The Fonts That Broke Germany 

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Palemonas, the Lithuanian font regarding the legend about our nations 'Roman' origin, created duting the Renaissance period

Merriweather (which I was surprised to see in the video)

That depends, but I'm very fond of Garamond typefaces (there are many). Often paired up with Univers (a sans-serif family).

I thought my brain glitched when I heard that

I thought I was having a stroke there for a moment then I rewound like five seconds and saw that I wasn’t…

𝖙𝖗𝖚𝖊 𝖋𝖗

best comment

And all Hip-Hop from the 1990’s through the late 2000’s.

that's pretty neat, so you just read aloud and they transliterate it into modern German orthography how different is German cursive from English?

Even old magazines were printed in Fraktur.. I've got some pre-WW1 magazines from the Bremen area and WOW. I can read it too.

@@nxtvim2521 Oh boy. Look up "Sütterlin" handwriting examples, you will have a hard time reading it. Coincidentally I had to read a Sütterlin sentence this week and this one sentence took me 5 minutes, despite having some experience with it...

​@@nxtvim2521Nowadays not so much, but there were Kurrent and Sütterlin which were essentially old cursive.

​@@aramisortsbottcher8201The fun fact is that Sütterlin was created in the early 20th century to replace the "old-fashioned" ways of writing cursive they had before then. There's Kurrent which is even harder to read

Thanks, the mistake annoyed by mildly

So many things share the fait of being linked to the Ns besides existing before.

I wonder how the other 'Gothic' fonts got their names, like Bastard & Schwabacher

@@mm552 Wikipedia has all that information

@@passatboi Yeah, that makes sense. Not sure why I didn't think of that 😅

Definitely not _origins._ Protestants might have made it fashionable, but the stylistic elements that it originates from are centuries older than Luther's blogpost. It might be stretching it a bit, but I'd be sorely tempted to argue that the origins of Fraktur were in the Carolingian Minuscule, a sort of scribal standard that arose and spread in the early years of the Holy Roman Empire, founded 800 CE. That standard, stylised in a particular direction, became a bunch of Blackletter hands, including the ones that we nowadays call Fraktur. Gutenberg then happened to invent a scribe-fast machine, which popularised his personal cultural preference, which happened to be a kind of Fraktur, and for a while, this variety spread much more rapidly than its competitors.

Also, Rammstein. Also, biker jackets.

You obviously don't listen to a lot of Heavy Metal music! Or '80's Heavy Metal, anyway, so as to capture that kinda _Teutonic_ look! Nowadays most HM bands seem to favour logos that look like they were scratched onto a schoolroom desk. Kinda hard to incorporate goats heads and pentagrams into those "Ölde World~ey" Fraktur/Old English/Gothic style typefaces! Oh and then there must be a gajillion newspaper mastheads... (What's a 'newspaper', Daddy?)

He said emperor Maximilian created it. Definitely not a Protestant.

Also, highest abstract algebra books, more precisely Lie algebras

Very true, Most people aren't some sort designer though.

Meanwhile, Polish has both "czcionka" (native Polish word) and "font" (obviously borrowed from English) which Polish people argue which word is correct as colloquially are interchangeable but according to the Polish Language Council; "czcionka" refers to traditional printing presses while "font" refers to modern digital computers and printers.

i've noticed that most of the research in his videos is quite shallow. he seldom makes a real effort to pronounce words from other languages correctly or source audio clips with the correct pronunciation. with that being said, i enjoy his videos and the fun topics, taking the commentary with a grain of salt.

@@jbw416 He already acknowledges that they aren’t correct, and to take them with a grain of salt. He literally says this in a decent amount of videos.

@@NBrixH that's the laziest solution to putting the wrong information in his videos

Was Finnish written with this typeface or did Swedish or something dominate scripts?

@@deutschermichel5807 both Swedish and Finnish were written with fraktur, but the the usage of it stopped much sooner than with Finnish. Even some Finnish news articles were written with fraktur on the papers. 1900-1950's many news papers had some parts written with fraktur, and some with the latin script. I haven't read Swedish in that style because Finnish is my native language.

@@Niko_P_Iskanius does it look ”good” or suitable in your eyes to write Finnish with blackletters?

