Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Eugene Sadko

Under this much abused heading, you’ll find a juicy text about the use of frequency analysis of languages in type design. Initially, I wanted to compare the performance of several typefaces in English, Russian, and Ukrainian languages, but that would amount to a whole tome. Therefore, I will be writing one text for each of the languages separately.

This article is devoted to the Russian language and will be useful to those who create typefaces with Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, but are not native speakers of any Slavic languages.

For each typeface and each alphabet, language is a separate discipline. A typeface may look harmoniously in the Russian language, but appear awkward in Ukrainian or Serbo-Croatian. Similarly, the same person could be a great tennis player and a lousy footballer. Therefore, looking into individual languages seems more practical than the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet in general.

The Cyrillic alphabet is evolving and has no century-proven reference standards. At the same time, Cyrillic letters are used by more than 100 languages with 300 million speakers. Many of them live in the developing countries, which are increasing their online presence. Therefore, demand exists for quality digital fonts with Cyrillic.

Letters and Words in the Russian Language

Grammar and orthography determine the character of words and distribution of letters, and these features are unique for every language. Therefore, before criticizing the Cyrillic, let us consider what graphemes it does offer for each language, and how economical, distinct, and visually balanced they are.

The frequency word book of the Russian National Corpus shows that all texts in Russian have 11% of just one letter o. Five letters о, е, а, и, н make up nearly a half of it.

Also, Russian-language texts have 40 times less uppercase than lowercase letters and they are used in special cases: At the beginning of sentences, in proper names, abbreviations, and all caps headings (there is no Title Case in Russian). Therefore, their distribution in texts is different.

In one of the largest texts in Russian, the War and Peace novel, the most prevalent capital letters are В, О, Н, П, К (names of characters are excluded from the rating), even though without case discrimination, the prevalence of letters is approximately the same as in the whole Russian National Corpus.

And these amazing adventures of the letter A in passport data demonstrate that it is sometimes important to analyze a language in more detail, by selecting texts of a certain genre, kind or style, e.g., research papers, fiction, news, names of city streets etc.

Prevalence determines the impact of proportions of each letter on the capacity of the whole typeface. For instance, by reducing the width of the letters о, е, а by 10%, the majority of texts will occupy 3% less space, even though the length of printed alphabet will only decrease by 0.9%. These values apply to Russian texts only, but in other languages, the same letters will influence the capacity differently.

Of course, any text consists of words rather than separate letters, and those words are not uniformly distributed too. The frequency analysis indicates that 37% of all Russian-language texts consist of 100 words. And eight single-letter words и, в, с, я, а, к, у, о cover 13% of the National Corpus.

Combinations of letters will also be more useful if their prevalence is accounted. The top 100 two-letter combinations cover 66% of all texts in Russian. Unbelievable, but true! 👽 Therefore, it is more convenient to start kerning with the most popular combinations. However, the top combinations and words are best suited for testing irregular typefaces, such as calligraphy, lettering or handwriting imitation.

Test words for early typeface drafts may also be improved if one takes to account the prevalence of letters. For example, a ten-letter «Нобельфайк» represents 47% of Russian-language texts and nearly all types of graphemes in the Russian alphabet. Not bad for a single word. But «Нобервудлайк» covers 60% of the language, all forms, ascenders and descenders, being just three letters longer.

Form and Plastic of Russian Alphabet Letters

Every designer at least once railed against the Cyrillic for the form and plastic of its letters. It has been called a picket fence, and not without reason. But before passing a judgment, one has to look at the evidence and find out what the culprit is guilty of. Could there be some mitigating circumstances?

Nearly 40% of capital letters in Russian-language texts are indeed a real palisade. Scary perpendiculars and three identical descenders. Very few oval shapes — just 20%. However, capital letters account for 2.6% of the language only and rarely combine into groups of more than three. This is a mitigating circumstance.

