Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Tree Alphabet

 


Learned about this "Tree Alphabet" by artist Katie Holton from a tweet from Emergence Magazine.


Holton wrote an article in Irish Times about why she decided to create a new tree alphabet.  She did one for New York City (you can download the actual font here) and one for Ireland.  

I didn't know that there were "old" tree alphabets.  Holton describes how an old Irish language, "Ogham," was her inspiration.

Ireland’s medieval Ogham, sometimes called a “tree alphabet”, used trees for letters. The characters were called feda “trees”, or nin “forking branches” due to their shape. Astonishingly, this ancient alphabet was “written” from the ground up – each character sprouting from a central line, like leaves on a stem or branches on a tree. 

x


No comments:

Post a Comment