Philology The Traditional
نویسنده
چکیده
The first Arabic book, a 5 × 11 cm volume titled Pi * Ð s w 2 (Book of the prayer of hours), was printed in 1514 by Grégoire de Grégoire in Venice and Fano, under the protection of Pope Leo the 10th [1, p. 18 – 19]. It took about two centuries for Arabic book printing to move to the East: in 1727 the Ottoman printing agency was founded in Constantinople and started printing using Dutch types and technology [8, p. 156]. A similar institution was founded in Cairo in 1821. Undoubtedly a script like the Arabic one, having deep roots in calligraphy, was rather difficult to adapt to typography, a technique where strict standardization and repetition of forms is necessary. When Aldus Manutius created the first italic font in 1501, out of manuscript calligraphic forms, he made a certain number of choices—and these choices became a standard for occidental typography. Similar choices had to be made for Arabic: calligraphy had to be “tamed”, so that the results would be homogeneous, reproducible, and flexible enough to be pleasant to the eye. This standardization took place in 1906, in Cairo, when the 8 ô T A â Ï 8 ¢ A ± (’Almaṫāb‘ al’amārya) typecase is defined. This typecase (see fig. 1), divided in four parts (as opposed to “upper” and “lower” case of the Occident), uses a total of 470 characters. Astonishing as it may seem, this typesetting system has been kept in use until today: books typeset in a traditional way, all around the Arabic world, are still using the same set of characters, and the same conventions and rules. In fig. 1, the reader can see the four parts of this typecase. The reader knowing the technical limitations of computerized typesetting can already imagine the effect of computers on the Arabic script: not being able to cope with the complexity of the Cairo typecase, the computer industry has tried (and was
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