At 05:41 6/27/2002, Wm Seán Glen wrote: >Serifs came about through experimentation because carving in stone tended >to crack unless it was done that way. Something about relieving the >stresses in the material, I think.
I think this theory has been pretty thoroughly debunked. In the first place, the majority of archaic and classical Greek inscriptions have no serifs, and there is no evidence that this practice caused any kind of structural problems in the stone. I have just returned from the Thessaloniki, where I saw many such inscriptions in the archaeological museum and the royal tombs at Vergina. Fr Edward Catich, in _The Origin of the Serif_ (1968), provides a convincing argument that the development of serifs in classical Roman epigraphy derived from the practice of painting the letters on the stone prior to cutting them. They are an artifact of brush lettering, not stone cutting. John Hudson Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED] Language must belong to the Other -- to my linguistic community as a whole -- before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to it. - Terry Eagleton
