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Fraktur () is a
calligraphic hand Calligraphy (from el, link=y, καλλιγραφία) is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instrument. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as "t ...
of the Latin alphabet and any of several
blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...
typefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the curves of the Antiqua (common) typefaces modeled after antique Roman square capitals and Carolingian minuscule. From this, Fraktur is sometimes contrasted with the "Latin alphabet" in northern European texts, which is sometimes called the "German alphabet", simply being a typeface of the Latin alphabet. Similarly, the term "Fraktur" or "Gothic" is sometimes applied to ''all'' of the blackletter typefaces (known in
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
as , "Broken Script"). The word derives from Latin ("a break"), built from , passive participle of ("to break"), the same root as the English word "fracture".


Characteristics

Besides the 26 letters of the
ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and ...
, Fraktur includes the ( ), vowels with umlauts, and the ('' long s''). Some Fraktur typefaces also include a variant form of the letter r known as the r rotunda, and many include a variety of
ligature Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
s which are left over from cursive handwriting and have rules for their use. Most older Fraktur typefaces make no distinction between the majuscules and (where the common shape is more suggestive of a ), even though the minuscules and are differentiated. One difference between the Fraktur and other blackletter scripts is that in the lower case , the left part of the bow is broken, but the right part is not. In Danish texts composed in Fraktur, the letter was already preferred to the German and Swedish in the 16th century. In the Latvian variant of Fraktur, used mainly until the 1920s, there are additional characters used to denote Latvian letters with
diacritical marks A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
. Stroked letters , , , , are used for palatalized consonants (, , , , ) stroked variants of and distinguish voiced and unvoiced sibilants or affricates ( for voiced for unvoiced / ž/ , while accents (, , , , , ) together with digraphs (, etc.) are used for long vowels (, , , , ). Stroked variants of are also used in pre-1950 Sorbian orthography.


Origin

The first Fraktur typeface arose in the early 16th century, when Emperor Maximilian I commissioned the design of the '' Triumphal Arch'' woodcut by
Albrecht Dürer Albrecht Dürer (; ; hu, Ajtósi Adalbert; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528),Müller, Peter O. (1993) ''Substantiv-Derivation in Den Schriften Albrecht Dürers'', Walter de Gruyter. . sometimes spelled in English as Durer (without an umlaut) or Due ...
and had a new typeface created specifically for this purpose, designed by
Hieronymus Andreae Hieronymus Andreae, or Andreä, or Hieronymus Formschneider, (died 7 May 1556) was a German woodblock cutter ("formschneider"), printer, publisher and typographer closely associated with Albrecht Dürer. Andreae's best known achievements includ ...
. Fraktur types for
printing Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The e ...
were established by the
Augsburg Augsburg (; bar , Augschburg , links=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_German , label=Swabian German, , ) is a city in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, around west of Bavarian capital Munich. It is a university town and regional seat of the ...
publisher Johann Schönsperger at the issuance of a series of Maximilian's works such as his ''Prayer Book'' (, 1513) or the illustrated ''
Theuerdank ''Theuerdank'' (''Teuerdank, Tewerdanck, Teuerdannckh'') is a poetic work composed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, (1486-1519) in German which tells the fictionalised and romanticised story of his journey to marry Mary of Burgundy in 14 ...
'' poem (1517). Fraktur quickly overtook the earlier Schwabacher and Textualis typefaces in popularity, and a wide variety of Fraktur fonts were carved and became common in the German-speaking world and areas under German influence (Scandinavia, Estonia, Latvia,
Central Europe Central Europe is an area of Europe between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, based on a common historical, social and cultural identity. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) between Catholicism and Protestantism significantly shaped the ar ...
). In the 18th century, the German Theuerdank Fraktur was further developed by the Leipzig typographer Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf to create the typeset Breitkopf Fraktur. While over the succeeding centuries, most Central Europeans switched to Antiqua, German speakers remained a notable holdout.


Use

Typesetting in Fraktur was still very common in the early 20th century in all German-speaking countries and areas, as well as in Norway, Estonia, and Latvia, and was still used to a very small extent in Sweden, Finland and Denmark, even though other countries typeset in Antiqua. Some books at that time used related blackletter fonts such as Schwabacher; however, the predominant typeface was the Normalfraktur, which came in slight variations. From the late 18th century to the late 19th century, Fraktur was progressively replaced by Antiqua as a symbol of the classicist age and emerging cosmopolitanism in most of the countries in Europe that had previously used Fraktur. This move was hotly debated in Germany, where it was known as the
Antiqua–Fraktur dispute The Antiqua–Fraktur dispute was a typographical dispute in 19th- and early 20th-century Germany. In most European countries, blackletter typefaces like the German Fraktur were displaced with the creation of the Antiqua typefaces in the 1 ...
. The shift affected mostly scientific writing in Germany, whereas most
belletristic is a category of writing, originally meaning beautiful or fine writing. In the modern narrow sense, it is a label for literary works that do not fall into the major categories such as fiction, poetry, or drama. The phrase is sometimes used pejora ...
literature and newspapers continued to be printed in Fraktur. The Fraktur typefaces remained in use in Nazi Germany, when they were initially represented as true German script; official Nazi documents and letterheads employed the font, and the cover of Hitler's used a hand-drawn version of it. However, more modernized fonts of the type such as Tannenberg were in fact the most popular typefaces in Nazi Germany, especially for running text as opposed to decorative uses such as in titles. These fonts were designed in the early 20th century, mainly the 1930s, as grotesque versions of blackletter typefaces. The Nazis heavily used these fonts themselves, though the shift remained controversial; in fact, the press was at times scolded for its frequent use of "Roman characters" under "Jewish influence" and German émigrés were urged to use only "German script". On January 3, 1941, the Nazi Party ended this controversy by switching to international scripts such as Antiqua. Martin Bormann issued a circular to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the -based handwriting) to be (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use. German historian Albert Kapr has speculated that the regime viewed Fraktur as inhibiting communication in the occupied territories during World War II.


