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In Latvia, the Fraktur typeface was called the Gothic, and Antiqua – Latin |
One day Latvians could no longer read their longest-running newspaper. Not because of censorship, no, – the paper did not get banned by the authorities. Neither was the language replaced by the Russian which would have been fitting to the Russification policy that was common at the time. And not even money was the issue – the price had not changed, the paper still sat on the same one kopeck as the day before. But one fundamental thing had transformed the newspaper the way somebody bumping into your elbow transforms your handwriting. A new typeface had splashed the pages of the paper making it alien to a large part of the Latvian audience. The words now stared back at the reader strangley round and…some would even say, even naked, having dropped their familiar robe. This new crazy typeface was… the Antiqua typeface. Or, for the people outside the printing industry, just the normal-looking letters we use today. Nothing surprising, right? Pretty ordinary, really… for a modern-day Latvian maybe and anyone else in the world, but back then it could be a real dealbreaker. Latvian printed word had evaded the king of typefaces for centuries. But now the day had come for the Latvian letters to finally take their long-promised form.
If you take a look at a hundred-years-old Latvian
newspaper, you will notice something extremely weird right away. It’s like the
editor has suffered from a personality disorder – the text is written in not
one, but in two very contrasting typefaces that differ from each other as much as
the black ink stands out against the white paper. The first typeface is the
very familiar Antiqua typeface while the other one is an old-fashioned,
spiky font that looks like it has been dragged through a medieval fantasy book.
An adventure that has left barbs and dents all over the letters. This typeface
is called the Fraktur… due to its fractured,
calligraphic style. So why is that? Why would someone mindlessly play around
with fonts like it was a PowerPoint presentation at elementary school and you
just discovered WordArt?
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The cover page of the biggest Latvian newspaper of the interwar period Jaunākās Ziņas (Breaking News) |
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Fraktur and Antiqua side by side in Jaunākās Ziņas (Breaking News) |
The Root of the Med(evil) was German
Like so many other big and small things in the
Latvian history, this one too is connected to Germans. Of course. Before the
German rule that sprouted among the Latvian tribes at the end of the 12th
century and gradually spread its wines over everything during the following one
hundred years, there was really no writing system in this corner of Europe. At
least no one knows about any. Which meant only one thing – anything that was
written after the Germans had stepped ashore was written the German way. And the
German way was a dramatic‑looking pointy typeface called the Blackletter and it’s even
pointier successor – the Fraktur.
At first after arriving in the Baltic lands, Germans
wrote in German and Latin only. For their own consumption and for the very few locals
who did know to some extent any of these languages. But as the years grew on
each other, Germans felt it was necessary to educate the indigenous people of
the conquered lands. Since the locals did not have the helping hand of Duolingo-sponsored
polyglots on YouTube yet, the texts needed to be written in their native Latvian.
Also the Reformation played its role here as Martin Luther thought it was
better to teach religion to people in their native tongue rather than Latin. So
in the 16th century came the moment when the German clergymen closed their
eyes, took a deep breath and started writing in Latvian. At first they
translated only religious texts, of course, but later on it was necessary to introduce
Latvians to laws and agreements and all other kinds of documents. No surprise
that Germans did it all in the same written form they used to write in their
own language. The Fraktur was the default and no other options were discussed.
So it would seem that this medieval German typeface
with its cathedral-like spikes blacked out any light of the Antiqua reaching the
poor Latvians, robbing them the slightest notion of what the rest of the world
was using until the 20th century? No. Latvians did know about the Antiqua typeface. Not from the printed materials
though. The part of writing that was not done in the Fraktur was handwriting. Antiqua
actually had been here since the Christian religion came
to our shores. The reason for that was that the religious texts, as in all
Catholic countries back then, were in the Antiqua typeface only. Printed books in the Fraktur were introduced later promoted by the Reformation and Gutenberg press. But
the handwriting, as introduced in the Antiqua typeface, remained in it. The
tradition to write Latvian texts with the Antiqua typeface kept on living even when
the printed word was taken over by the Fraktur.
