14 May 2004

Type and Empire, 1

From an interview with Hrant H Papazian designer of typefaces for Latin, Armenian, Georgian, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew scripts:

Nour Yerevan“But virtually everything I complain about in type (even the stuff I take action on) is essentially trivial in the context of the needs of the world. Except for one thing: increasingly I become more worried about Latinization — the imposition of Latin alphabetic ideals on other scripts. It’s really nothing short of cultural imperialism, even cultural genocide. To me Latinization is a henchman of globalization, and anybody who feels that cultural variety is a central pillar of life being worth living needs to fight it.”