1.
A
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A is the first letter and the first vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives, the upper-case version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lower-case version can be written in two forms, the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ, the latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. The earliest certain ancestor of A is aleph, the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, in turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended. The Phoenician alphabet letter had a form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name is thought to have corresponded closely to the Hebrew or Arabic aleph, the Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and left the letter unchanged. During Roman times, there were many variant forms of the letter A, first was the monumental or lapidary style, which was used when inscribing on stone or other permanent mediums. There was also a style used for everyday or utilitarian writing. Variants also existed that were intermediate between the monumental and cursive styles, the known variants include the early semi-uncial, the uncial, and the later semi-uncial. At the end of the Roman Empire, several variants of the cursive minuscule developed through Western Europe. By the 9th century, the Caroline script, which was similar to the present-day form, was the principal form used in book-making. This form was derived through a combining of prior forms, 15th-century Italy saw the formation of the two main variants that are known today. These variants, the Italic and Roman forms, were derived from the Caroline Script version, the Italic form, also called script a, is used in most current handwriting and consists of a circle and vertical stroke. This slowly developed from the fifth-century form resembling the Greek letter tau in the hands of medieval Irish and English writers, the Roman form is used in most printed material, it consists of a small loop with an arc over it. Both derive from the majuscule form, in Greek handwriting, it was common to join the left leg and horizontal stroke into a single loop, as demonstrated by the uncial version shown. Many fonts then made the right leg vertical, in some of these, the serif that began the right leg stroke developed into an arc, resulting in the printed form, while in others it was dropped, resulting in the modern handwritten form. Italic type is used to mark emphasis or more generally to distinguish one part of a text from the rest. There are some other cases aside from italic type where script a, the double ⟨aa⟩ sequence does not occur in native English words, but is found in some words derived from foreign languages such as Aaron and aardvark
2.
Grapheme
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In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived from Greek γράφω, meaning write, the study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is an one and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific typeface is called a glyph. For example, the corresponding to the abstract concept of the Arabic numeral one has two distinct glyphs in the fonts Times New Roman and Helvetica. Graphemes are often notated within angle brackets, as ⟨a⟩, ⟨B⟩ and this is analogous to the slash notation used for phonemes, and the square bracket notation used for phonetic transcriptions. Hence a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all semantically equivalent, for example, in written English, there are many different physical representations of the lowercase letter a, such as a, ɑ, etc. But because the substitution of any of these for any other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, italic and bold face are also allographic. There is some disagreement as to whether capital and lower-case letters are allographs or distinct graphemes, some linguists consider digraphs like the ⟨sh⟩ in ship to be distinct graphemes, but these are generally analyzed as sequences of graphemes. Ligatures, however, such as ⟨æ⟩, are distinct graphemes, as are letters with distinctive diacritics. For a full discussion of the different types, see Writing system § Functional classification, there are additional graphemic components used in writing, such as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, word dividers such as the space, and other typographic symbols. As mentioned in the section, in languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In practice, however, the orthographies of such languages entail at least an amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph, as the digraph sh represents a sound in English. Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, for more examples, see Alphabetical order § Language-specific conventions. Conversion of scripts Character Grapheme–color synesthesia Grapheme–color ideasthesia Sign
3.