In the 19th century, samples of the Antiqua
letters began to appear in school textbooks, thus giving Latvians the
opportunity to get to know this typeface in its printed form. However, regular
books were still printed in the Fraktur.
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An example of Latvian in the Fraktur saying Mēneša sapulce (Monthly meeting) |
Rusty Latvians
So you would think that introducing Antiqua to
Latvians would be as easy as teaching someone to ride a bicycle with training
wheels on. Pretty simple, right? Well, no. There were no training wheels and the
bicycle was crying of rust. The thick layer of the resistance was not built up
by the German ruling elite trying to hold Latvians down in their ever-reducing Fraktur
world. (In the map below, you can see that in 1901 there are only Germany,
Austria, Norway and Denmark left using this typeface). No. It was Latvians themselves – the older generations. And newspapers... holding onto those generations. Because… money. They were very lukewarm when it came to
introducing a new typeface. For them it would have meant investing money into
something that would potentially make them lose readers. Most of the newspapers
were so oxidized in their position that no lubrication in the form of linguist recommendations
was able to loosen them up. They would have to be broken by a law, which came
in force in the mid-1930s. But we will get back to that later.
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Scripts or typefaces in Europe in 1901 (the Fraktur in blue) |
The New Orthography
There was another stick that kept this Antiqua wheel
from fully turning. This time it was not the rusty older generation or the
newspaper owners. On the contrary, it was the progressive linguists…or rather their
overengineering (so it seemed at the time) of this language revolution. You
see, they were not happy enough with just changing to Antiqua. They wanted
more. Their ultimate goal was to put this language reform on steroids cutting
off all the heads of the German monster keeping Latvian language hostage.
This second swing of blade Latvian linguists
called for was introducing the “new orthography”. The thing is, a century ago, the
Latvian language did not only look German, but also to some extent functioned
like German. The root of this could be traced all the way back to the time Germans
started writing in Latvian. In the olden days, they not only gave the Latvian
language their own second-hand German robes but also stuffed it full with all
kinds of implants of the German language engineering. In other words, they transferred
over to Latvian the German rules on how to represent sounds. To be fair, it
was not their fault, really. It’s what they knew to work with, and Latvian
itself did not have any previous samples to draw inspiration from. So it had to
be German orthography. For example, “sh” and “ch” sounds in German are written
as “sch” and “tsch” respectively. So this written representation was shared
with the Latvian language too. The same happened with the sound “ts” which in
German is written as the letter z. The letter h, which in German is used to lengthen
vowels preceding them, got mixed in the Latvian bowl too. Why not? Germans had
it, why can’t the Latvian language have the same ingredients? There are other similar
examples, but you got that idea…
Latvian linguists wanted to get rid of all of this
and make it simpler and more logical for the Latvian language. This troubled a
lot our countrymen as the words now looked even weirder and more alien than
before with just the Antiqua typeface strapped on. Which meant that now not
only the newspaper owners and older generations were against them. Yes, even
the proponents of the Antiqua typeface were shaky on the matter. The oldest
Latvian newspaper Latviešu Avīzes (Latvian Newspaper) in 1915 wrote: “The
new orthography completely changes the Antiqua letters introducing ones that
do not even exist in Antiqua. Those are letters the linguists themselves
have come up with!”
One Nation Under One Typeface
Erasing the Fraktur was certainly important to upgrade the Latvian language technologically and get rid of the hated Germans symbolically. But there was another goal that was equally essential. You see, the Antiqua typeface would open the doors not only to the wider world and faraway lands but also reconnect us to our long-lost brothers on the other shore of Aiviekste river in the east. The Latgale region (the easternmost part of Latvia) for a really long time got stuck under a different colonial administration than the rest of the Latvian lands. Of course, in the medieval times, all the Latvian tribes, one by one, were swept up by Germans. However, in the later centuries, other regional powers rushed in to carve out their own piece of the Latvian potato pie. Latgale got cut off in the 16th century when it was incorporated in the Polish‑Lithuanian state. There the principal educators were the Polish clergymen and monks of the Jesuit Order who used the Antiqua typeface which stayed as the principal writing system for Latgalians until the latter part of the 19th century when the Russians banned it in favour of the Cyrillic.
