1.
French language
–
French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages, French has evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues doïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to Frances past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, a French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French. French is a language in 29 countries, most of which are members of la francophonie. As of 2015, 40% of the population is in Europe, 35% in sub-Saharan Africa, 15% in North Africa and the Middle East, 8% in the Americas. French is the fourth-most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union, 1/5 of Europeans who do not have French as a mother tongue speak French as a second language. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 17th and 18th century onward, French was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, most second-language speakers reside in Francophone Africa, in particular Gabon, Algeria, Mauritius, Senegal and Ivory Coast. In 2015, French was estimated to have 77 to 110 million native speakers, approximately 274 million people are able to speak the language. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie estimates 700 million by 2050, in 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese. Under the Constitution of France, French has been the language of the Republic since 1992. France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education except in specific cases, French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland and is spoken in the western part of Switzerland called Romandie, of which Geneva is the largest city. French is the language of about 23% of the Swiss population. French is also a language of Luxembourg, Monaco, and Aosta Valley, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands. A plurality of the worlds French-speaking population lives in Africa and this number does not include the people living in non-Francophone African countries who have learned French as a foreign language. Due to the rise of French in Africa, the total French-speaking population worldwide is expected to reach 700 million people in 2050, French is the fastest growing language on the continent. French is mostly a language in Africa, but it has become a first language in some urban areas, such as the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast and in Libreville. There is not a single African French, but multiple forms that diverged through contact with various indigenous African languages, sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand, because of the expansion of education and rapid population growth
French language
–
The
"arrêt" signs (French for "stop") are used in
Canada while the international stop, which is also a valid French word, is used in France as well as other French-speaking countries and regions.
French language
–
Regions where French is the main language
French language
–
Town sign in
Standard Arabic and French at the entrance of
Rechmaya in
Lebanon.
French language
–
An obsolete 100
Lebanese pound note with the French language inscriptions "Banque du Liban" and "Cent livres".
2.
English language
–
English /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the global lingua franca. Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third most common language in the world, after Mandarin. It is the most widely learned second language and a language of the United Nations, of the European Union. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch, English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the century, are called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England, Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London and the King James Bible, and the start of the Great Vowel Shift. Through the worldwide influence of the British Empire, modern English spread around the world from the 17th to mid-20th centuries, English is an Indo-European language, and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Most closely related to English are the Frisian languages, and English, Old Saxon and its descendent Low German languages are also closely related, and sometimes Low German, English, and Frisian are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic languages. Modern English descends from Middle English, which in turn descends from Old English, particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other English languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy dialects of Ireland. English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares new language features with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and these shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor, which linguists call Proto-Germanic. Through Grimms law, the word for foot begins with /f/ in Germanic languages, English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic. The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon, in the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain and the Romans withdrew from Britain. England and English are named after the Angles, Old English was divided into four dialects, the Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex. The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the sixth century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms and it included the runic letters wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ð⟩, and ash ⟨æ⟩
English language
–
The opening to the Old English epic poem
Beowulf,
handwritten in
half-uncial script: Hƿæt ƿē Gārde/na ingēar dagum þēod cyninga / þrym ge frunon... "Listen! We of the Spear-Danes from days of yore have heard of the glory of the folk-kings..."
English language
–
Countries of the world where English is a majority native language
English language
–
Title page of Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales c.1400
3.
