The Letter

N

Calligraphic 810

N

ITC Avant Garde
Gothic Book

Н\С

Ariadne жШші

The early form of the N was
always closely associated with
water, and with its immediate
proximity to its letter-neigh¬
bor, the M. While it apparently
lost the former somewhere
during the course of its evolu¬
tion, it has kept the latter to
this day. When the sign was
used by the Phoenicians
around 1000 B.C., it was called
nun (pronounced noon),
which meant “fish.” Before the
Phoenician nun, the Egyptian
hieroglyph for the n sound was
a wavy line signifying water. In
both writing systems the char¬
acter signifying the n sound
immediately followed the one
representing the m.

Although it is commonly
accepted that the Phoenician
nun represented a fish, histori¬
ans have been hard-pressed to
find a fish shape in that ancient
line drawing. Some feel that
the jagged line portrays the
head of a fish, while others
contend that it is the body of a
fish held vertically, as if dan¬
gling on a line. Still others
believe that the sign may actu¬
ally only represent a fishhook.
Anyway you look at it, it’s not
easy to make the mental leap
from the lightning-bolt shape
used by the Phoenicians to

anything that resembles an
aquatic animal. (Perhaps they
were thinking of an eel?)

tion,” the Greeks extended the
other vertical stroke to run par¬
allel to the first.

/WV 5 'l

In about the tenth century
B.C., the Greeks began to bor¬
row parts of the Phoenician
alphabet and adopt them as
their own. In the process, they
not only acquired the shape of
the Phoenician nun as their
own, they also preserved its
name—to a point. The initial
sound of the Phoenician char¬
acter’s name, which was mean¬
ingless to the Greeks, became
the sound of the letter that the
sign represented. The name of
the Phoenician character rep¬
resenting the n sound was thus
modified slightly, and became
the Greek nu.

The squiggly nun more than
likely upset organized, rational
Greek minds, which obliged
them to redesign the character
to suit their sensibilities. First
they tried to give the angled
strokes stability by designing
one as a strong vertical support.
But this left the letter asymmet¬
rical! Obviously this would not
do. To overcome this “aberra-

The Greek nu was passed to
the Romans virtually un¬
changed. Over time, however,
subtle modifications were
made to the N, as well as to all
the other letters that the
Romans borrowed from the
Greeks. At first the Romans,
like the Greeks, incised their
letters directly into stone or
inscribed them in soft clay.
These early letters had no vari¬
ations in stroke thickness and
lacked most of the curved
strokes we have come to asso¬
ciate with the Roman alphabet.
In the first century A.D., how¬
ever, stonecutters began to
paint the characters on the
stone before carving them with
hammer and chisel. It was this
precutting process that gave our
current alphabet its variance in
stroke weight, rich flowing
curves, and—ultimately—ser¬
ifs. The N was no exception to
this process of change. Its ver¬
tical strokes became thinner
and serifs were added.

42

ITC Galliard
Bold Italic

щт

s

New Century

Schoolbook

N

Broadway Engraved

Copperplate
Gothic 33

ITC Lubalin Graph
Book Oblique

Insignia

ITC Ozwald

Modula

Letraset Follies

Clarendon
Bold Italic

Plantin

The N is a medium-width
letter. In fact, in traditional
typographic measurement, an
en space is the median mea¬
surement of space, midway
between the em space (a square
that is as high and as wide as
the point size of a type) and the
thin space (one-fifth of an em
of space).

Like the H, the N requires a
relationship among its three
elements that will make it opti¬
cally stable. The verticals
should appear to be unified by
the diagonal, rather than mere¬
ly joined. The influence of the
flat brush emphasizes the diag¬
onal stroke, but optical consid¬
erations require that this part
of the letter not appear too
heavy. For this reason, the ver¬
tical strokes of the N are just
slightly heavier than in most
other places they occur in the
alphabet. In the N, subtle vari¬
ances in weight can make the
difference between good and
bad design.

The Trajan N has a pointed
apex, a form seen in many
typefaces that are based on the
Roman monumental standard.
In contrast, the Ns from type¬
faces based on calligraphic
forms tend to have a left-point¬
ing serifs at their left apexes,

Trajan

Baskerville

corresponding to the start of a
brushstroke. The vertex, how¬
ever, never has a serif. It can be
left as a point that drops slight¬
ly below the baseline, or, as in
many sans serif designs, it is
flattened to align with the base¬
line. In some typefaces the
diagonal’s stroke length is
abbreviated, and joins the right
vertical well above the baseline.