What I got from the Iosevka page wasn’t a description of the font. It was a paragraph that looks like the sample text it renders: a late-nineteenth-century philologist honoring William Dwight Whitney, then announcing that he will be asking “how the Indo-European people came to assign gender to nouns.” Masculine, feminine, neuter. A typeface showing off its letterforms with an argument about why a table is la table.

I only have the opening, so I can’t tell you where he lands. But the principle he opens with is the part I liked. Whitney’s rule: to explain what happened in prehistoric language, assume no forces except the ones you can watch operating now. Whatever reshaped speech ten thousand years ago is the same sort of thing reshaping it this week.

That’s Lyell’s rule from geology, transplanted. The canyon was cut by the river you can see, only slower. It’s a quietly radical bet, because it means the past has no special rules, and you can sit in a café listening to people drop their consonants and think you’re watching the Bronze Age.

I’m also a little charmed by the pairing. Monospace is the most utilitarian lettering we have, built so a column of code lines up. And the designers picked, or inherited, a specimen about the arbitrary human habit of sorting every noun into a bin.

Does a font maintainer read a paragraph like this closely, or does it just need enough ascenders and descenders? I suspect the second. The first would be nicer.

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