@@deutschermichel5807 yes it does look nice. There is some candy packets that use fraktur. You can google Sisu candy and see for yourself

Fraktur was used by Catholics and Protestants likewise.

​Yes, I donʼt get where Name Explain got this Catholic-Protestant dichotomy in regards to typeface from. Fraktur was used by Catholics, too@@ulrichhartmann4585

@@ulrichhartmann4585 Perhaps, but I thought that this video said that the typefaces were associated with different denominations.

@@Furienna... yes because Name Explain lied bruh. I am convinced that he didnʼt want to lie, tho

You can say Hitler you know

I also can read Fraktur quite well without having such a book. My grandmother used to writed the lowercase z in Sütterlin, another typeface. With this I learned (a bit) about the moonphases because the "z" in Sütterlin from "zunehmen" looked like a crescent moon.

@@HalfEye79 Ah yes, the old german "A" with the big arc on the left like the "Abnehmende Mond/waning moon" and the old german "Z" with its big arc on the right like the "Zunehmende Mond/waxing moon". I learned that from my granny as well :)

The U is short

@@aquilla2.087 Nope

@@aquilla2.087 Nein! Definitiv langes U

Comic Sans actually looks better than Calligraffiti because it's at least readable ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-GUCcObwIsOs.html

@@Tailikku1 HERETIC!!!! 😜

If someone went back in time and showed them Comic Sans we could probably have a German Reich (and possibly WWI) a hundred years ahead of time.

I honestly donʼt think he should. I appreciate his work on yt but he (consciously) makes so many oversimplifications that important details get brushed over. For example Fraktur is not nor was it ever a particularly protestant typeface

@@deutschermichel5807 I have many Lutheran books in Fraktur, so…. 🤪 Just kidding. What I found a little annoying was the suggestion that Fraktur can be difficult to read. I am an American, whose native language is English. Granted, I have worked with Fraktur for nearly 30 years, and have many books printed in it. Yet my German sister-in-law cannot read it easily, if at all. Put anything in Kurrent or Sütterlin in front of her, and she channels Satan in German basically telling me no sane person would have a clue to what those scribbles are. Which thinking of it, I think I think I should start writing her letters in Sütterlin for instructions on family events. But I digress. On a side note, I personally do like Fraktur. Not because some of the German reasons it dominated for so long, but rather for its artistic presentation, as well as its uniqueness in modernity. Let me tell you, you haven’t read the Bible until you read it in its original Fraktur print. (Sorry, a poor joke based on a Star Trek reference.) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-HsCVuO1yeJc.htmlsi=KhcbapqI9UgIwo5v

@@stephenkneller6435 lol When I mentioned to my Latin teacher that I read a hundred years old Lutheran Bible printed in Fraktur, she told me to just go read the Latin Vulgate already 😂

It's probably just a matter of exposure. I find Fraktur (and other kinds of blackletter) easy to read (in my head, their letterforms' skeletons are close enough to modern popular Latin script letterforms to recognise at glance; Schwabacher generally being closer to what I'm used to than High Fraktur), I can also read Sütterlin easily, sometimes with a bit of effort, but I often really can't make heads or tails out of Kurrent. And that's probably because my local library used to have a couple of old books typeset in Fraktur or Schwabacher, Sütterlin is reasonably close to the modern 'European cursive' hand that I learnt as a child, and my exposure to Kurrent has been brief enough for my brain not to learn to recognise its patterns just yet. => If you need to read (or write) any of these, it's probably just a matter of some practice, not a significant inherent complexity.

Wait until you see Marx's handwriting. A doctor saw it and gave up trying to read it.

I did my MA on early 20th century German history and had to work with index cards typed by librarians who couldn't read Fraktur. I remember one index card book title that included the words "Unferes Fozialen Brogramms". 😅

@@donatist59 Lol, I think my favorite in Fraktur was the "tz" at the end of words that could look like a tiny capital B.

> "but, of course, it's perfectly possible to have a long s in a Roman typeface as well." Indeed, and the moſt common fonts ſtill have it, juſt in caſe.

This is a test to see if I can type an umlaut using its defined MacOS keystroke Cmd-u Nope, YT rejects it.

Command U is undo. I think you're looking for option U which only works on certain keyboard layouts. On others you press option U then either the letter you want umlauted or space if you just want a naked umlaut.

