I wanted to call this my roman type theory, but it’s just more of an observation of an interesting pattern. Maybe after you read this, you’ll look at the alphabet differently, especially if you’re looking at the alphabet with something obstructing your view of most of it….

What I mean here by the roman alphabet is the characters used to represent the English language to English readers. If you are not familiar with this alphabet…how did you read this?

it is easiest to illustrate this observation step by step:

consider only the top and bottom portions of the alphabet. write out the alphabet in order with these portions highlighted (brown), using a different color (red) for the 1st instance of each distinct top or bottom.

remove each letter not containing the 1st instance of a top or bottom

remove the middles of the letters and subsequent instances of tops and bottoms.

condense the remaining tops and bottoms by shifting leftward

this is where the pattern becomes more obvious. there are only 6 distinct tops and bottoms in the roman alphabet. they are described below in the illustration as:

• single point
• line / curve
• curve
• line
• double point
• triple point

the order in which these 6 tops and bottoms appear is illustrated below (and could also be 1/5 2 3 4 5/1 6, depending on how you look at it).