The visual equivalent of 'Prisencolinensinainciusol'

March 30, 2013 3:25 AM

There are Latin fonts designed to mimic Cyrillic, Asian characters, and many other scripts. What are some examples of foreign-script fonts which mimic Latin characters?
posted by Gordafarin to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

I don't know if single examples count, but Lay's crisps in Thailand obviously hint at the Roman script.
posted by Jehan at 7:05 AM on March 30, 2013

I don't know about fonts, but here are some Hebrew logos that use Latin letterforms, specifically.
posted by vasi at 12:40 PM on March 30, 2013 [2 favorites]

These are alternative alphabets rather than fonts for established alphabets, but you might find something interesting at Omniglot's page of Constructed Scripts. For example, Akkhara Muni for Pali, or Lipen Søerjehn for English and Tagalog. (Although to be honest I don't know how Pali and Tagalog are usually written down, so I don't know how far these alphabets deviate from the norm.)

Just to throw in a nice example in the opposite direction (i.e. another foreign-looking representation of English), I'm rather fond of Xu Bing and David B. Kelley's Square Word Calligraphy, which grew out of the former's "Book From the Sky" (discussed half-way down this Language Log article).
posted by logopetria at 1:13 PM on March 30, 2013

logopetria's answer reminds me of the Cherokee syllabary, which seems to mimic Roman script. It is said that the syllabary's inventor had seen examples of written English, and understood the concept of writing, but could not himself read English. Thus his letters look like Roman letters but have different sounds.
posted by Jehan at 4:17 PM on March 30, 2013