Script Pretenders.

This Twitter thread starts off with Alex Shams saying:

I’ve seen English font pretending to be Arabic, Persian pretending to be Hebrew, Telugu pretending to be Chinese…

But this was the first time I saw Arabic trying to look like Syriac!

It’s followed by “Persian looking like Hebrew at a rest stop in Iran,” “Telugu as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic,” and other weirdness. Thanks, Y!

Comments

  1. PlasticPaddy says

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonton_font
    (Why wonton?)
    https://www.dafont.com/mtheme.php?id=2
    (don’t know the history of these fonts)

  2. (Why wonton?)

    Because wontons are what you find in every American-style Chinese takeaway? (With that hideous sweet-and-sour — alleged — style sauce.) I suspect the deep-fried variety of wontons, because they’re curled up with bitsy tapering edges like those serifs. Not really serifs, just stray continuations of strokes.

    Also called ‘ChopSuey fonts’ says wp, so more American than Chinese?

  3. John Cowan says

    Here’s a pseudo-Hebrew sign at the Second Avenue Deli. This is the new 33rd St location, but a similar sign was also present at the old 2nd Ave location.

  4. PlasticPaddy says

    @jc
    Why don’t they put “kosher” in the font and not in Hebrew? Expense?

  5. John Cowan says

    Most kosher businesses, at least on the Lower East Side, display kosher or glatt kosher in Hebrew script. Expense can be ruled out, since kosher would require six letters in a pseudo-Hebrew font rather than just three. (Note that glatt doesn’t always bear its technical meaning: it can simply mean ‘unquestionably, stringently’.)

  6. Mad magazine did a layout for cartoonist Sudhir Dar, with the title in lovely pseudo-Devanagari.

  7. Stu Clayton says

    (Note that glatt doesn’t always bear its technical meaning: it can simply mean ‘unquestionably, stringently’.)

    In plain German, for instance, “das ist glatt gelogen” = “that’s a bare-faced lie”.

    Other, only slightly different uses to be found in DWDS (all of them are tropes, in more-or-less fixed idiomatic German expressions, thus not idiomatically translatable by the same English word in all cases):

    er verweigerte glatt den Gehorsam = “he straight-out refused to obey [orders]”
    ein glatter Versager = “a complete loser”
    das hätte ich glatt vergessen = “I had nearly forgotten about that [completely]”

  8. CuConnacht says

    The pseudo-Hebrew Persian sign includes two lines (the bottom two) of pseudo-Hebrew Persian script transliterating English words (which I suppose have been borrowed unto Persian): “Fast fūd/Kāfī shāp”.

    What is the first letter (top right) supposed to be? I know a little Arabic, but no Persian, and I can’t make it out.

  9. Owlmirror says

    One of the additions to the thread is this calligraphy by Xu Bing. As his WikiP page notes:

    From 1994 he started a new project, in which he adapted Latin alphabets into the shape of hanzi. He called this New English Calligraphy, and gave lessons in how to write the characters.[10]

    Many examples of this work.

    If you scroll down far enough, you get to his next work, which is, um, possibly disturbing.

  10. Owlmirror says

    @John Cowan:

    Expense can be ruled out, since kosher would require six letters in a pseudo-Hebrew font rather than just three.

    I think you meant “cannot”, there, assuming signmakers would charge by the letter regardless of what the typeface is, and the charge is not nominal.

    However, looking at the picture. I would suggest that the chosen pseudo-Hebrew typeface for the name is meant to convey playfulness, but the typeface of the actual Hebrew letters is meant to convey professionalism.

    “We’re fun-loving people here, but we take kashrut seriously.”

  11. John Cowan says

    think you meant “cannot”, there, assuming signmakers would charge by the letter regardless of what the typeface is, and the charge is not nominal.

    No, I meant that expense can be ruled out as the reason for using a Hebrew rather than a pseudo-Hebrew font, as the latter would in fact be more expensive.

    I would suggest that the chosen pseudo-Hebrew typeface for the name is meant to convey playfulness, but the typeface of the actual Hebrew letters is meant to convey professionalism.

    I think you’re right about that.

  12. here’s a longish (and fairly floppy, unfortunately) piece on faux-hebrew fonts from last year.

    and @PP/JC: i agree about the choice of hebrew typeface at the 2nd Avenue Deli, but with two quibbles:

    (1) it may be the restaurant’s choice, but it might be a formal hekhsher [kosher certification] mark and so be decided by their mashgiekh [supervising authority]. in a quick look at a randomly-chosen hekhsher-symbol list i didn’t see any that just said “כשר”, but i did see some fauxbrew, and a range of hebrew fonts.

    (2) there’s no urgent reason for an nyc kosher restaurant to mark itself as such in english: practically anyone who it would matter to will at least recognize the word, and the different alphabet will pop out more, visually (except, perhaps, next to a fauxbrew font!). i think something similar applies to halal establishments, though i do see plenty of places labeled “halal” on their signs as well as (or instead of) “حلال” – but that may have to do with being recognizable to non-arabic-reading muslims or to non-muslims who don’t eat pork, or just pervasive state islamophobia making the arabic not seem a sensible choice.

  13. This website collects examples of a hideous Israeli graphic design affectation: adorning writing in Roman letters with Hebrew vowel signs.

  14. Halal subsections in meat sections in large supermarkets are common here (there are millions Muslims or at least people from traditionally Muslim regions in Moscow I think), but halal brands usually either use stylised Cyrillic script or normal Cyrillic script. Arabic is present on signs of various certifying organisations, they imitate international signs.

  15. @Y: WOW! i actually kinda love it. (especially where it seems to be indicating actual pronunciation, but with vowels that aren’t what i’d expect – though that difference probably has to do with my default nusakh as much as anything)

    but i’m also one of the only people who likes pointed yiddish for non-dialectological reasons.

  16. rozele: the vowels are erratic. Most people in Israel don’t know how to point correctly (tsere vs. segol, qamatz vs. patah). I think that’s why the blogger put below each image the normative pointing (or inferred normative pointing, for foreign words).

  17. ah! that makes a lot of sense! it was the qamatz/patah stuff that struck me most immediately.

  18. Owlmirror says

    @rozele:

    (1) it may be the restaurant’s choice, but it might be a formal hekhsher [kosher certification] mark and so be decided by their mashgiekh [supervising authority]. in a quick look at a randomly-chosen hekhsher-symbol list i didn’t see any that just said “כשר”, but i did see some fauxbrew, and a range of hebrew fonts.

    Given that an eatery might switch to a different mashgiach, it doesn’t really make sense to put the logo of a specific mashgiach on a prominent sign.

    The actual hashgacha of the 2nd ave deli is from the Internation Kosher Coucil, with a distinctive logo of a script-like K superimposed over a thick block-letter IC (which looks confusingly like another odd-looking K until I parsed it out).

    https://2ndavedeli.com/about/kosher-certification/

    The above page is in the web archive from 2010, although the image is broken in snapshots from 2010-early 2011.

    Snapshots from late 2011 onwards show the hashgacha being from a group called CupK®; it remains like that until June 2021, when they switched to the current mashgiach.

    Generally, I suspect that everyone involved would prefer to have distinctive logos that wouldn’t look like a common generic word, in either English or Hebrew.

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