Gaelic type and "YEPPICK"

Recently my cousin mentioned the misreading of my name by Cowering (or someone else who maintains the GoodNES database).

The "YEPPICK" problem arose from a build of a snake game I released in the early 2000s whose CHR ROM had an alphabet in insular script, commonly associated with the Irish language but also used for Anglo-Saxon (Old English). One form of the letter 'r' in insular script is 'ꞃ', which somewhat resembles the roundhand cursive form of 'p'. This thread on a fountain pen forum discusses open 'p'.

I even found one scholarly reference that nails the "YEPPICK" problem. From Palaeographia Latina, edited by Wallace Martin Lindsay, page 39:

Statistics on the use of "open" 'p' have not yet been collected (except that in Beneventan script only close 'p' is reported), but it appears that a very open form of 'p' is a mark of antiquity, as in "Introd" facs. 142 (from the Anglo-saxon minuscule of the Moore Bede, written c. 773, with 'p' often dangerously like Insular 'r'.

That's why when I made another insular pixel font three years ago, I chose the less confusing forms for 'r' (ʀ not ꞃ) and 's' (s not ꞅ), both of which are attested in insular script, but retained the distinctive insular forms for "d f g t" (ꝺ ꝼ ᵹ ꞇ). I don't have the old snake game handy, but here's the 2014 insular font:


Incidentally, the name Mackenzie derives from a similar misreading, in this case reading yogh (ȝ), a letter derived from a form of 'g', as a tailed 'z' (ʒ). In Middle English and Middle Scots, it represented several sounds now spelled as 'g', 'y', 'gh', or 'ch' as in "Bach", especially the 'ugh' sounds in "dough" and "laugh" that have mutated or dropped out in modern English. "Coinneach" is the Scottish Gaelic form of the name Ken, where "MacCoinnich" means "son of Ken". It mutated to "Makenȝie" in Scots, which was supposed to be pronounced "Makenyie" but ended up misread as "Mackenzie".

There's a "TERRICK" floating around as well, presumably from a misreading of a capital Y with a shallow valley as a T.

Whatever you say, DJ Temples.

Classic example of something similar: Ye olde tavern.

Where y is just a misread futhark rune for "th" - Þ

That does look like an easy mistake to make:


Did you ever make a GORILLAS.BAS?

Only if you read the fine print of your "wappanty" when you install a new "ppogpam". I mistakenly thought at the time that people would be able to reason from the appearance of the same letters in other words.

If the screen had used the 2014 font, it'd've looked like the second and fourth rows:

But then the larger x-height creates a problem with the pair 'r' and 'k', similar to the problem with 'h' and 'n' in the font that comes with my VWF engine. These pairs aren't as much of a big deal in running English text, just in names.

Nor do they create any sort of problem in Irish because Irish uses 'c' instead of 'k', and insular script denotes a lenited consonant with a dot above rather than 'h' after. An Irish display engine would probably resemble one for Japanese kana, where the character occupies the bottom half of an 8x16 cell and the top half holds a double tick for voicing or ring for fortition.


No, but Chris Covell did, and it's on Double Action 53 under the name "Solar Wars". My involvement was limited to porting it to UNROM back when the menu couldn't handle CNROM.

But would the gorilla game run on a white Lite? No, you need at least a DSi to run Petit Computer.

Woof Woof Yerrier.

Found an example of the r/k minimal pair in the wild: "For You" gift tags get confused with "Fok You", as reported by @DrLizStafford.

2001 vomion yeppich nibbles comes wich absolucely no wappancy chis is ppee soptwape. ano you ape welcame to pediscpbuce ap notipy ic subsect ca captain cepms! pead the capying pile pop decails. you can peach the soupce cave pop this ppognam at pine15ht.com apisinal by micposapt copp. not licenseu by nintenao Press Scott

I guess For You is traditional english, and modern english would be F*r You?

The font is reminding me of the CPC game "Sorcery" (there are plenty screenshots if you search for CPC sorcery).
For R and K they've simply used modern/uppercase letters. And D and F and G are also modernized.
The T is similar than yours, but less curvy, with less risk to confuse it with C. And the I is much wider to match up for non-proportional drawing.
Well, and it's using 7pix height with 9pix spacing, that's quite different from your (old) font with 4pix height.

On the other hand, deciphering old-fashioned fonts (or fantasy/sci-fi fonts) with confusing symbols can be entertaining by itself.
In older german prints, small letters like "mnrou" can be bewildering hard to distinguish from each other, the outstanding fun-factor is that lowercase "s" is usually having almoft the fame fhape as "f" (except at the end of the word, there it's having a normal "s" shape).

Somebody just having a quick look at the game for scribbling down the game's title and the name of the author is a special case. Maybe graffiti artists can give some useful advice on creating legible signature tags (or at least give some tips on what to do when people are blatantly misreading their signatures).

The form of lowercaſe s that looks like f is long s, which Unicode encodes at U+017F.

Insular has its own long s (ꞅ). Like the antiqua long s, insular long s corresponds to insular f (ꝼ) minus the crossbar.

Incidentally, the Eszett (ß) was originally a ligature of long s plus regular s (ſs) in Latin, or long s plus tailed z (ſʒ) in German. The two ligatures were eventually unified.

It's funny you mention this, because I've had the occasion to see an old Bible in pre-revolutionary french. Most "s" uses the form that looks like a f, but sometimes a modern "s" is also used. We can see that it's not just a change of a letter's shape, but really a loss of information when they switched to only the modern "s".

Just as Greek has two forms for sigma (medial σ and terminal ς), long and ſhort s reſpectively take the ſame roles.

([wikipedia:Long s] also said this)