Typography
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Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, the term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography, most typographers do not design typefaces, Typography also may be used as a decorative device, unrelated to communication of information. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation, as the capability to create typography has become ubiquitous, the application of principles and best practices developed over generations of skilled workers and professionals has diminished. Babylonian cylinder seals were used to create an impression on a surface by rolling the seal on wet clay, Typography also was implemented in the Phaistos Disc, an enigmatic Minoan printed item from Crete, which dates to between 1850 and 1600 B. C. It has been proposed that Roman lead pipe inscriptions were created with movable type printing, the essential criterion of type identity was met by medieval print artifacts such as the Latin Pruefening Abbey inscription of 1119 that was created by the same technique as the Phaistos Disc. The silver altarpiece of patriarch Pellegrinus II in the cathedral of Cividale was printed with individual letter punches, apparently, the same printing technique may be found in tenth to twelfth century Byzantine reliquaries. Other early examples include individual letter tiles where the words are formed by assembling single letter tiles in the desired order, Typography with movable type was invented during the eleventh-century Song dynasty in China by Bi Sheng. His movable type system was manufactured from ceramic materials, and clay type printing continued to be practiced in China until the Qing Dynasty, wang Zhen was one of the pioneers of wooden movable type. Although the wooden type was more durable under the mechanical rigors of handling, repeated printing wore the character faces down, metal movable type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty, approximately 1230. Hua Sui introduced bronze type printing to China in 1490 AD, the diffusion of both movable-type systems was limited and the technology did not spread beyond East and Central Asia, however. Modern lead-based movable type, along with the printing press, is most often attributed to the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg in 1439. His type pieces, made from an alloy, suited printing purposes so well that the alloy is still used today. Gutenberg developed specialized techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letter punches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts and this technical breakthrough was instrumental in starting the Printing Revolution and the first book printed with lead-based movable type was the Gutenberg Bible. Rapidly advancing technology revolutionized typography in the twentieth century. During the 1960s some camera-ready typesetting could be produced in any office or workshop with stand-alone machines such as introduced by IBM. During the mid-1980s personal computers such as the Macintosh allowed type designers to create typefaces digitally using commercial graphic design software, Digital technology also enabled designers to create more experimental typefaces as well as the practical typefaces of traditional typography. Designs for typefaces could be created faster with the new technology, the cost for developing typefaces was drastically lowered, becoming widely available to the masses
4.
Writing
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Writing is a medium of human communication that represents language and emotion through the inscription or recording of signs and symbols. In most languages, writing is a complement to speech or spoken language, Writing is not a language but a form of technology that developed as tools developed with human society. Within a language system, writing relies on many of the structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar and semantics. The result of writing is called text, and the recipient of text is called a reader. Motivations for writing include publication, storytelling, correspondence and diary, Writing has been instrumental in keeping history, maintaining culture, dissemination of knowledge through the media and the formation of legal systems. As human societies emerged, the development of writing was driven by pragmatic exigencies such as exchanging information, maintaining financial accounts, codifying laws, in both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica writing may have evolved through calendrics and a political necessity for recording historical and environmental events. H. G. Wells argued that writing has the ability to put agreements, laws and it made the growth of states larger than the old city states possible. It made a continuous historical consciousness possible, the command of the priest or king and his seal could go far beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. The major writing systems—methods of inscription—broadly fall into four categories, logographic, syllabic, alphabetic, another category, ideographic, has never been developed sufficiently to represent language. A sixth category, pictographic, is insufficient to represent language on its own, a logogram is a written character which represents a word or morpheme. A vast number of logograms are needed to write Chinese characters, cuneiform, and Mayan, where a glyph may stand for a morpheme, many logograms have an ideographic component. For example, in Mayan, the glyph for fin, pronounced ka, was used to represent the syllable ka whenever the pronunciation of a logogram needed to be indicated. In Chinese, about 90% of characters are compounds of an element called a radical with an existing character to indicate the pronunciation. However, such phonetic elements complement the elements, rather than vice versa. A syllabary is a set of symbols that represent syllables. A glyph in a syllabary typically represents a consonant followed by a vowel, or just a vowel alone, phonetically related syllables are not so indicated in the script. For instance, the syllable ka may look nothing like the syllable ki, syllabaries are best suited to languages with a relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. Other languages that use syllabic writing include the Linear B script for Mycenaean Greek, Cherokee, Ndjuka, an English-based creole language of Surinam, most logographic systems have a strong syllabic component
5.
