1.
Jasper
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Jasper, an aggregate of microgranular quartz and/or chalcedony and other mineral phases, is an opaque, impure variety of silica, usually red, yellow, brown or green in color, and rarely blue. The common red color is due to iron inclusions, the mineral aggregate breaks with a smooth surface and is used for ornamentation or as a gemstone. It can be polished and is used for vases, seals. The specific gravity of jasper is typically 2.5 to 2.9, along with heliotrope, jasper is one of the traditional birthstones for March. Jaspilite is a banded iron formation rock that often has bands of jasper. The name means spotted or speckled stone, and is derived via Old French jaspre and Latin iaspidem ) from Greek ἴασπις iaspis, green jasper was used to make bow drills in Mehrgarh between 4th and 5th millennium BC. Jasper is known to have been a gem in the ancient world, its name can be traced back in Arabic, Azerbaijani, Persian, Hebrew, Assyrian, Greek. On Minoan Crete, jasper was carved to produce seals circa 1800 BC, although the term jasper is now restricted to opaque quartz, the ancient iaspis was a stone of considerable translucency including nephrite. The jasper of antiquity was in many cases distinctly green, for it is compared to the emerald. Jasper is referred to in the Nibelungenlied as being clear and green, the jasper of the ancients probably included stones which would now be classed as chalcedony, and the emerald-like jasper may have been akin to the modern chrysoprase. The Hebrew word yushphah may have designated a green jasper, flinders Petrie suggested that the odem, the first stone on the High Priests breastplate, was a red jasper, whilst tarshish, the tenth stone, may have been a yellow jasper. Jasper is a rock of virtually any color stemming from the mineral content of the original sediments or ash. Patterns arise during the process forming flow and depositional patterns in the original silica rich sediment or volcanic ash. Hydrothermal circulation is thought to be required in the formation of jasper. Jasper can be modified by the diffusion of minerals along discontinuities providing the appearance of vegetative growth, the original materials are often fractured and/or distorted, after deposition, into diverse patterns, which are later filled in with other colorful minerals. Weathering, with time, will create intensely colored superficial rinds, the classification and naming of jasper varieties presents a challenge. A few are designated by the place of such as a brown Egyptian or red African. Picture jaspers exhibit combinations of patterns resulting in what appear to be scenes or images, diffusion from a center produces a distinctive orbicular appearance, i. e. leopard skin jasper, or linear banding from a fracture as seen in leisegang jasper
2.
Ideogram
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An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. In proto-writing, used for inventories and the like, physical objects are represented by stylized or conventionalized pictures, for example, the pictorial Dongba symbols without Geba annotation cannot represent the Naxi language, but are used as a mnemonic for reciting oral literature. Some systems also use ideograms, symbols denoting abstract concepts, the term ideogram is often used to describe symbols of writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters. However, these symbols are logograms, representing words or morphemes of a language rather than objects or concepts. In these writing systems, a variety of strategies were employed in the design of logographic symbols, pictographic symbols depict the object referred to by the word, such as an icon of a bull denoting the Semitic word ʾālep ox. Some words denoting abstract concepts may be represented iconically, but most other words are represented using the rebus principle, many signs in hieroglyphic as well as in cuneiform writing could be used either logographically or phonetically. Semantic compounds are semantic combinations of characters, such as 明 míng bright, composed of 日 rì sun and 月 yuè moon, or 休 xiū rest, composed of 人 rén person and 木 mù tree. An example of ideograms is the collection of 50 signs developed in the 1970s by the American Institute of Graphic Arts at the request of the US Department of Transportation, the system was initially used to mark airports and gradually got more widespread. An early proposal was An Essay towards a Real Character, a recent example is the system of Blissymbols, which was proposed by Charles K. Bliss in 1949 and currently includes over 2,000 symbols, emoji Heterogram Icon Lexigram List of symbols List of writing systems Logotype Therblig Traffic sign The Ideographic Myth Extract from DeFrancis book. American Heritage Dictionary definition Merriam-Webster OnLine definition
3.
