The three‐legged te

The three‐legged te

It­al­ic type ori­gin­ated as an al­tern­at­ive to ro­man, and gradu­ally evolved in­to its an­cil­lary, com­pan­ion style. Des­pite the ob­vi­ous visu­al dif­fer­en­ces between the two—pos­ture comes to mind first—they are strongly re­lated: it is quite easy to trace their re­spect­ive glyph pat­terns to a com­mon con­struc­tion scheme (ex­cept, prob­ably, the a/a and the reg­u­lar and it­al­ic g).

 

 

Among many mys­ter­ies of Cyril­lic type there are some let­ters whose ro­man ver­sions seem to have noth­ing in com­mon with their it­al­ic coun­ter­parts. De­sign­ers used to Lat­in glyph con­struc­tion pat­tern are of­ten puzzled with those in­con­sist­en­cies and ap­par­ent lack of visu­al con­nec­tion between the ro­man г and the it­al­ic г (U+0433), the д and the д (U+0434), and so on. The it­al­ic т (т, U+0442) look­ing like the Lat­in lower‐case m (U+006D) is one of those oddit­ies.

 

In the his­tory of Cyril­lic writ­ing and ty­po­graphy the т and the т used to be much closer con­nec­ted—as re­cently as in the 19th cen­tury. Just like the Lat­in T (U+0054) the Cyril­lic te (tverdo / Т, U+0422) was dir­ec­tly bor­rowed from Greek (tau / Τ, U+03A4). In 9th cen­tury AD, when Cyril­lic al­pha­bet was in­ven­ted by the Holy Broth­ers, that glyph, shared between the Greek and the Cyril­lic, fea­tured a bar ad­orned with massive tri­an­gu­lar ter­min­als—sim­il­ar to the hanging ter­min­als of the baseline bar of the de (dobro /Д, U+0414) which, in its turn, was ident­ic­al to the Greek delta (Δ, U+0394). That was the form used in ustav, a form­al Cyril­lic writ­ing style, sim­il­ar to Greek un­cial.

 

In time, with the de­vel­op­ment of less form­al, more curs­ive hands—poluustav, skoropis—new forms of the Т and the Д emerged, with longer ter­min­als.

 

In the Т they have be­come nearly as long as the stem, al­most reach­ing
the baseline. By late 17th cen­tury their length equalled the stem’s, so the en­tire glyph looked like the in­ver­ted Ш. Thus the three‐legged т (the m) was born.

 

Civil Type, the first Rus­si­an ro­man in­tro­duced by Peter the Great in
1708–10, fea­tured a single‐stem, tau‐like cap­it­al Т, and a three‐legged lower‐case m.

 

The three‐legged, flat‐topped lower‐case т some­times shows up in it­al­ic
and script faces styled after the types of the 18th cen­tury.

 

In time a sim­il­ar, tri­pod­al form of the cap­it­al Т emerged in form­al
hand­writ­ing; it has be­come a norm­at­ive pat­tern in Rus­sia and oth­er Cyril­lic‐ us­ing na­tions, and is stand­ard today.

 

In the 18th and early 19th cen­tury the three‐legged т was of­ten used in
Rus­si­an pop­u­lar lub­ok prints, as an al­tern­at­ive to the single‐stem т.

 

The single‐stem lower‐case т was first in­tro­duced in print in 1830 by
Count Mikhail Sper­an­sky in his mo­nu­ment­al Pol­noe so­branie za­konov (‘Full Collection of Laws’) for its space‐sav­ing qual­it­ies.

 

The three‐legged т proved quite eco­nom­ic­al in­deed. Be­low is the com­par­is­on
of the very same text from the ori­gin­al edi­tion of the So­branie port­retov rossiy­an (‘Col­lec­tion of por­traits of the Rus­si­ans’) by Pla­ton Beketov (Mo­scow, 1821), and its re­print of 1842.

 

The single‐stem т and the nar­row­er ъ and ѣ were used in the lat­ter, set
in a slightly more con­densed face, which came out one line short­er.

 

Count Sper­an­sky’s ini­ti­at­ive garnered sup­port of the print­ing com­mu­nity,
and gradu­ally, the single‐stem т form be­came a norm in ro­man, while the three‐legged т con­tin­ued to be used in it­al­ic. However, the use of the three‐legged lower‐case т con­tin­ued throughout most of the 19th cen­tury; West­ern type founders (Bodoni, Fry, Didot) kept of­fer­ing ‘Rus­si­an’ fonts with the three‐legged т. The latest use of the tri­pod­al т I have man­aged to find as late as in 1883; by that time that form cer­tainly looked ar­cha­ic and quaint.

 

The top of the lower‐case three‐legged т, flat in poluustav and Civil Type /
Civil Hand, be­came arched in curs­ive hand­writ­ing, and the it­al­ic types. To pre­vent con­fu­sion between the te (m) and the sha (ш), the over­score т and the un­der­score ш had been ad­op­ted.