Latin alphabet
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The Latin alphabet is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the script of the English language and is often referred to simply as the alphabet in English. It is an alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, the phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters, due to classicism, modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts. The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as roman square capitals, the lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the formerly inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Throughout the ages, many stylistic variations of each letter have evolved that are still identified as being the same letter. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived, the Latins ultimately adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters. Gaius Julius Hyginus, who recorded much Roman mythology, mentions in Fab, the Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos invented seven Greek letters — A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters, Simonides, too, invented four letters — Ó E Z PH, Epicharmus of Sicily, two — P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the added the rest. The original Latin alphabet was, The oldest Latin inscriptions do not distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, representing both by C, K and Q according to position, K was used before A, Q was used before O or V, C was used elsewhere. This is explained by the fact that the Etruscan language did not make this distinction, C originated as a turned form of Greek Gamma and Q from Greek Koppa. In later Latin, K survived only in a few such as Kalendae, Q survived only before V. G was later invented to distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, it was simply a C with an additional diacritic. C stood for /ɡ/ I stood for both /i/ and /j/, V stood for both /u/ and /w/. K was marginalized in favour of C, which stood for both /ɡ/ and /k/
6.
Tittle
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A tittle or superscript dot is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an part of the glyph of i and j. In most languages, the tittle of i or j is omitted when a diacritic is placed in the usual position. The word tittle is rarely used, the quotation uses them as an example of extremely minor details. The phrase jot and tittle indicates that every detail has received attention. In the Greek original translated as English jot and tittle are found the words iota, iota is the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet. Alternatively, it may represent yodh, the smallest letter of the Hebrew, a keraia is also used in printing modern Greek numerals. A number of alphabets use dotted and dotless I, both upper and lower case and this practice has carried over to several other Turkic languages, like the Azerbaijani alphabet, Crimean Tatar alphabet, and Tatar alphabet. The other Dene language of the Northwest Territories, Gwich’in, always includes the tittle on lowercase i, there is only one letter I in Irish, but i is undotted in the traditional uncial Gaelic script to avoid confusion of the tittle with the buailte overdot found over consonants. Modern texts replace the buailte with an h, and use the same antiqua-descendant fonts, however, bilingual road signs use dotless i in lowercase Irish text to better distinguish i from í. The letter j is not used in Irish other than in foreign words, in most Latin-based orthographies, the lowercase letter i loses its dot when a diacritical mark, such as an acute or grave accent, is placed atop the letter. However, the tittle is sometimes retained in some languages, in the Baltic languages, the lowercase letter i sometimes retains a tittle when accented. In Vietnamese in the 17th century, the tittle is preserved atop ỉ and ị but not ì and í, in modern Vietnamese, a tittle can be seen in ì, ỉ, ĩ, and í in cursive handwriting and some signage. This detail rarely occurs in computers and on the Internet, due to the obscurity of language-specific fonts, in any case, the tittle is always retained in ị. It is thought that the phrase to a T is derived from the word tittle because long before to a T became popular, the phrase to dot ones Is and cross ones Ts is used literally and also to mean to put the finishing touches to or to be thorough. Dictionary. com – Tittle Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon Tittle on Everything2
7.