In Linux it's easy enough even on a US keyboard layout, if you have a Compose key set: äöüßſ

Exactly, so weird and annoying

Tirritate them with Katakana Fraktur. 😸

I love texts that have German written in Fraktur, Latin written in Antiqua, Greek written in Greek letters. I have like four Latin school books like this at home

I never understood how people can have issues with reading Fraktur. Like every letter looks like its supposed to except the lowercase x.

@@OneAngryVelociraptor The lowercase f and s can sometimes look alike.

That’s been happening for at least six months or so. Maybe more. I agree that it is a bit of an annoying quirk.

Is a UK thing? There was a contestant (Dana) on Great British Bake-off last season who spoke in the exact same way…

Very off-putting.

Not to mention the vocal fry. I always feel people who speak like that are trying to prove something.

Heck, we already had a few modernist sans-serif fonts even before WW2. Futura was designed in Germany in 1927, for example -- inspired by a lot of the same ideals that were driving Bauhaus designs (in architecture and other things) at the same time.

But we are still more...

Germans tend to imagine they invented Protestantism (it was actually the Czechs). A bit like Lager (also a Czech invention).

​@@chrisoneill3999 wasn't the Protestant shift mainly based around Martin Luther? As far as I know he was German.

​@@chrisoneill3999so we can blame protestantism on the Czech 🤫

@@chrisoneill3999 No, protestantism was invented by the Hugenots. Or is Christianity perhaps a protestantism of judaism? Seriously, arguments like these are entirely pointless. Martin Luther invented Lutheranism, I think we can say that for sure, but claims like "we invented beer" or "we invented not liking the pope" are nonsensical, because there have always been people (christians) not liking the pope and organizing around that ever since the pope, just like people have basically always made alcohol out of grains, ever since grains. Something like Lager beer, or Protestantism didn't come out of nowhere, so there can't be a definite, single inventor of it. Even for something like the light bulb or the telephone, seemingly every country on earth has "their guy", who is supposedly the inventor of it. Because there actually isn't "the one" inventor, but a series of step by step innovations around the technology, that included lots of people from lots of nations, without just "the one" inventor being part of that. A more recent example is the internet, same story.

OMG, I was about to leave the same comment. So curious about his peculiar accent.

The AI ​​that YT uses cannot distinguish for what purpose this designation is used. Whether it is an argument for or against, or, as in this case, a historical fact. And size advertising partners, for example, don't want their advertising to be shown in front of, say, a Nazi channel. The ceator can then have his videos checked and re-activated by YT, but this takes several days and then most of the clicks are through and thus the option to earn money with the video.

It really isnʼt. Bismarck took the nationalist German side of the dispute. But saying Antiqua was Latin and Catholic while Fraktur was German and Protestant is simply a lie

What do you have against Bismarck?

@@OneAngryVelociraptor Mainly that he made German unification impossible for the foreseeable future, and that he set up a way too intricate system that nobody could have maintained for long.

I haven't seen them used that way, but I've seen R and C set in Fraktur to represent the sets of real and complex numbers, respectively.

These are the symbols I got thought to use for sets, ℝ (Unicode: U+211D) set of real numbers ⅈ (U+2148) set of imaginary numbers ℂ (U+2102) set of complex numbers ℕ (U+2115) set of natural numbers ℚ (U+211A) set of rational numbers ℤ (U+2124) set of integers There are also , ℍ and ℙ, in the letterlike block and ⅅ, ⅆ, ⅇ and ⅉ in the double struck italic math block but I'm insure what sets those were, if any at all. It's been a while

I heard that it was because it is easier to read than fraktur to foreigners.

