- en
- pl
Izografia (“isography”) is a writing system devised by the Polish logician Tadeusz Wójcik (1917-1975), designed as an improved writing system to supersede existing alphabets.
This summary is based on Wójcik's article “Wspólne pismo dla ludzi i maszyn” (“A common writing system for humans and machines”), published in the December 1971 issue of the Polish periodical “Młody Technik” (page 36 here); and a brief follow-up article, which appeared in the April 1972 issue (page 59 here). Wójcik also wrote a number of scientific publications, which I have not read.
Purpose
Wójcik proposed his Izografia as a universal system, usable for all languages, with a single standard set of glyphs. The author argued that izografia could supersede all existing alphabets, and argued for its advantages as follows:
- All words are written phonetically, with no exceptions or irregular spellings. Additionally, there is no separation into upper- and lower-case letters. Therefore, izografia would simplify spelling, making the writing system easier to learn.
- Because the glyphs are composed of simple geometric elements based on a rigid grid, izografia writing is well-suited for optical character recognition. (This idea is similar to bespoke OCR typefaces, which had already existed since the 1960s.)
- The script is more space-efficient (no digraphs, smaller vowels) and thus printing and writing requires less ink and paper.
In the two aforementioned articles, Wójcik provided examples of Izografia texts in Polish, Russian and English (although he noted that proper notation for English vowels was yet not complete.)
Characteristics
Izografia uses a two-line writing format: the lower line is dedicated to consonants; the narrower upper line contains vowels, as well as markers for aspirated consonants and tones. Each glyph is constructed from a standardized set of straight lines and arcs, based on a square grid (the glyph template is depicted on the cover of the 1971 “Młody Technik” issue - see here).
Glyphs have one-to-one correspondence to phonemes. Visual features of the glyphs correspond to particular types of phonemes. For example, glyphs representing voiced consonants contain arcs in their upper halves, while those for unvoiced consonants do not. Voiced/unvoiced consonant pairs correspond to pairs of glyphs with similar shapes; for example, “p” is written as 𝖤 while “b” is written as 𝖡, which is shaped like 𝖤 with added arcs. Palatalized consonants (which are particularly common in Slavic languages such as Polish) have glyphs struck through with a line.
Example
An example of English sentences written in the Izografia writing system devised by Tadeusz Wójcik. Based on an example paragraph provided by Tadeusz Wójcik in “Młody Technik”, issue 4/1972, p. 63; redrawn from scratch by Havoc Crow.
The black symbols are English sentences written in Izografia, as originally drawn by Tadeusz Wójcik. The blue text is the English text. The red text represents each Izografia symbol (consonants and vowels) as Latin and IPA symbols, to illustrate that Izografia represents text phonetically; elongated vowels are represented with a colon :. The font is Liberation Mono.
Incidentally, Wójcik's Izografia text does not faithfully represent English pronunciation; in particular, 'has' is written as if the vowel was elongated (although it might be Wójcik's attempt at representing the schwa, ə; Wójcik writes in the caption that notating English vowels was still a work in progress as of 1972).
Note that in the original example, the word “goes” was written with the glyph “∠”, which according to the author's attached explanation stands for 'eu'. I assume it's a mistake, so I have replaced it with its mirror image “⦣”, which stands for “ou”.
Reception
In the end, Izografia did not find any success (the author's death in 1975 probably didn't help), and today is one of many forgotten utopian ideas.