German language
–
German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol, the German-speaking Community of Belgium and it is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg. Major languages which are most similar to German include other members of the West Germanic language branch, such as Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Luxembourgish and it is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English. One of the languages of the world, German is the first language of about 95 million people worldwide. The German speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of publication of new books. German derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, a portion of German words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and English. With slightly different standardized variants, German is a pluricentric language, like English, German is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many unique varieties existing in Europe and also other parts of the world. The history of the German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the migration period, when Martin Luther translated the Bible, he based his translation primarily on the standard bureaucratic language used in Saxony, also known as Meißner Deutsch. Copies of Luthers Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region that translated words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Roman Catholics initially rejected Luthers translation, and tried to create their own Catholic standard of the German language – the difference in relation to Protestant German was minimal. It was not until the middle of the 18th century that a widely accepted standard was created, until about 1800, standard German was mainly a written language, in urban northern Germany, the local Low German dialects were spoken. Standard German, which was different, was often learned as a foreign language with uncertain pronunciation. Northern German pronunciation was considered the standard in prescriptive pronunciation guides though, however, German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-19th century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire and its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Some cities, such as Prague and Budapest, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain, others, such as Pozsony, were originally settled during the Habsburg period, and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest and Bratislava as well as cities like Zagreb, the most comprehensive guide to the vocabulary of the German language is found within the Deutsches Wörterbuch. This dictionary was created by the Brothers Grimm and is composed of 16 parts which were issued between 1852 and 1860, in 1872, grammatical and orthographic rules first appeared in the Duden Handbook. In 1901, the 2nd Orthographical Conference ended with a standardization of the German language in its written form
German language
–
Old Frisian (Alt-Friesisch)
German language
–
The widespread popularity of the
Bible translated into German by
Martin Luther helped establish modern German
German language
–
Examples of German language in
Namibian everyday life
German language
–
German-language newspapers in the U.S. in 1922
4.
Spanish language
–
Spanish —also called Castilian —is a Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain, with hundreds of millions of native speakers around the world. It is usually considered the worlds second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and it is one of the few languages to use inverted question and exclamation marks. Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. Beginning in the early 16th century, Spanish was taken to the colonies of the Spanish Empire, most notably to the Americas, as well as territories in Africa, Oceania, around 75% of modern Spanish is derived from Latin. Greek has also contributed substantially to Spanish vocabulary, especially through Latin, Spanish vocabulary has been in contact from an early date with Arabic, having developed during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula. With around 8% of its vocabulary being Arabic in origin, this language is the second most important influence after Latin and it has also been influenced by Basque as well as by neighboring Ibero-Romance languages. It also adopted words from languages such as Gothic language from the Visigoths in which many Spanish names and surnames have a Visigothic origin. Spanish is one of the six languages of the United Nations. It is the language in the world by the number of people who speak it as a mother tongue, after Mandarin Chinese. It is estimated more than 437 million people speak Spanish as a native language. Spanish is the official or national language in Spain, Equatorial Guinea, speakers in the Americas total some 418 million. In the European Union, Spanish is the tongue of 8% of the population. Spanish is the most popular second language learned in the United States, in 2011 it was estimated by the American Community Survey that of the 55 million Hispanic United States residents who are five years of age and over,38 million speak Spanish at home. The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the language of the whole Spanish State in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas. Article III reads as follows, El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado, las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas. Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State, the other Spanish languages as well shall be official in their respective Autonomous Communities. The Spanish Royal Academy, on the hand, currently uses the term español in its publications. Two etymologies for español have been suggested, the Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary derives the term from the Provençal word espaignol, and that in turn from the Medieval Latin word Hispaniolus, from—or pertaining to—Hispania
Spanish language
–
A page of
Cantar de Mio Cid, the oldest preserved Spanish
epic poem, in medieval Spanish.
Spanish language
–
Spanish is sole official language at the national level
Spanish language
–
Antonio de Nebrija, author of
Gramática de la lengua castellana, the first grammar of modern European languages.
Spanish language
–
Miguel de Cervantes author of
Don Quixote, considered the first modern European novel.
5.