Syllabary
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A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or moras which make up words. This loosely corresponds to shallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems, most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules. Otherwise they are synthetic, if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus or coda, or systematic, some scholars, e. g. Daniels, reserve the general term for analytic syllabaries and invent other terms as necessary. Some system provides katakana language conversion, in addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven. Chinese characters, the script used for Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages. They are therefore referred to as logosyllabic. The contemporary Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana, which were developed around 700. They are mainly used to some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words. Because Japanese uses mainly CV syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language, as in many syllabaries, however, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both atta and kaita are written with three kana, あった and かいた. It is therefore called a moraic writing system. Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics, with a predominance of monomoraic syllables, few syllabaries have glyphs for syllables that are not monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity. For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda, the modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. g. Ko-no-so for Κνωσός Knōsos, pe-ma for σπέρμα sperma, the Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster. The languages of South Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages, have a type of alphabet called an abugida or alphasyllabary, in the 19th century these systems were called syllabics, a term which has survived in the name of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or close to regular. For example, the characters for ke, ka, and ko in Japanese hiragana have no similarity to indicate their common k sound, compare abugida, where each grapheme typically represents a syllable but where characters representing related sounds are all similar graphically. For example, in Devanagari, an abugida, the characters for ke, ka and ko are के, का and को respectively. English, along many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures
4.
Minoan chronology
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Sir Arthur Evans developed a relative dating scheme of Minoan chronology based on the excavations initiated and managed by him at the site of the ancient city of Knossos. He called the civilization that he discovered there Minoan, the same scheme was later applied to the Greek mainland and the Cyclades Islands to form a general plan for dating events of the prehistoric and early historic Aegean. The relative chronology is based on the shapes and decorative styles of pottery found at sites on Crete. Arthur Evans began excavating on a hill called tou tseleve he kephala, two of the palace storerooms had been uncovered by Minos Kalokairinos in 1878, whose work ceased at the demand of the land owners. Simultaneously, coins and seals inscribed with a script were also discovered. These came to Evans attention as the curator of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the area was rumored to have been the site of the ancient city of Knossos. Evans examined the site on March 19,1894, nothing further could be done at that time, but in 1898 Crete became an independent republic. In 1899 Evans purchased the land with his own funds and decided to set up an excavation, attacking the site with crews of hundreds of diggers, Evans uncovered most of the sites 6 acres within 6 seasons. Subsequently he concerned himself mainly with restoration, an activity frowned upon by archaeologists of today and he continued to excavate there and elsewhere and to restore until 1935. Evans was knighted in 1911 for his work, in 1921, the first edition of his monumental work, Palace of Minos, was released, which became indispensable for any department of classical archaeology. On Evans death in 1941, the British School of Archaeology assumed responsibility for the excavation, later turning the property over to the Greek government, while retaining excavation rights. Evans chronological framework had triple divisions each triply divided, a formula that has retained, thus Early Minoan I, II and III, Middle Minoan I. Each subsection he divided into A and B, early and late, wace and Carl Blegen adapted Evans chronology to the Greek mainland and the islands, where the culture was termed Helladic and Cycladic. In 1941 Arne Furumark applied the term Mycenaean to LH and LC, as it is clear that the Mycenaean Greeks dominated at Knossos at some point in Late Minoan, the latter is often included under Mycenaean or called Minoan-Mycenaean. The major study of Cretan pottery was Evans, a very general stylistic trend was from dark decoration on a light background in the Early Minoan to white and red decorations on a dark wash or slip in Middle Minoan. Finally, there was a return to the manner of dark on light in Late Minoan. New body shapes for vessels also emerged and various styles of decoration are evident within Evans chronology, Evans never intended to give exact calendrical dates to the pottery periods. Most criticism does not aim at the overthrow of Evans system, even with these faults the system has no competitors
5.