Dotted and dotless I
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The Turkish alphabet, which is a variant of the Latin alphabet, includes two distinct versions of the letter I, one dotted and the other dotless. The dotless I, I ı, denotes the close back unrounded vowel sound, neither the upper nor the lower case version has a dot. The dotted İ, İ i, denotes the close front unrounded vowel sound, both the upper and lower case versions have a dot. Diyarbakır /dijaɾˈbakɯɾ/ In contrast, the letter j does not have this distinction, with a dot only on the lower case character, in scholarly writing on Turkic languages, ï is sometimes used for /ɯ/. A similar ligature for ffi is also possible, since the unligatured forms are unattractive and the ligatures make the i dotless, such fonts are not appropriate for use in a Turkish setting. However, the fi ligatures of some fonts do not merge the letters and instead space them next to each other, such fonts are appropriate for Turkish, but the writer must be careful to be consistent in the use of ligatures. Most Unicode software uppercases ı to I and lowercases İ to i, thus uppercasing then lowercasing, or vice versa, changes the letters. In the LaTeX typesetting language the dotless ı can be written with the backslash-i command, the İ can be written using the normal accenting method. The C or US English locales do not have these problems, the. NET Framework has special provisions to handle the Turkish i. Many cellphones available in Turkey lack a proper localization, which leads to replacing ı by i in SMS, in one instance, a miscommunication played a role in the deaths of Emine and Ramazan Çalçoban in 2008. A common substitution is to use the character 1 for dotless ı, the casing of the dotless and dotted ı forms differ from other languages. That implies that a case insensitive matching expected by an English person doesnt match the expectations of a Turkish user, the Turkish I is often used as an example of the problems with case insensitivity in computing. Dotted and dotless i are used in other writing systems for Turkic languages, Azerbaijani. Kazakh, The Kazakh alphabet as used in Kazakhstan is Cyrillic, however, Dotted and dotless I, in addition to I with diaraesis are employed in the Latin script versions of the Kazakh Wikipedia and of several governmental websites. The main website of the government of Kazakhstan and the information agency KazInform-QazAqparat offer Turkish-like Latin script along with official Cyrillic one. Tatar, The Tatar alphabet in Russia is officially Cyrillic due to the requirements of Russian federal law, several Romanization schemes exist, which are used on the Internet and some printed publication. Most of them are modelled in different ways on Turkish and employ dotted and dotless I, while some also use I with acute, the only Latin alphabet that ever had official status in Tatarstan, Yañalif, used the character Ь instead of dotless i. Crimean Tatar, The Latin alphabet is used for the Crimean Tatar language
8.
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
9.
Diacritic
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A diacritic – also diacritical mark, diacritical point, or diacritical sign – is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω, diacritic is primarily an adjective, though sometimes used as a noun, whereas diacritical is only ever an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave, are often called accents, diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of marks in the Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. In other Latin alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as the French là versus la that are both pronounced /la/, in Gaelic type, a dot over a consonant indicates lenition of the consonant in question. In other alphabetic systems, diacritical marks may perform other functions, vowel pointing systems, namely the Arabic harakat and the Hebrew niqqud systems, indicate vowels that are not conveyed by the basic alphabet. The Indic virama and the Arabic sukūn mark the absence of a vowel, in the Hanyu Pinyin official romanization system for Chinese, diacritics are used to mark the tones of the syllables in which the marked vowels occur. In orthography and collation, a letter modified by a diacritic may be treated either as a new and this varies from language to language, and may vary from case to case within a language. ◌ː – triangular colon, used in the IPA to mark long vowels, not all diacritics occur adjacent to the letter they modify. In the Wali language of Ghana, for example, an apostrophe indicates a change of vowel quality, because of vowel harmony, all vowels in a word are affected, so the scope of the diacritic is the entire word. In abugida scripts, like those used to write Hindi and Thai, diacritics indicate vowels, the tittle on the letter i of the Latin alphabet originated as a diacritic to clearly distinguish i from the minims of adjacent letters. It first appeared in the 11th century in the sequence ii, then spread to i adjacent to m, n, u, the j, originally a variant of i, inherited the tittle. The shape of the diacritic developed from initially resembling todays acute accent to a flourish by the 15th century. With the advent of Roman type it was reduced to the round dot we have today, tanwīn symbols, Serve a grammatical role in Arabic. The sign ـً is most commonly written in combination with alif, waṣla, Comes most commonly at the beginning of a word. Indicates a type of hamza that is pronounced only when the letter is read at the beginning of the talk, ḥarakāt, fatḥa kasra ḍamma sukūn The ḥarakāt or vowel points serve two purposes, They serve as a phonetic guide. They indicate the presence of short vowels or their absence, at the last letter of a word, the vowel point reflects the inflection case or conjugation mood. For nouns, The ḍamma is for the nominative, fatḥa for the accusative, for verbs, the ḍamma is for the imperfective, fatḥa for the perfective, and the sukūn is for verbs in the imperative or jussive moods
10.
