Aravit, a new typeface which manages to merge Hebrew and Arabic letters together, is being billed as a language of peace - and it’s not hard to see why.
Liron Lavi Turkenich, a 32-year-old Israeli graphic designer and researcher, was inspired to see if she could combine the two languages by the bilingual road markings and other official signage in her home town of Haifa, which has a large Arab population.
“It’s common to hear both Hebrew and Arabic in Haifa. I don’t speak Arabic, and one day I noticed I ignore the language,” she said in a video explaining how Aravit works. “I looked for a way to bridge the gap and that led to my project.”
The writing system utilises the work of French ophthalmologist Louis Émile Javal, who discovered that we only need to be able to see the top half of Latin letters to make sense of a word.
The same is true for Arabic - and, as Ms Turkenich found, the bottom half of the Hebrew alphabet.
She eventually created 638 characters which cover all possible letter combinations.
While several initiatives along the same lines as Aravit have been floated in the past, but Ms Turkenich’s invention appears to be making real waves: a video in Hebrew explaining the project has been viewed on different social media accounts more than a million times and generated thousands of positive comments since it was picked up by Israeli public broadcaster Kan last week.
Language is often tied up with politics in Israel and the occupied West Bank; in May, Israeli politicians gave their backing to a bill which would make Hebrew the only official language in the Jewish state - a move critics said marginalises Israel’s 20 per cent Arab population.
“This didn’t start as a political project, but the response on the street is amazing,” Ms Turkenich said.
“People can read it right away and feel like they’ve solved a riddle. Bottom line, I wanted everyone to read the language they find easiest… without ignoring the other language which is always present."
