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What is the field of study or classification system for indexing glyphs by their visual characteristics?

  • What is the field of study or classification system for indexing glyphs by their visual characteristics? This is one of those questions where there is probably a word for an existing field of study, but I do not know what this word is. Topology would not quite cover it — the glyph for the number eight, the letter B, and the infinity symbol both have two holes in the middle. Example: Indiana Jones spies some markings on a wall, and, though they are faintly familiar, he is unable to place them. He can, however, describe them to a colleague via telegram. Open versus closed figures, axes of symmetry or none at all, straight versus curved lines, presence of dots or not, and so forth. Said colleague consults, say, the Chillicoathe-Penning Index using these descriptions and comes up with some candidate glyphs, their point of origin, and their names, then returns the telegram.

  • Answer:

    I'd go with historical orthographic typology. Or historical orthography. Or historical typology. Also, historical typography.

adipocere at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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I don't know the technical term for it, but Symbols.com has http://www.symbols.com/section/6/category/15/ that lets you search for symbols using some of the criteria you describe (Open versus closed figures, axes of symmetry, etc.).

Rhaomi

The organization of Japanese dictionaries by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_%28Chinese_character%29 is called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_dictionary#Graphically_organized_dictionaries (字形引き , lit. "character shape arrangement") or "logographic collation."

jedicus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraphy? Is that what you're looking for?

smokingloon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics? Might be too general though.

mnemonic

At this point, I think that just gathering vocabulary words is probably as good as it will get for this particular question. Thank you.

adipocere

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