Cedilla
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A cedilla, also known as cedilha or cédille, is a hook or tail added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan, French, and Portuguese, it is used only under the c, and the letter is called respectively c trencada, c cédille. The tail originated in Spain as the half of a miniature cursive z. The word “cedilla” is the diminutive of the Old Spanish name for this letter, an obsolete spelling of cedilla is cerilla. The earliest use in English cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1599 Spanish-English dictionary, chambers’ Cyclopædia is cited for the printer-trade variant ceceril in use in 1738. The main use in English is not universal and applies to words from French and Portuguese such as “façade”, “limaçon”. This can add to confusion as the use of commas as opposed to cedillas varies by language, the most frequent character with cedilla is ç. In Occitan, Friulian and Catalan ç can also be found at the beginning of a word or at the end and it represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/ in Albanian, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Friulian, Kurdish, Tatar, Turkish, and Turkmen. It is also used this way in Manx, to distinguish it from the velar fricative. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨ç⟩ represents the palatal fricative. Azerbaijani Crimean Tatar Gagauz Tatar Turkmen Romanian Kurdish In HTML character entity references Ş, comparatively, some consider the diacritics on the Latvian consonants ģ, ķ, ļ, ņ, and formerly ŗ to be cedillas. Although their Adobe glyph names are commas, their names in the Unicode Standard are g, k, l, n, the letters were introduced to the Unicode standard before 1992, and their names cannot be altered. The uppercase equivalent Ģ sometimes has a regular cedilla, four letters in Marshallese have cedillas, ļ, m̧, ņ and o̧. In standard printed text they are always cedillas, and their omission or the substitution of comma below and dot below diacritics are nonstandard. As of 2011, many font rendering engines do not display any of these properly, Unicode has precombined glyphs for these letters, but most quality fonts display them with comma below diacritics to accommodate the expectations of Latvian orthography. This is considered nonstandard in Marshallese, the use of a zero-width non-joiner between the letter and the diacritic can alleviate this problem, ļ and ņ may display properly, but may not, see below. M̧ and o̧ do not currently exist in Unicode as precombined glyphs, most Unicode fonts issued with Windows do not display combining diacritics properly, showing them too far to the right of the letter, as with Tahoma and Times New Roman. This mostly affects m̧, and may or may not affect o̧, but some common Unicode fonts like Arial Unicode MS, Cambria and Lucida Sans Unicode do not have this problem
11.
Ogonek
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The ogonek is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European languages, and directly under a vowel in several Native American languages. An ogonek can also be attached to the top of a vowel in Old Norse-Icelandic to show length or vowel affection, for example, o᷎ represents i-mutated ø. — Vikar Margit Andersdotter, I fäbodlivet i gamla tider, example in Western Apache, lęke created The use of the ogonek to indicate nasality is common in the transcription of the indigenous languages of the Americas. This usage originated in the created by Christian missionaries to transcribe these languages. Later, the practice was continued by Americanist anthropologists and linguists who still follow this convention in phonetic transcription to the present day, the ogonek is also used in academic transliteration of Old Church Slavonic. In Polish, Old Church Slavonic, Navajo, Western Apache, Chiricahua, Tłįch Yatiì, Slavey, Dëne Sųłiné, thus, the mark is now de facto an indicator of vowel length. The mark also is useful for distinguishing different grammatical forms that would otherwise have the written form even if they are pronounced differently. In Rheinische Dokumenta, it marks vowels that are more open than those denoted by their base letters Ää, Oo, in two cases, it can be combined with umlaut marks. The E caudata, a similar to an e with ogonek, evolved from a ligature of a and e in medieval scripts, in Latin. The O caudata of Old Norse is used to write the open-mid back rounded vowel, medieval Nordic manuscripts show this hook in both directions, in combination with several vowels. Despite this distinction, the ogonek is sometimes used in discussions of typesetting and encoding Norse texts. The ogonek is functionally equivalent to the cedilla and comma diacritics, in handwritten text the marks may even look the same. The ogonek should be almost the size as a descender. When used for Native American languages, the ogonek should be placed directly under the rather than to the side as is the norm for European languages. European-style placement is acceptable when no other alternatives are available, in LaTeX2e, macro \k will typeset a letter with ogonek, if it is supported by the font encoding, e. g. \k will typeset ą. So \textogonekcentered better fits the latter purposes, actually, \k is defined to result in \textogonekcentered, and \k is defined to result in \textogonekcentered. The package TIPA, activated by using the command \usepackage, offers a different way, Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents Polish Diacritics — How To. Förslag till en enhetlig stavning för älvdalska
12.
