Linguistic Autology: A Revisit, Restructuring and Expansion (an Introduction)

Engglyph—coined by Carl Morris in 2009-- a portmanteau of “English” and “hieroglyph.” Morris uses it to describe words that resemble pictorially what they are. For instance, the word bed looks like one. There are more examples he provides—he uses “CD” as one,  and suggests we ignore the vertical line in the middle; though one could better suggest the "C" functions as the disc entering the player, “D.”  Morris lists another example with “i”—the letter resembles a person with a bobbly big head, a hardship the author (i) can readily sympathize with.

Bruno Munari, the Italian designer, touched on the “shape” of words in his book 'Design as Art'. He emphasizes how, with certain words like jazz, one is often able to recognize the word visually even if the silhouette were filled in. In other words, even if one were only given its outline to decipher--the  shape of the j, coupled with the unmistakable jagged edge of the zs, would indicate what word we were looking at regardless of whether each grapheme had proper airtime.

Effectively, Morris and Munari are emphasizing the geometry of words and letters, with Morris developing this idea further by naming the phenomenon of visual and semantic alignment. In the case of an Engglyph, the word/image in question must be a noun.

In his blog post, Morris mentions autological words.

As noted by Henry Segerman, autological words describe themselves. Segerman offers the words 'four', 'common', and 'polysyllabic' as a few examples. If the word red were typed or written in red, it would qualify as autological. Segerman pushes this further, coining the term autologlyphs for images that describe themselves. Some examples from Segerman are below:

This concept is not unique to graphic design or concrete poetry, Ji Lee’s Word as Image project showcases this attribute, though it does not appear to reference the concept of autological words.

An Expansion

It would prove useful to consolidate the concepts of autological words, Engglyphs, autologlyphs, etc. under the broader umbrella of Linguistic Autology.

Linguistic Autology—the capacity of a linguistic expression to embody, resemble, or enact a property associated with itself.

This can encompass one of many subcategories, including semantic, sonic, performative, and formal autology. Rather than treating Engglyphs and autologlyphs as separate phenomena, they can be denoted as forms of linguistic autology.

The following breakdown is the author’s suggestion:

Semantic Autology — the traditional or most common use of autological words, when the meaning of the word applies to itself; i.e. 'common', 'polysyllabic', 'four'.

Sonic Autology — not to be confused with onomatopoeia: the word’s sound or phonetic expression is connected to its definition; i.e., mellifluous, cacophonous. In this case, the word does not depict a sound as an onomatopoeia would, but instead demonstrates a sonic quality corresponding to its meaning.

Performative / Practical Autology — how a word is communicated or experienced and its connection to its meaning; i.e. the word lazily being pronounced lazily. 

Formal Autology — the visual or material form of a word, letter, phrase, or image relates to what it represents; Engglyphs, Autologlyphs (as described by Segerman), Autolograms (denoted by the author), and Autolographs (denoted by the author).

Note: These categorizations are not mutually exclusive.

Autolograms—a subset of formal autology where an image is constructed with the letterforms in a word or phrase. They can be formally heterological, as in a bike composed of the letters love:

Autolographs—composed only using the letterforms/graphemes of a word or phrase, and possessing semantic or formal autology. Often animated or dynamic:

Specifically for autolographs, the letters are essential, and the image is dependent on each letter and its shape. There are existing examples of related typographic practices, such as Dan Fleming’s Word Animals, in which animals are constructed from the letters in their names. 

The autolograph, has a tighter constraint; the lines and strokes of a letter must be a functional component of the image. It is not enough for a letter to simply occupy the area of the object it helps construct (similar to a tangram puzzle) ; by contrast, each letter's typographic anatomy should be exploited in the construction of the image.

On Autolograms and Autolographs