Lowercase letters are much more harmonious. They only turn 29% of the Russian language into a picket fence. However, 33% of texts consist of pleasing ovals, and 14% of a rather nice combination of semi-ovals and straight lines. Some lowercase letters are quite beautiful. It is a pity that у, р, б, ф cover 10% of texts only.

One thing is certain, however, Russia cannot build a real EMPIRE (ИМПЕРИЮ) with such majuscule 😉

Let us take a look at the “portrait of the Russian alphabet”. Looks like composite photos of two partners in crime. It is immediately apparent that lowercase letters look very similar to capitals. This is incriminating evidence. Excessive similarity between majuscule and minuscule is not only unshapely, but also impractical. The gravest problem of the Russian alphabet is its excessive use of a middle crossbar, as in Н, н. This zone is used in 15 lowercase letters and 18 capitals. Extreme detailing of lowercase letters raises the risk of optical distortion and running ink in printing.

To compare, in the English alphabet, the middle zone is only used in 5 lowercase and 10 capital letters. This simplicity of form, combined with a significant number of ascenders and decsenders, makes English text less susceptible to physical and optical distortions. More details about the English alphabet will be discussed in my next article.

The above mentioned special features of Cyrillic script in the Russian language apply to graphemes and are not related to the historical value of certain forms. However, if one is to improve the quality of the Russian alphabet, some letters will have to be modified. When looking for appropriate substitutes, the historical forms used before the reform of Peter I could be handy. In any case, however, it will be impossible to change graphemes without the opinion of native speakers.

Line Rhythm in Russian Language Texts

The frequency word book of a language allows to more objectively evaluate not just the graphemes but also some specific features of the language at the typography level. A language may have hundreds of thousands of words, but not all words are equally useful when dealing with kerning, evenness of setting, and random effects of lettering or writing.

In text typefaces, such as Roboto, the most common words and letter combinations of the required language are very useful for kerning pairs and adjusting the proportions of characters.

Irregular typefaces, such as Hatter Display usually tend to imitate the randomness and variety of hand work. Nearly everything can be varied, including weight, contrast, height, width, slope, and shape distortions. To create the “randomness” rhythm one needs to keep track of the popular combinations of letters and words to include the most beautiful and entertaining variations.

True randomness looks ugly and not even random. Therefore, the “hand work effect” requires adjustment for each specific language.

In this typeface, however, the Cyrillic codepage was made after the Latin one, and, probably, with no account for prevalence; therefore, the chaotic nature of the base line, height, and distortions are much more noticeable in the English text than in the Russian one.

Cyrillization of a chaotic font is a difficult and interesting task. To repeat a “dancing line” one would need to record distortions in each letter and, based on letter frequency, determine the prevalence of that or other distortion in the whole language. Then, one would need to transpose these distortion to another language, this time with due account for the frequency of letters of the required alphabet. For instance, in English texts, 30% of letters will be jumping up, and 25% hanging down. Therefore, Russian letters, according to the frequency in Russian texts, should repeat this ratio.

All distortions should be distributed so that the most common words and letter combination did not look boring. If your letters depart from the base line by -10, 0, 10 and are condensed by -30%, 0%, 30%, then, you need to make sure than the most common combinations: ост, ени, ого, про, ств, … did not have the series of -10, -10, -10 or 30%, 30%, 30%.

In the fonts, which imitate calligraphy or handwriting, such as Mojito, one also has to “tame the chaos.” As you already understand, frequency word books of the most common world languages will also help with that.

Thanks for reading to the end! Follow me on Medium if you do not want to miss the next articles about the Ukrainian and English languages.

Useful References on the Topic

National Russian Corpus: Website
Top 200 Words and Letter Combs of Russian Language: Download PDF

Fonts Used

Opinion Pro: Rent font
Laqonic 4F: Rent font
Hatter Cyrillic: Rent font
Mojito: Rent font
Roboto: Download font

There Is No Cyrillic was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There Is No Cyrillic

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