited (dissimilar upper/lower case symbols) is really a problem. The only motivation Thompson gives for the proposed redesign is this:
I and others presented reasons why this is not really a problem, and certainly not worth the cost of a redesign. It’s my opinion that Thompson’s head was in the clouds.
Drew, tell me: Why, exactly, would I want to decrease the differentiating characteristics between two letters?
Bill, I’m certain that everyone here would concede that if we could wave our magic wand and start over, we could design a much better alphabet. That is so self-evident it’s not worth discussion, and I believe that’s why it hasn’t been addressed much by commenters.
Matthew, brilliant people are more capable than average of both brilliant ideas and ridiculous ideas. Let’s argue ideas, eh?.
Drew
on 02 Mar 07Splashman – I’m making no assumptions about you, nor about those who argued that there is a) no need of this or b) no way it’s practical. The assumptions I made were about the many folks who said “so this is an alphabet with no capital letters? that’s stupid.”
As for your question to me: I can’t imagine why you would want to do anything, as I don’t know you. Personally, I don’t think it’s that big of an issue for kids to learn that more than one “shape” represents the same sound. But I see no reason why this font shouldn’t be used. Maybe it will catch on, and maybe it will quietly die. It seems that the question “why should upper-case letters have a different shape than lower-case letters?” is a valid one, and I enjoyed momentarily being made aware of an inconsistency I hadn’t noticed in a system that I use every day.
On another note: I agree with one of the other posters who said that the particular choice of “a” isn’t the best one. From a purely aesthetic perspective, all of the other characters have a nice even roundness, so it seems out of place.
Torley
on 02 Mar 07I, too, felt some unease looking at the “a”. I prefer the one that looks more like a squished “o” with a tail down the bottom-right. :)
“Alphabet 26” and some of the context behind this would be just ripe for a science-fiction story with authoritarian leanings, tho.
Chrisooya
on 02 Mar 07I think people misunderstood my comments (SM in particular). I understand that you can use the Alphabet26 characters as either uppercase or lowercase. It still is limiting in terms of expression.
When I say to change meaning and tone, I don’t mean simple capitalizing in order to add emphasis. I mean that the shapes of letters in themselves can be communicative, and having more shapes to work with means more freedom.
An example that jumps to mind is the branding/marketing for Apple’s line if i-products (iMac, iPod etc…). This branding would not be nearly as effective if you replaced the lowercase i with the Alphabet26’s lowercase i.
I disagree with Justin Bell that readability is much more important than aesthetics. We need both. I would say that choice is more important than simplicity.
(I was amused to read Tim’s comment, because when I first looked over the alphabet, my very first reaction was surprise and disappointment that they had chosen the capital G, when the lowercase g is so much more attractive.)
Anonymous Coward
on 02 Mar 07Splashman, I’m simply pointing out the obvious.
BT has a (career) lifetime’s worth of experience in a field closely related to his theory, yet you seemingly see fit to dismiss his idea(s) in a reactionary fashion.
To each his own, but I’ll take BT’s word for it that there’s merit in challenging convention(s). If not for the purpose of proving that Alphabet 26 is worthy of our attention, then for what it can teach us about looking at all things we take for granted.
Splashman
on 02 Mar 07I’m all for challenging conventions. But the ultimate goal, in my opinion, should not be challenge for the sake of challenge. The ultimate goal should be making something better.
Here’s what I like to see: “I challenged a convention, and made something better!”
I also like to see: “I challenged a convention, and didn’t find a better solution, so I’ll stay with the convention.”
What I don’t like to see: “I challenged a convention. My solution doesn’t work as well, but at least it’s different, and different is good, so let’s use it.”
Regarding my “reactionary” dismissal—you’re welcome to your opinion. I prefer to think of it as “challenging authority.” :)
Justin Bell
on 03 Mar 07Chrisooya:>
The fact is, most of the time, text is use for communication. In these cases, readability comes first. Newspapers, books, magazines, road signs, instrument panel labels, websites, you name it.
Aesthetics is a luxury—it comes after.
Kula bácsi
on 05 Mar 07The 90% of the population is tv show watcher retard, so it’s a good idea.
This discussion is closed.