After 1941

Even with the abolition of Fraktur, some publications include elements of it in headlines. However, academic works occasionally continued to use Fraktur in the text itself. Notably, Joachim Jeremias's work ("The Letters to Timothy and Titus") was published in 1963 using Fraktur. More often, some ligatures ch, ck from Fraktur were used in antiqua-typed editions up to the offset type period. Fraktur saw a brief resurgence after the war, but thereafter fell out of common use. Fraktur is today used mostly for decorative typesetting: for example, a number of traditional German newspapers such as the , as well as the Norwegian , still print their name in Fraktur on the masthead (as indeed do some newspapers in other European countries and the U.S.) and it is also popular for pub signs and the like. In this modern decorative use, the traditional rules about the use of long s and short s and of
ligature Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
s are often disregarded. Individual Fraktur letters are sometimes used in mathematics, which often denotes associated or parallel concepts by the same letter in different fonts. For example, a
Lie group In mathematics, a Lie group (pronounced ) is a group that is also a differentiable manifold. A manifold is a space that locally resembles Euclidean space, whereas groups define the abstract concept of a binary operation along with the ad ...
is often denoted by ''G'', while its associated Lie algebra is \mathfrak. A ring ideal might be denoted by \mathfrak (or \mathfrak if a prime ideal) while an element is a \in \mathfrak. The Fraktur \mathfrak c is also sometimes used to denote the
cardinality of the continuum In set theory, the cardinality of the continuum is the cardinality or "size" of the set of real numbers \mathbb R, sometimes called the continuum. It is an infinite cardinal number and is denoted by \mathfrak c (lowercase fraktur "c") or , \mathb ...
, that is, the cardinality of the real line. In model theory, \mathfrak is used to denote an arbitrary model, with ''A'' as its universe. Fraktur is also used in other ways at the discretion of the author. Fraktur is still used among traditional
Anabaptists Anabaptism (from Neo-Latin , from the Greek : 're-' and 'baptism', german: Täufer, earlier also )Since the middle of the 20th century, the German-speaking world no longer uses the term (translation: "Re-baptizers"), considering it biased. ...
to print German texts, while Kurrent is used as hand writing for German texts. Groups that use both forms of traditional German script are the
Amish The Amish (; pdc, Amisch; german: link=no, Amische), formally the Old Order Amish, are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christian church fellowships with Swiss German and Alsatian origins. They are closely related to Mennonite churche ...
, Old Order Mennonites, Hutterites, and traditional Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonites who live mostly in Latin America today.


Typeface samples

In the figures below, the German sentence that appears after the names of the fonts (Walbaum-Fraktur in Fig. 1 and Humboldtfraktur in Fig. 2 reads, . It means "Victor chases twelve boxers across the Sylt dike" and contains all 26 letters of the alphabet plus the umlauted glyphs used in German, making it an example of a
pangram A pangram or holoalphabetic sentence is a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding. Origins The ...
.


Unicode

Unicode does not encode Fraktur as a separate script. Instead, Fraktur is considered a "presentation form" of the Latin alphabet. Thus, the additional ligatures that are required for Fraktur typefaces will not be encoded in Unicode: support for these ligatures is a font engineering issue left up to font developers. There are, however, two sets of "Fraktur" symbols in the Unicode blocks of Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, Letterlike Symbols, and Latin Extended-E. The long s, ß, and the umlauted vowels are not encoded, as the characters are meant to be used in mathematics and phonetics, so they are not suitable for typesetting German-language texts. : 𝔄 𝔅 ℭ 𝔇 𝔈 𝔉 𝔊 ℌ ℑ 𝔍 𝔎 𝔏 𝔐 𝔑 𝔒 𝔓 𝔔 ℜ 𝔖 𝔗 𝔘 𝔙 𝔚 𝔛 𝔜 ℨ : 𝔞 𝔟 𝔠 𝔡 𝔢 𝔣 𝔤 𝔥 𝔦 𝔧 𝔨 𝔩 𝔪 𝔫 𝔬 𝔭 𝔮 𝔯 𝔰 𝔱 𝔲 𝔳 𝔴 𝔵 𝔶 𝔷 : 𝕬 𝕭 𝕮 𝕯 𝕰 𝕱 𝕲 𝕳 𝕴 𝕵 𝕶 𝕷 𝕸 𝕹 𝕺 𝕻 𝕼 𝕽 𝕾 𝕿 𝖀 𝖁 𝖂 𝖃 𝖄 𝖅 : 𝖆 𝖇 𝖈 𝖉 𝖊 𝖋 𝖌 𝖍 𝖎 𝖏 𝖐 𝖑 𝖒 𝖓 𝖔 𝖕 𝖖 𝖗 𝖘 𝖙 𝖚 𝖛 𝖜 𝖝 𝖞 𝖟


See also

* * * * * (letter ''ß'') * * * * * * * * *


Notes


References


Further reading

* Bain, Peter and Paul Shaw. ''Blackletter: Type and National Identity.'' Princeton Architectural Press: 1998. . * Silvia Hartmann: ''Fraktur oder Antiqua. Der Schriftstreit von 1881 bis 1941'', Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main u. a. 1998 (2. üb. A. 1999), * Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. . * Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press: 2006. .


External links


A complete Fraktur chart
(Library of Yale University)
UniFraktur
Free Fraktur fonts and resources at SourceForge
Translating newspapers set in Fraktur
(familyhistoryfanatics) {{Authority control Blackletter Blackletter typefaces Latin script German orthography 16th-century introductions 1941 disestablishments in Germany