Romanian language
–
Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24 million people as a native language, primarily in Romania and Moldova, and by another 4 million people as a second language. It has official status in Romania and the Republic of Moldova and it is one of the official languages of the European Union and the Latin Union. Romanian is a part of the Balkan-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin separated from the Western Romance during the 5th–8th centuries. To distinguish it within that group in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. Eastern Romance languages, like the branches of Romance languages, descend from Vulgar Latin. These vestiges of military usage are unique to Romanian in its language family. s. o, sat village, șes plain, a supune, tindă veranda, țară homeland a. s. o. This linguistic evidence challenges the Roeslerian theory, the vestiges from sermo castrensis particularize the Romanian language in the neolatin area, together with its isolated history. e. With Rom. māgurā and Alb. magulë etc, the Roman Empire withdrew from Dacia in 271–272 AD, leaving it to the Goths. The history of Eastern Romance between the 3rd century and the development of Proto-Romanian by the 10th century, when the area came under the influence of the Byzantine Empire, is unknown. It is a matter of debate whether Proto-Romanian developed among Romanized people who were left behind in Dacia by the Roman withdrawal or among Latin-speakers in the Balkans south of the Danube, during the Middle Ages, Romanian became influenced by the Slavic languages and to some degree by Greek. Romanian remains unattested throughout the Middle Ages, and only enters the record in the early 16th century. The use of the denomination Romanian for our language and use of the demonym Romanians for speakers of this language predates the foundation of the modern Romanian state. In 1534, Tranquillo Andronico notes, Valachi nunc se Romanos vocant, francesco della Valle writes in 1532 that Romanians are calling themselves Romans in their own language, and he subsequently quotes the expression, Știi Românește. After travelling through Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania Ferrante Capecci accounts in 1575 that the population of these regions call themselves românești. Pierre Lescalopier writes in 1574 that those who live in Moldavia, Wallachia, the Transylvanian Saxon Johann Lebel writes in 1542 that Vlachi se numeau între ei Romuini and the Polish chronicler Stanislaw Orzechowski notes in 1554 that în limba lor walachii se numesc romini. In Palia de la Orăștie stands written «, că văzum cum toate limbile au și înfluresc întru cuvintele slăvite a lui Dumnezeu numai noi românii pre limbă nu avem. și le-au dăruit voo fraților români. », nevertheless, the oldest extant document written in Romanian remains Neacșus letter and was written using Cyrillic letters. There are no records of any documents written in Romanian from before 1521
Romanian language
–
Neacșu's letter is the oldest surviving document written in Romanian
Romanian language
–
Distribution of the Romanian language in
Europe.
Romanian language
–
A sample of Romanian written in the
Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, which was still in use in the early 19th century
Romanian language
–
A close shot of some keys with Romanian characters on the keyboard of a laptop
6.
Chinook Jargon
–
It is related to, but not the same as, the aboriginal language of the Chinook people, upon which much of its vocabulary is based. The total number of Jargon words in published lexicons numbered only in the hundreds and it has its own grammatical system, but a very simple one that, like its word list, was easy to learn. The consonant r is rare though existent in Chinook Jargon, and English and French loan words, such as rice and merci, have changed in their adoption to the Jargon, to lice and mahsie, respectively. The participating peoples came from a number of distinct language families. It peaked in usage from approximately 1858 to 1900, and declined as a result of the Spanish Flu, World War I, after European contact, the Jargon also acquired English and French loans, as well as words brought by other European, Asian, and Polynesian groups. Some individuals from all these groups soon adopted The Jargon as a highly efficient and this use continued in some business sectors well into the 20th century and some of its words continue to feature in company and organization names as well as in the regional toponymy. In the Diocese of Kamloops, British Columbia, hundreds of speakers also learned to read and write the Jargon using Duployan shorthand via the publication Kamloops Wawa. As a result, the Jargon also had the beginnings of its own literature, mostly translated scripture and classical works, and some local and episcopal news, community gossip and events, novelist and early Native American activist Marah Ellis Ryan used Chinook words and phrases in her writing. In Oregon, Chinook Jargon was widely used by Natives, trappers, traders, employees of the Hudsons Bay Company, missionaries, in Portland’s first half century there were frequent trade interactions between pioneers and Native Americans. After about 1900, when such daily interactions were less frequent, many Oregonians used Jargon in casual conversation--to add humor, whimsy or emphasis and to exhibit deep knowledge of Oregon’s history. Though traditions of speaking Jargon faded away among the population, some of Oregons tribal groups continued speaking Chinook Jargon. However, a revival occurred with the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregons 2012 Chinuk Wawa dictionary. Writing in 1972, he remarked that at later date Only a few can speak it fully, men of ninety or a hundred years old, like Henry Broderick, the realtor, and Joshua Green. Jones estimates that in pioneer times there were about 100,000 speakers of Chinook Jargon, historical speakers did not use the name Chinook Wawa, however, but rather the Wawa or Lelang. NB Wawa also means speech or words – have a wawa means hold a parley even in idiomatic English today, and lelang also means the physical bodypart, the name for the Jargon varied throughout the territory in which it was used. For example, skokum hiyu in the Boston Bar-Lytton area of the Fraser Canyon, there is some controversy about the origin of the Jargon, but all agree that its glory days were during the 19th century. During this era many dictionaries were published to help interact with the First Nations people living there. The old settler families heirs in the Pacific Northwest sent communiques to each other, many residents of the British Columbia city of Vancouver spoke Chinook Jargon as their first language, even using it at home in preference to English
Chinook Jargon
–
Cover, Gill 's Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, 13th Edition, 1891. Photographed at Log House Museum,
Seattle, Washington.