Icelandic language
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Icelandic /aɪsˈlændɪk/ is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. It is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages, historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the colonisation of the Americas. Icelandic, Faroese, Norn, and Western Norwegian formerly constituted West Nordic, Danish, Eastern Norwegian, modern Norwegian Bokmål is influenced by both groups, leading the Nordic languages to be divided into mainland Scandinavian languages and Insular Nordic. Most Western European languages have reduced levels of inflection, particularly noun declension. In contrast, Icelandic retains a four-case synthetic grammar comparable to, Icelandic is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic also has many instances of oblique cases without any governing word, for example, many of the various Latin ablatives have a corresponding Icelandic dative. The vast majority of Icelandic speakers—about 320, 000—live in Iceland, more than 8,000 Icelandic speakers live in Denmark, of whom approximately 3,000 are students. The language is spoken by some 5,000 people in the United States. Notably in the province of Manitoba, while 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue, the language is in decline in some communities outside Iceland, particularly in Canada. Icelandic speakers outside Iceland represent recent emigration in almost all cases except Gimli, Manitoba, the state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies serves as a centre for preserving the medieval Icelandic manuscripts and studying the language and its literature. Since 1995, on 16 November each year, the birthday of 19th-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day, the oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD. Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally, the most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise the historical works and the eddaic poems, the language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. Danish rule of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic, though more archaic than the other living Germanic languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th to the 16th century, especially in vowels. The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from an established in the 19th century. The later Rasmus Rask standard was a re-creation of the old treatise, with changes to fit concurrent Germanic conventions. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used much in later centuries, rasks standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use of é instead of je, apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts were written on vellum
13.
German language
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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
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Typographic ligature
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In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined, the common ampersand developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t were combined. The origin of typographical ligatures comes from the invention of writing with a stylus on fibrous material or clay, the earliest known script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that, over time, gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Ligatures figure prominently in many manuscripts, notably the Brahmic abugidas. Medieval scribes who wrote in Latin increased their speed by combining characters. Others conjoined letters for aesthetic purposes, for example, in blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls and those with left-facing bowls were written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. In many script forms, characters such as h, m, scribes also used notational abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character in one stroke. Manuscripts in the century employed hundreds of such abbreviations. In hand writing, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in atypical fashion by merging their parts or by writing one above or inside the other. While in printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, for example, in some cases the fi ligature prints the letters f and i with a greater separation than when they are typeset as separate letters. When printing with movable type was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, Ligatures began to fall out of use due to their complexity in the 20th century. Sans serif typefaces, increasingly used for text, generally avoid ligatures, though notable exceptions include Gill Sans. Inexpensive phototypesetting machines in the 1970s also generally avoid them, the trend was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution starting around 1977 with the production of the Apple II. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution, as most of the early PC development was designed for the English language dependence on ligatures did not carry over to digital. Ligature use fell as the number of traditional hand compositors and hot metal typesetting machine operators dropped since the mass of the IBM Selectric brand of electric typewriter in 1961. A designer active in the period commented, some of the world’s greatest typefaces were quickly becoming some of the world’s worst fonts, Ligatures have grown in popularity over the last 20 years due to an increasing interest in creating typesetting systems that evoke arcane designs and classical scripts. One of the first computer typesetting programs to take advantage of computer-driven typesetting was Donald Knuths TeX program, now the standard method of mathematical typesetting, its default fonts are explicitly based on nineteenth-century styles. Many new fonts feature extensive ligature sets, these include FF Scala, Seria and others by Martin Majoor, mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko contains a particularly large set to allow designers to create dramatic display text with a feel of antiquity
