Hrant H. Papazian said that latinization -- "the imposition of Latin alphabetic ideals on other scripts" -- worries him. When I read this, I wasn't quite sure what he means. How do you impose "alphabetic ideals" of one script onto another?

Unlike phonetic systems, typographical features of Russian and English never seemed sufficiently orthogonal to me. There is pretty much seamless fusion between the two alphabets. When I switch languages on keyboard, I continue to type in the "same" font (if it is "russified", more about it later).

In truth, the fusion I take as granted is a result of a long process. Professional typographers do think that fusion between Latin and Cyrillic script is the main direction along which the latter develops. To like it or not is another question, and alas, rethorical one.

This process was started by Peter the Great. In 1708-1710 he personally supervised the typographic reform, that would simplify the printed forms of the Russian language and bring them closer to Latin (he took Dutch fonts as an etalon).

A text in Russian before and after the reform:

Later, Russian typography was mainly influenced by German typographic culture, and finally, after the Revolution of 1917, started to develop completely independently. Practically, it means that most of Russian fonts of that time are "adapted" versions of famous Western species: Century, Cheltenham, Helvetica, etc. The government considered 5-6 fonts more than enough for any publishing activity, so the fonts never proliferate too much in The Soviet Union. Now there are 20 times less Cyrillic fonts than there are Latin.

"Russification" or "adaptations" were sometimes made by the creators of the original font, or a company that had copyright -- in this case the local artists complained that ignorant and indifferent foreigners screwed some intricate and vital Cyrillic proportions, which rendered the resulting type virtually unusable. In other cases, the Russian part of the type was drawn by the local talents, which process is described here (Russian) and as the saying goes, if you like laws and sausages, you better never see how either is made.

I am not aware of any instance of the reverse process, when some Latin font would be inspired by a Cyrillic original. If you are, let me know. Granted, there are some fonts that are stylized to look like Old Russian, for example, but as I understand the inspiration is the script as such, not a particular type.

The one-directional influence is what bothered Hrant, and he reversed the order in his Armenian font:

"... increasingly I become more worried about Latinization – the imposition of Latin alphabetic ideals on other scripts. It’s really nothing short of cultural imperialism, even cultural genocide."
Hrant H. Papazian

Patria comes from Harrier, and Harrier comes from Nour, an Armenian font I drew in Yerevan (on paper) during the summer of 2000, motivated by two things: a wish to apply my understanding of readability to Armenian; and a desire to forestall the rampant Latinization of Armenian. A curious thing happened though when I took the idea of Nour with me to the ATypI conference in Leipzig: I realized that this would be a great opportunity to give Nour a subordinate Latin “slave”. It would look as Armenian as possible. Payback for all the times it had been the other way around. Sweet revenge. And I drew it. And I liked it, and called it Harrier, after the dog breed – not as a slight – I really love hounds, they’re the newspaper fonts of the dog world. I think Harrier would make for a very interesting book face, with its rigid slant and generous extenders. In a way, Harrier is actually a slanted-Roman, but not the stubborn ideological stuff Morison was preaching.
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I do much of my best thinking while walking my beagle (Garmir, which means “red” in Armenian – yeah, he’s a bourgeois commie like me), and during successive walks I nailed down something I’m pretty proud of: a network of fonts that supports both hierarchic and parallel setting under one stylistic umbrella. A “master” design for each script, each with a “subordinate” in the other script. The two masters can be set in parallel and/or each can have some embedded text in the other script. The [admitted] complexity of this system is a feature, not a bug; it reflects the complexity of cultural relationships.
URL

This is an example of a multiscriptual font. Rumoredly, such fonts were created in the former Soviet Union, where five alphabets were in use: Latin, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian and Hebrew. If you wonder why Arabic is absent in this list, that's because to reduce Islam's ideological influence, in 1920-s susceptible nation writing systems were assigned the Latin alphabet, which was replaced by Cyrillic in 1930-s. By 1940s, 21 language changed alphabets twice, and 13 languages three times. Both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets were rather promiscuous in XX century.

To design a font that would combine features of two (or more?) scripts looks like an interesting challenge. I enjoy many Latin fonts greatly, and I can only welcome any attempt to transfer their spirit into Cyrillic script. Rather than "cultural genocide", I see this as what Walter Benjamin in his essay "The Task of the Translator" described as one language complementing another up to the one complete language.