Why is ‘a’ an a? What is a? It’s more than one sound. To the deaf, it’s a glyph used to build words, but not a sound. Why does a language with 44-ish sounds use 26 letters, three of which (c, q, x) are easily replaced phonetically?
Working out a ‘rhetoric and semiotics of typography‘ theory for a book proposal based on thesis and dissertation work.
Letters gain meaning from use, from agreed upon norms. Move beyond typographical history to a land of theory. A is a. Yet even then a is 5400 forms of a, or more.
This seems like a book topic. A Routledge 2017 title claims to be the only (130 page) text specific to semiotics of text on screens. (How’s that for a circular reference?) I found little for my thesis, definitely.
A space to fill? It would be nice to publish a monograph on typography.
I love typography and we inherently know that type is rhetorical. There are too many texts on type that are, at best, supperficially informed by theory and, at worst, mere opinion without scholarship.