Re: Heb. Fonts and Lions Tails Re: Serif vs. sans serif

>Daniel A. Wier <dawier@...>
>>The design, I've
>>heard, is intended to represent little flames, referring to the 'fire' of
>>the Holy Spirit, Who inspired the recording of Scripture.  But that claim
>>came from a certain Christian (and very Gentile) pastor.
>>
>>Come to think of it, you do have in traditional Jewish square script, those
>>little 'serifs' that turn up in the upper left corner of the symbol.  What
>>are they called in Hebrew anyways?
>
>I've heard them referred to as "horns"...
>But just this week one of the middle schoolers
>called the "flame" on the "lamed" a "lions tail"
>I thought this was the cutest name I've ever heard
>it called and I asked where she got this from...
>she said her Sabbath school teacher calls them
>that... and when made with a brush, or a flat pen
>they do look like a little "lion's tail".
>
>This swash script is very brush oriented... when
>I print the characters I omit these "horns"... sort
>of like Arial/Helvitic Hebrew :-))) Cursive hebrew
>of course doesn't have them.
Another script with serifs which I don't think has been mentioned yet
is the Ge'ez (?) script of Ethiopia and Eritrea, used to write Amharic,
Tigre, Tigrinya, Oromo, etc..  This script usually has little square
serifs at the end of each of the horizontal lines.  (As with Hebrew, the
standard print-form probably evolved out of pen-and-ink writing with
a flat-tipped nib.)

I like those little square serifs so much that I adopted them as a
design feature of the Tokana script - with the consequence that the
Tokana script now looks like a straight rip-off of the Ge'ez script,
when in fact the letter forms are quite different (imagine an
Ethiopian scribe writing Germanic runes, with a few Cyrillic and
Devanagari characters mixed in).

Matt.