Writing Around the World: Trends & Observations, World Written Trends

As we observe writing systems globally, what common attributes are revealed? What stages have led us from early written forms to contemporary writing? Which key inventions have changed the course of writing? How many types of writing systems can we identify?

Kamal Mansour

Since childhood, Kamal has been curious about languages. Through his education, he knew early on that languages could be expressed through different alphabets. The seed for his interest in writing was sown through an introduction to calligraphy in elementary school. As a youth, he was drawn back to calligraphy, which eventually let to an interest in typography.

When digital typography had matured sufficiently to give birth to the Postscript language, Kamal found his backdoor to typography. A dogged determination, coupled with a series of most fortunate events, finally allowed him to break into the field of typography.

In time, he joined the typographic firm Monotype and stayed there for 25 years. As his daughter had declared as a 5-year old, he “played with ABCs all day long”.

Over the years, he got to dissect the typographic details of numerous writing systems, with the aim of putting them back into more orderly form.

Meanwhile, Kamal leaned on his background in linguistics to study the logical foundation of various types of writing. After a few years, he was granted the opportunity to teach a course on Writing Systems at Stanford University.

In the past decade, the Google-sponsored Noto Font project was instrumental in exposing him to more writing systems than he had ever dreamed of. It can be readily confirmed that Kamal is a fast learner since it’s taken him only 6 decades to learn some tidbits about human writing.