7.
Unicode range
–
The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. UCS has a capacity to encode over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is represented by a code point, which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111, used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software. The number of encoded characters is made up as follows,128,019 graphical characters 218 special purpose characters for control, ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably, however, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character, what one might think of as its address. Input methods can be through keyboard or a character palette. The UCS can be divided in various ways, such as by plane, block, character category, the x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros, the hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, an entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition, the format is the same as for any entity reference, &name, where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. Unicode and ISO divide the set of points into 17 planes. As of 2016 ISO and the Unicode Consortium has only allocated characters, the others remain empty and reserved for future use. Most characters are assigned to the first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane. This is to ease the transition for legacy software since the Basic Multilingual Plane is addressable with just two octets. The characters outside the first plane usually have very specialized or rare use. Each plane corresponds with the value of the one or two hexadecimal digits preceding the four ones, hence U+24321 is in Plane 2, U+4321 is in Plane 0
Unicode range
–
Example of fraction slash use. This
typeface (
Apple Chancery) shows the synthesized common fraction on the left and the precomposed fraction glyph on the right as a rendering the plain text string “1 1⁄4 1¼”. Depending on the text environment, the single string “1 1⁄4” might yield either result, the one on the right through substitution of the fraction sequence with the single precomposed fraction glyph.
8.
Shorthand
–
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and it has also been called brachygraphy, from Greek brachys and tachygraphy, from Greek tachys, depending on whether compression or speed of writing is the goal. A typical shorthand system provides symbols or abbreviations for words and common phrases, abbreviation methods are alphabet-based and use different abbreviating approaches. Several autocomplete programs, standalone or integrated in text editors, based on word lists, many journalists use shorthand writing to quickly take notes at press conferences or other similar scenarios. Shorthand was used widely in the past, before the invention of recording. Shorthand was considered a part of secretarial training and police work. Although the primary use of shorthand has been to record oral dictation or discourse, for example, healthcare professionals may use shorthand notes in medical charts and correspondence. The earliest known indication of shorthand systems is from the Parthenon in Ancient Greece and this shows a writing system primarily based on vowels, using certain modifications to indicate consonants. Hellenistic tachygraphy is reported from the 2nd century BC onwards, though there are indications that it might be older, the oldest datable reference is a contract from Middle Egypt, stating that Oxyrhynchos gives the semeiographer Apollonios for two years to be taught shorthand writing. Hellenistic tachygraphy consisted of word stem signs and word ending signs, over time, many syllabic signs were developed. In Ancient Rome, Marcus Tullius Tiro, a slave and later a freedman of Cicero, the Tironian notes consisted of Latin word stem abbreviations and of word ending abbreviations. The original Tironian notes consisted of about 4000 signs, but new signs were introduced, in order to have a less complex writing system, a syllabic shorthand script was sometimes used. After the decline of the Roman Empire, the Tironian notes were no longer used to transcribe speeches, though they were known and taught. After the 11th century, however, they were mostly forgotten, when many monastery libraries were secularized in the course of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, long-forgotten manuscripts of Tironian notes were rediscovered. In imperial China, clerks used an abbreviated, highly cursive form of Chinese characters to record court proceedings and these records were used to create more formal transcripts. One cornerstone of imperial court proceedings was that all confessions had to be acknowledged by the signature, personal seal, or thumbprint. Versions of this technique survived in clerical professions into the modern day, an interest in shorthand or short-writing developed towards the end of the 16th century in England. In 1588 Timothy Bright published his Characterie, An Arte of Shorte, Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character which introduced a system with 500 arbitrary symbols each representing one word
Shorthand
–
Dutch stenography using the "System Groote"
Shorthand
–
Sun Guoting 's Treatise on Calligraphy, an example of cursive writing of Chinese characters.