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Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
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Hieroglyph
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A hieroglyph is a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called hieroglyphs, in Neoplatonism, especially during the Renaissance, a hieroglyph was an artistic representation of an esoteric idea, which Neoplatonists believed actual Egyptian hieroglyphs to be. The word hieroglyphics refer to a hieroglyphic script, middle Egyptian, An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, A Practical Guide, the Story of Writing, Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms
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John Florio
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John Florio, known in Italian as Giovanni Florio, was a linguist and lexicographer, a royal language tutor at the Court of James I, and a possible friend and influence on William Shakespeare. He was also the first translator of Montaigne into English and he was born in London, and in 1580 he married Aline, the sister of poet Samuel Daniel. The couple had three children, Joane Florio, baptised in Oxford in 1585, Edward, in 1588 and Elizabeth and he died in Fulham, London in 1625 Born in London, John Florio was of Anglo-Italian origin. He referred to himself as an Englishman in Italiane, johns father, Michelangelo Florio, born in Tuscany, had been a Franciscan friar before converting to the Protestant faith. He got into trouble with the Inquisition in Italy, after preaching in Naples, Padua, seeking refuge in England during the reign of Edward VI, he was appointed pastor of the Italian Protestant congregation in London in 1550. He was also a member of the household of William Cecil and he was dismissed from both on a charge of immorality, but William Cecil later fully forgave him. Little is known of Florios mother, she may have been English and he dedicated a book to Henry Herbert and Jane Grey, his highest-ranking pupils, Regole de la lingua thoscana. Lady Jane Greys youth, faith, and death affected him deeply and later, in seclusion, in Soglio in Switzerland and it was only published in 1607 but written around 1561/1562. He describes her as a martyr and innocent saint and it is possible that he had witnessed some of the events surrounding her or had told her about the persecutions in Italy. Anthony à Wood says that the Florio family, which now included infant John Florio, in Strasburg, Florio met members of the aristocratic de Salis family of Bregaglia, in the Alpine canton of the Grisons. Count de Salis offered Michelangelo the post of pastor at Soglio, which offered him the manse on the edge of a precipice, the post of school teacher. Soglio was remote from the Inquisition and was situated near Chiavenna, John Florio grew up speaking Italian with his father. His father would have taught him French and German, John returned to England, possibly with his mother, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in the early 1570s, in possession of a formidable Christian Reformed and humanist education. John Florio considered the English uncouth and barbaric and set about teaching the Protestant aristocrats European manners, linguistic skills and polished expressions. This mission was in ways similar to that of reformer Philip Sidney who sought to educate the English to write. Florio introduced the English to Italian proverbs, Florio was a friend of Giordano Bruno, while he worked as tutor and spy in the home of the French Ambassador. John Florio resided for a time at Oxford, and was appointed, about 1576, as tutor to the son of Richard Barnes, Bishop of Durham, then studying at Magdalen College. In 1578 Florio published a work entitled First Fruits, which yield Familiar Speech, Merry Proverbs, Witty Sentences and this was accompanied by A Perfect Induction to the Italian and English Tongues
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Maya script
