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Day 19: Decorative scripts

Today I was working more on the White Raven’s Bilingual picturebooks, developing the writing and argument as I go. While I was working a new book arrived from the stacks, and this was another more-than-2 language multilingual picturebook. They are like gold!

This one is called a French, English and Arabic ABC book, and it was really interesting to look through. At first all I could see was two languages on the left hand page: French first, and English second, so I was looking for the Arabic, and then I realised that the Arabic script is presented beside the illustration on the right hand page, presented in a stylised, illustrative style, which is then picked up on in the black and white illustration accompanying the French and English vocabulary. This reminds me of some beautiful French rhyme collections which I looked at last week, incorporating Armenian and Greek script in with the illustrations. It may be being a little harsh, but to me this reflects a rather condescending approach which treats unfamiliar script as a kind of decoration. It'd be interesting to hear what readers literate in these non-Latin scripts would think.

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