Shorthand
–
Tombstone of
Heinrich Roller, inventor of a
German shorthand system, with a sample of his shorthand
Shorthand
–
Ancient and Medieval
9.
Alphabet
–
An alphabet is a standard set of letters that is used to write one or more languages based upon the general principle that the letters represent phonemes of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries and logographies, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. Under a terminological distinction promoted by Peter T. Daniels, an alphabet is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, in other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants, such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal letters, as in Devanagari. The Khmer alphabet is the longest, with 74 letters, there are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet. Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks, while most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. Alphabets are usually associated with an ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order and it also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of numbering ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, the Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha and beta. The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, in the alphabet song in English, the term ABCs is used instead of the word alphabet. Knowing ones ABCs, in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything, the history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. These glyphs were used as guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs and this script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit, the Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called Proto-Canaanite before ca.1050 BC. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram and this script is the parent script of all western alphabets
Alphabet
–
Edward Bernard 's "Orbis eruditi", comparing all known alphabets as of 1689.
Alphabet
–
Writing systems
Alphabet
–
A Specimen of
typeset fonts and
languages, by
William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728
Cyclopaedia.
Alphabet
–
Codex Zographensis in the
Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval
Bulgaria
10.
Stenography
–
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and it has also been called brachygraphy, from Greek brachys and tachygraphy, from Greek tachys, depending on whether compression or speed of writing is the goal. A typical shorthand system provides symbols or abbreviations for words and common phrases, abbreviation methods are alphabet-based and use different abbreviating approaches. Several autocomplete programs, standalone or integrated in text editors, based on word lists, many journalists use shorthand writing to quickly take notes at press conferences or other similar scenarios. Shorthand was used widely in the past, before the invention of recording. Shorthand was considered a part of secretarial training and police work. Although the primary use of shorthand has been to record oral dictation or discourse, for example, healthcare professionals may use shorthand notes in medical charts and correspondence. The earliest known indication of shorthand systems is from the Parthenon in Ancient Greece and this shows a writing system primarily based on vowels, using certain modifications to indicate consonants. Hellenistic tachygraphy is reported from the 2nd century BC onwards, though there are indications that it might be older, the oldest datable reference is a contract from Middle Egypt, stating that Oxyrhynchos gives the semeiographer Apollonios for two years to be taught shorthand writing. Hellenistic tachygraphy consisted of word stem signs and word ending signs, over time, many syllabic signs were developed. In Ancient Rome, Marcus Tullius Tiro, a slave and later a freedman of Cicero, the Tironian notes consisted of Latin word stem abbreviations and of word ending abbreviations. The original Tironian notes consisted of about 4000 signs, but new signs were introduced, in order to have a less complex writing system, a syllabic shorthand script was sometimes used. After the decline of the Roman Empire, the Tironian notes were no longer used to transcribe speeches, though they were known and taught. After the 11th century, however, they were mostly forgotten, when many monastery libraries were secularized in the course of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, long-forgotten manuscripts of Tironian notes were rediscovered. In imperial China, clerks used an abbreviated, highly cursive form of Chinese characters to record court proceedings and these records were used to create more formal transcripts. One cornerstone of imperial court proceedings was that all confessions had to be acknowledged by the signature, personal seal, or thumbprint. Versions of this technique survived in clerical professions into the modern day, an interest in shorthand or short-writing developed towards the end of the 16th century in England. In 1588 Timothy Bright published his Characterie, An Arte of Shorte, Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character which introduced a system with 500 arbitrary symbols each representing one word
Stenography
–
Dutch stenography using the "System Groote"
Stenography
–
The
Lord's Prayer in
Gregg and a variety of 19th-century systems
Stenography
–
Sun Guoting 's Treatise on Calligraphy, an example of cursive writing of Chinese characters.
Stenography
–
Tombstone of
Heinrich Roller, inventor of a
German shorthand system, with a sample of his shorthand
11.
The Unicode Standard
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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
The Unicode Standard
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Logo of the
Unicode Consortium
