All About Allography

Kensington Court, Pennington, New Jersey

Since the shape of letters is a crucial element in many visual poems, the creators of these poems must understand allographs.

An allograph is merely a certain way of writing a particular letter. For instance, on this page, you see one common allograph of the minuscule a. This allograph is uncommon in handwriting, but it is quite common in print.

Sometimes called the "two-storey a," this allograph contains exactly the same verbal meaning as the one-storey a we commonly write when we print a small a. But we also write a's in cursive. These a's usually resemble the one-storey a with a tail on either side of it--one tail sloping down to the left and one turning up on the right.

What is interesting about allographs is that they are different accepted shapes (different graphemes) for the same letter. We also have differing majuscule forms of letter--sometimes dramatically different (Q:q, R:r, A:a). Though we can perceive visual similarities between these letters, the real reason we see them as the same letter is that our mind has been taught that they are the same.

In some languages, like Arabic, individual letters have initial, medial, and final forms--different shapes based on whether they appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a word. Their phonetic meaning remains unchanged, but their shape changes.

Yet there is another level of meaning that changes with each allograph, an esthetic meaning that we cannot avoid. I often handwrite little visual poems called fidgetglyphs, whose meanings often depend on the shapes of letters. Often, I distort letters for esthetic effect, but at other times I use different allographs to convey different meanings. For instance, a handwritten double-storey a suggests something exotic, since such a's are so uncommon in handwriting; a single-storey a, on the other hand, exists as the default value of a; a cursive a suggests formality and grace; a capital A suggests stability and authority.

In the context of our visible language, each letter can mean much more than we expect.

ecr. l'inf.