Proto-writing
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They used ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbols to convey information yet were probably devoid of direct linguistic content. These systems emerged in the early Neolithic period, as early as the 7th millennium BCE, in 2003, tortoise shells were found in 24 Neolithic graves excavated at Jiahu, Henan province, northern China, with radiocarbon dates from the 7th millennium BCE. According to some archaeologists, the symbols carved on the shells had similarities to the late 2nd millennium BCE oracle bone script, others have dismissed this claim as insufficiently substantiated, claiming that simple geometric designs such as those found on the Jiahu shells cannot be linked to early writing. 5300 BCE, it has argued that the alignment of the symbols evokes the impression of a text. The Dispilio Tablet of the late 6th millennium is similar, the hieroglyphic scripts of the Ancient Near East seamlessly emerge from such symbol systems, so that it is difficult to say at what point precisely writing emerges from proto-writing. Adding to this difficulty is the fact very little is known about the symbols meanings. The transition from proto-writing to the earliest fully developed writing systems took place in the late 4th to early 3rd millennium BCE in the Fertile Crescent. The Kish tablet, dated to 3500 BCE, reflects the stage of proto-cuneiform, by the end of the 4th millennium BCE, this symbol system had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a stylus to indicate what was being counted. The transitional stage to a writing system takes place in the Jemdet Nasr period. A similar development took place in the genesis of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, various scholars believe that Egyptian hieroglyphs came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and. Invented under the influence of the latter, although it is pointed out and held that the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy and that a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt. The so-called Indus script is a system used during the 3rd millennium BCE in the Indus Valley Civilization. With the exception of the Aegean, the writing systems of the Near East did not reach Bronze Age Europe. The earliest writing systems of Europe arise in the Iron Age, however, there are number of interpretations regarding symbols found on artefacts of the European Bronze Age which amount to interpreting them as an indigenous tradition of proto-writing. Of special interest in this context are the Central European Bronze Ages cultures derived from the Beaker culture in the half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Sommerfeld favours an interpretation of symbols as numerals associated with a lunar calendar. Even after the Bronze Age, several cultures have gone through a period of using systems of proto-writing as a stage before the adoption of writing proper
6.
Linear A
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Linear A is one of two currently undeciphered writing systems used in ancient Greece. Linear A was the script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It was discovered by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans and it is the origin of the Linear B script, which was later used by the Mycenaean civilization. In the 1950s, Linear B was largely deciphered and found to encode an early form of Greek, although the two systems share many symbols, this did not lead to a subsequent decipherment of Linear A. Using the values associated with Linear B in Linear A mainly produces unintelligible words, if Linear A uses the same or similar syllabic values as Linear B, then its associated language, dubbed Minoan, appears unrelated to any known language. Linear A has hundreds of signs and they are believed to represent syllabic, ideographic, and semantic values in a manner similar to Linear B. It primarily appears in the direction, but occasionally appears as a right-to-left or boustrophedon script. An interesting feature is that of how numbers are recorded in the script, the highest number that has been recorded is 3000, but there are special symbols to indicate fractions and weights. Linear A has been unearthed chiefly on Crete, but also at other sites in Greece, as well as Turkey, the extant corpus, comprising some 1427 specimens totalling 7362–7396 signs, if scaled to standard type, would fit easily on two sheets of paper. Discoveries have been made at the locations on Crete, Prior to 1973. Since then, other locations yielded inscriptions, according to Finkelberg, most—if not all—inscriptions found outside of Crete were made locally. This is indicated by such factors as the composition of the material on which the inscriptions were made. Also, close analysis of the inscriptions found outside of Crete indicates the use of a script that is somewhere in between Linear A and Linear B, combining the elements of both. Kea Kythera Melos Samothrace Thera Mycenae Tiryns Hagios Stephanos, Laconia Linear A was a contemporary and possible child of Cretan hieroglyphs, several tablets inscribed in signs similar to Linear A were found in the Troad. While their status is disputed, they may be imports, as there is no evidence of Minoan presence in the Troad, Classification of these signs as a unique Trojan script is not accepted by other linguists. It is difficult to evaluate a given analysis of Linear A as there is point of reference for reading its inscriptions. The simplest approach to decipherment may be to presume that the values of Linear A match more or less the values given to the deciphered Linear B script, in 1957, Bulgarian scholar Vladimir I. Georgiev published his Le déchiffrement des inscriptions crétoises en linéaire A stating that Linear A contains Greek linguistic elements
7.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
8.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
9.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