From a German perspective Fraktur was easier to read, because it had certain constructs that helped with grouping the letters correctly, particular in compound words, which is why it was simply the standard typeface for things like newspapers back then. (There is a similar reason why newspapers and books still consistently employ typefaces with serifs up to this day). Hitler generally favored geometry based eastatics, which is very evident when you look into the building projects commisioned. As such he personally prefered Aniqua over Fraktur. However he was faced with the issue that in a political context, Aniqua fonts, in particular the relativly new sans-serif, where more associated with the political left and many of his associates and party members prefered Fraktur, in particular the "sans-serif Fraktur" styles that became popular a few years before the Nazi-takeover. For this reason he sidesteped the issue until 1944 when the "normal font decree" was issued. In this decree Fraktur fronts where labled as "Jewish" (a bullshit excuse to not having to give a meaningfull reason.) and where to be phased out in both goverment use and eductation. After the war, the allied occupation forces had little love for Fraktur because they themselves found it difficult to read and as such also promoted antiqua. Politically all forces wanted to associate more with the pre-war left and thus used antiqua. Given that sans-serif Fraktur fonts where also very associated with the Nazi era, they stopped being used in advertisment and such. It was this combination of factors that effectivly killed Fraktur.

2 main reasons. 1. He liked being wrong. 2. Hes austrian (which may be connected to 1.)

I thought I was having a stroke for a sec

@@bezzquiko was just about to say this!

Sounds like the mainstream should conquer back blackletters typefaces! ✊

Germany is paranoid about nazism, also when it makes no sense

​@deutschermichel5807 true

If you haven’t already been to Germany I would highly encourage you not to miss the experience of a lifetime and I am not exaggerating either. I travelled to koln for a contract in the Fordwerke factory for a year or so and my dad had already worked over there in the 1980s but still nothing made me ready for the experience, the people, culture etc everything.🎚️

As a German I respectfully donʼt get how anyone canʼt read it. I mean, just read lol. I see how the fancy fractured (broken) nature of the letters might confuse the eyes of the reader but is it so hard to focus on the lettersʼ core form. Every letter of Fraktur (except maybe x, y but they are pretty much non-existant in German) looks basically like the Antiqua version but a little fancier

​@@deutschermichel5807We germans cant have problems with it because we know the words and you only need to recognize like every 3rd letter of a word to read a language you speak fluently. The thing is foreigners arent as familiar with the words so they actually need to read the individual letters to figure out whats written there.

Yes

I wish we still used it in germany. It looks pretty, has a lot of history and the french cant read it. Its literally the perfect typeface.

lol but only politicians like Otto von Bismarck and intellectuals cared

German cursive is influenced by runes.

But Catholics used Fraktur the same Protestants did. There was no religious divide

Same

same

I literally have my phone set to it and my handwriting kind of looks like it too

@@robinrehlinghaus1944 same

@@robinrehlinghaus1944 cool! What do you mean your handwriting looks a little like Fraktur? Are you writing not cursive?

The reason for this is that Fraktur and Aniqua where not seen as two seperate typefaces but as different scripts, as such the situation is more akin to what you today have in Serbia, where the language can be written in both Latin and Cyrillic, but of course this wouldn't extend to other languaages.

@@nacaclanga9947 That's extremely interesting that you should have brought up the matter of Serbian, as that brings back an argument I had with somebody elsewhere on RU-vid who was trying to make out that Slovak was nothing more than a dialect of Czech, which is simply not the case. They actually added that Serbian and Croatian were much more different from each other than were Czech and Slovak, which further mystified me, as I'd long been under the impression that Serbian and Croatian are effectively the same language - ie., Serbo-Croat - the only difference being that the former is written in Cyrillic, while the latter is written in Latin. If Serbian can indeed be written in Latin, too, that makes Serbian and Croatian yet closer to each other.

Wie kann man das nicht lesen? Lies! Erkennen Sie einfach die Grundform der Buchstaben und lassen Sie sich nicht vom Geschnörkel verwirren! Im Grunde sieht jeder Buchstabe ob Fraktur oder Antiqua gleich aus

Ja, denn mir ging es ebenso und das S-Problem hat mich ebenfalls immer gestört. Ich habe auch bei mittelalterlichen Texten angenommen, dass sie in Fraktur verfasst sind, doch wenn man genauer hinschaut, bemerkt man erst die unterschiedlichen Schrifttypen, die sich Textura oder Schwabacher nennen.

@@michaelneuwirth3414 aber welches S-Problem? Am Anfang oder inmitten einer Silbe schreibt man ſ, am Ende einer Sibe schreibt man s. Doppel-s inmitten eines Wortes wird geschrieben wie bei Waſſer, und am Ende einer Silbe wie in wäßrig.

Then don't be mad about the typeface, be mad about the people that never teached it or helped you in that regard.