Heraldry

Europe’s oldest system for describing pictures in words. A coat of arms is not first a drawing — it is a blazon, one sentence in a controlled language, from which any competent artist can redraw the arms correctly without ever having seen them.

Grammar: Strict word order, and tinctures follow their nouns: azure, a bend or is a blue field crossed by a gold diagonal band, and there is exactly one way to parse it. The palette is a closed set divided into metals (or, argent) and colours (azure, gules, sable, vert, purpure), and the rule of tincture forbids metal on metal or colour on colour — a contrast constraint written into the grammar itself so that arms stay legible at distance, at speed, and in poor light. The language specifies content and never specifies drawing, which is why two artists can produce visibly different pictures that are both entirely correct. It is a declarative description language for images, several centuries before there was anything to run one on.
Governance: Genuinely governed, and still enforced. Officers of arms grant and record arms — the College of Arms in England and Wales, the Court of the Lord Lyon in Scotland — and in Scotland the misuse of arms remains a matter for the court. Almost nothing else in this institute has a living authority that can rule you out of order.
Members: Fields, ordinaries and charges; crests, supporters and mottoes; the tinctures as a closed and named set.

§Its members

These are typographic approximations, not the system. Heraldry has no character set: its members are blazons, and a blazon is a sentence.

Twenty-six flags drawn from their blazons →

Sources · 3

documented A. C. Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry, 1909 — the standard English reference for blazon and its syntax.
documented A. C. Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry, 1909, on the rule of tincture as a rule of contrast rather than of taste.
documented The Court of the Lord Lyon’s jurisdiction over arms in Scotland — a symbol system with a court attached.