In other words, Latgalians could
not read the Fraktur, and thus any materials published by their western
brothers were out of reach. So changing the writing to the Antiqua was kind of a
big deal from a national point of view. It would finally unify the nation under
one typeface – the printed word from the western Latvia would open up to our
Latgalian brothers while their own texts would become familiar to the people in
the “west”.
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Kurzeme (in orange) as a German-ruled autonomy under the Polish-Lithuanian state, Vidzeme (in green) under the Swedish rule, and Latgale (in blue) as part of the Polish-Lithuanian state |
Language Laws Save the Day!
Now let’s get back to matter of the rusty
Latvians. By the time Latvia tore its independence off Germany and Russia in 1920,
the writing was on the wall. The Fraktur had to go. Not even Germans were much
interested in this old typeface anymore and planned to introduce Antiqua for
themselves. The only ones left with the Fraktur hanging from the pages were Latvians
and Estonians. If the grease of compelling linguist recommendations was not
enough, it had to be brute force instead. On 24 May 1922, a law was passed that
made the use of the Antiqua typeface mandatory in schools and public institutions.
This ignited motivation in many publishers to
abandon the “Dark Side”, as now this was no longer kooky talk of some mentally deranged
linguists who don’t understand what it means to fully upgrade a printing press.
However, it took another 14 years to completely throw out the German legacy.
During this time there were still newspapers who continued to use the Fraktur.
Some exclusively, out of the fear to alienate their readers. Some less so,
printing part of the text in the new typeface to prepare their readers for the
inevitable.
The inevitable came on 15 May 1936. A law which was
passed a year earlier ruled that all major Latvian periodicals had to be printed in the Antiqua typeface
only. And, yes, this was somewhat
uncomfortable for the older generations, but at the same time it greatly helped
to the younger ones. Especially kids. In school they were completely immersed
in the Antiqua typeface and were struggling to unlock the texts hidden behind the
Fraktur still used by some major periodicals.
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The title of the newspaper Kurzemes Vārds (Word of Courland) in 1918 |
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The title of the newspaper Kurzemes Vārds (Word of Courland) in 1940 |
The reform of the Latvian written language was
a story of a thousand pages. The talks about switching to Antiqua had been
going on since as long back as the 18th century. One of the first
quills spilling ink in favour of this move was none other than the famous
(famous in Latvia) Gotthard Friedrich Stender, an enlightened German Lutheran
pastor and the first Latvian grammarian and lexicographer (affectionately
called by Latvians the Old Stender). He held the opinion that Latvian needed the Antiqua
typeface rather than the Fraktur. He underlined it in his Latvian-German
dictionary of 1789 printing Latvian words in Antiqua while leaving their German
counterparts in the Fraktur.
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The first page of the Latvian-German dictionary of 1789 |
The long way to the “new orthography” was not easier. A lot of paper got wasted in long, seemingly useless confrontations over minuscule details of how the written representation of Latvian sounds should look like. Linguistic battles were waged above and under letters over literally millimetres of length for some special marks. Pedantic and nit-picking and… irritating for the general public. However, eventually, when everything was said and done, even the German linguist Eduard Hermann praised the work of Latvian linguists stating: “They have introduced orthography with such advantages that would make other nations envy Latvians”.
But even the greatest inventions are usually not accepted right away. A striking example here was the first president of Latvia Jānis Čakste. He continued to use the old orthography in his signature – representing the sound “ch” the German way – with four letters (tsch) instead of the new č – until the very end of his days.
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The signature of Jānis Čakste |