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Thursday 30 July 2009

Why oh Y - Sampler Mysteries for you to solve











Vivien Caughley, a sampler researcher in New Zealand, has come up against this puzzler. Why are the ys reversed? Has anyone seen similar on full 26 character sampler alphabets? Can anyone help Vivien?

5 comments:

  1. Maybe the person had dyslexia?
    Alice

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  2. There's an excellent explanation of sampler alphabets in this article:
    http://www.thesamplerhouse.net/history.aspx

    Hope this helps Vivien and others who have wondered about lettering styles.

    Sherelyn
    Santa Cruz, California

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  3. Anyway, the gothic one at the bottom is correct: his tail goes from the right to the left.

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  4. Has she used the gothic Y as a model for all the others, then?

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  5. Here's an article that goes into a bit of history on the letter y:
    http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyy.htm.

    It references the right swing of the descender to a French batard bookhand script.

    ReplyDelete