The use of the over­score in it­al­ic has be­come a stand­ard fea­ture in Ser­bi­an;
it is now ap­plied to three lower‐case glyphs: the ī (U+0433), the ū (U+043F), and, of course, the ш (U+0442).

 

In the 19th cen­tury the use of over­score for dis­am­big­u­ation was stand­ard
prac­tice in German; that could have in­flu­en­ced Vuk Karadžić, a Ser­bi­an lin­guist and a re­former of Ser­bi­an lan­guage, brought up and edu­cated in Aus­tria‐Hun­gary whose main of­fi­cial lan­guage was Ger­man.

The tri­pod­al l.c. т was briefly brought back to life in early 20th cen­tury, in the Rus­si­an typefaces is­sued in com­mem­or­a­tion of, or in con­nec­tion with, the bi­cen­ten­ni­al of Peter the Great’s ty­po­graph­ic re­form—Aka­de­micheskii (Ber­thold, 1911), Pet­rovskii (Lehmann, 1902), Palmyra (Lehmann, 1905–10), and oth­ers.

 

You can still find that pat­tern used, for styl­ist­ic reas­ons, al­though not
ne­ces­sar­ily as a nod to ty­po­graph­ic tra­di­tion.

 

 

 

Curi­ous though it may seem, the three‐legged т had been em­braced by
the Rus­si­an con­struct­iv­ists…

 

 

Kon­stantin
Go­lovchen­ko

de­sign­er, typeface
his­tor­i­an

In­ter­est­ingly, the three-legged t proved to be a highly poly­valent form, one in which dif­fer­ent people could see dif­fer­ent mean­ings. For the Fu­tur­ists, it was likely a ges­ture of pro­voca­tion, a de­lib­er­ate vi­ol­a­tion of es­tab­lished norms.

Con­struct­iv­ists were at­trac­ted to its sim­pli­city, sta­bil­ity, geo­met­ric char­ac­ter, and pre­dom­in­ance of straight lines—primar­ily in sans-serif typefaces, of course. Ad­mirers of the clas­sic­al tra­di­tion, by con­trast, could per­ceive in it el­eg­ance and a ref­er­en­ce to his­tor­ic­al forms; in this case, we are speak­ing of serif typefaces.

For vari­ous theat­ers, stu­di­os, and houses of cul­ture whose names con­tained the let­ter t, the form ac­quired yet an­oth­er mean­ing: the three-legged t re­sembled an en­trance por­tico with columns and could there­fore eas­ily func­tion as an ar­chi­tec­tur­al or stage-re­lated sym­bol, lend­ing a sense of grandeur and ce­re­mony. Not­ably, all of these in­ter­pret­a­tions co­ex­is­ted al­most sim­ul­tan­eously in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, and this con­ver­gence of dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ic tend­en­cies un­doubtedly con­trib­uted to the grow­ing pop­ular­ity of the form.

In later years, the three-legged t con­tin­ued to be used, though more of­ten as a purely ex­press­ive device: to en­liven a line of text or, for ex­ample, to visu­ally broaden a com­pos­i­tion that ap­peared too sparse on a poster.

 

Cor­ri­gendum

It ap­pears that the single-stem lower­case т first ap­peared in Rus­si­an print­ing some­what earli­er than in­dic­ated by Mod­est Korf in his book Life of Count Sper­an­sky. The earli­est known oc­cur­rence of the single-stem т seems to be in Pyotr Köp­pen’s 1827 book So­branie slov­en­skikh pami­at­nikov, na­k­ho­di­ashchikh­sia vne Rossii, rather than in 1830, as had pre­vi­ously been be­lieved.

 

Alexei Sidorov wrote in 1925: ‘The emer­gence of the new pat­tern of the let­ter “te”, sim­il­ar to the up­per-case form of the Lat­in T, has been noted for quite some time. […] Ac­cord­ing to Nikolai Garelin, the earli­est book with a new T is in­deed So­branie slavi­an­skikh pami­at­nikov, pub­lished at the print­ing of­fice of the Orphan­age in 1827.’

This cor­rec­tion has been sug­ges­ted by Kon­stantin Go­lovshen­ko, an out­stand­ing ty­po­graph­ic col­lect­or, ex­pert and con­nois­seur from Odessa. Kon­stantin also provided hy­per­links to the re­spect­ive on‐line re­sources: So­branie slov­en­skikh pami­at­nikov and Kniga v Rossii. Thank you so very much Kon­stantin.

 

More ex­amples Pin­terest col­lec­tion of posters fea­tur­ing ex­amples of the three-legged t, cur­ated by type his­tor­i­an Kon­stantin Go­lovchen­ko.