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The earliest inscriptions found which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BCE in San Bartolo, Guatemala. Maya writing was in use throughout Mesoamerica until the Spanish conquest of the Maya in the 16th and 17th centuries. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, modern Mayan languages are written using the Latin alphabet rather than Maya script. It is now thought that the codices and other Classic texts were written by scribes, usually members of the Maya priesthood, there is also some evidence that the script may have been occasionally used to write Mayan languages of the Guatemalan Highlands. However, if languages were written, they may have been written by Ch’olti’ scribes. Mayan writing consisted of an elaborate set of glyphs, which were laboriously painted on ceramics, walls or bark-paper codices, carved in wood or stone. Carved and molded glyphs were painted, but the paint has rarely survived, about 90% of Mayan writing can now be read with varying degrees of certainty, enough to give a comprehensive idea of its structure. The Mayan script was a logosyllabic system, individual glyphs could represent either a word or a syllable, indeed, the same glyph could often be used for both. For example, the calendaric glyph MANIK’ was also used to represent the syllable chi, there was polyvalence in the other direction as well, different glyphs could be read the same way. For example, half a dozen apparently unrelated glyphs were used to write the common third person pronoun u-. However, in the case of Mayan, each tended to correspond to a noun or verb phrase such as his green headband. Also, glyphs were sometimes conflated, where an element of one glyph would replace part of a second, conflation occurs in other scripts, For example, in medieval Spanish manuscripts the word de of was sometimes written Ð. Another example is the ampersand which is a conflation of the Latin et, in place of the standard block configuration, Mayan was also sometimes written in a single row or column, L, or T shapes. These variations most often appeared when they would fit the surface being inscribed. For example, the logogram for fish fin, came to represent the syllable ka, for example, balam jaguar could be written as a single logogram, BALAM, complemented phonetically as ba-BALAM, or BALAM-ma, or ba-BALAM-ma, or written completely phonetically as ba-la-ma. Phonetic glyphs stood for simple consonant-vowel or bare-vowel syllables, when these final consonants were sonorants or gutturals they were sometimes ignored, but more often final consonants were written, which meant that an extra vowel was written as well. This was typically an echo vowel that repeated the vowel of the previous syllable and that is, the word fish fin would be underspelled ka or written in full as ka-ha. A more complex spelling is ha-o-bo ko-ko-no-ma for they are the guardians, a minimal set is, ba-ka ba-ki ba-ku = ba-ke ba-ke-le Despite depending on consonants which were frequently not written, the Mayan voice system was reliably indicated
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Frederick Catherwood
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Frederick Catherwood was an English artist, architect and explorer, best remembered for his meticulously detailed drawings of the ruins of the Maya civilization. He explored Mesoamerica in the mid 19th century with writer John Lloyd Stephens, in 1837, Catherwood was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary member. Thus, they must have made by the native people of the area. Catherwood made visits to Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine and with Joseph Bonomi the Younger made drawings, during a six-week period in 1833, Catherwood was probably the first Westerner to make a detailed survey of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Catherwood developed a reputation as a topographical artist. He perfected a technique which used the camera lucida and supplied the drawings for the panoramas of Jerusalem. In 1836 he met travel writer John Lloyd Stephens in London and they read the account of the ruins of Copán published by Juan Galindo, and decided to try to visit Central America themselves and produce a more detailed and better illustrated account. The expedition came together in 1839 and continued through the year, visiting and documenting dozens of ruins. Stephens and Catherwood are credited for the rediscovery of the Maya civilization, the expedition resulted in the book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, published in 1841, with text by Stephens and engravings based on the drawings of Catherwood. Stephens and Catherwood returned to Yucatan to make further explorations, resulting in Incidents of Travel in Yucatan in 1843, the following year Catherwood published Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, with 25 colour lithographs from watercolours he made at various ruins. This folio was published in May 1844 simultaneously in London and New York in an edition of 300, some 282 copies are known to survive, mostly held in private collections or libraries. In 1854, Frederick Catherwood was a passenger aboard the steamship Arctic, on 27 September in conditions of poor visibility, the Arctic collided with the French steamer Vesta, and sank with much loss of life, including Catherwood. The Lost Cities of the Mayas, the Life, Art, fox, Stephen R. Transatlantic, Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships. Cities of Stone, Stephens & Catherwood in Yucatan, 1839-1842, the Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas, Aztec, Maya, Inca. Von Hagen, Victor W. F. Catherwood, Architect-Explorer of Two Worlds
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Maya civilization
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The Maya civilization developed in an area that encompasses southeastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. The Archaic period, prior to 2000 BC, saw the first developments in agriculture, the first Maya cities developed around 750 BC, and by 500 BC these cities possessed monumental architecture, including large temples with elaborate stucco façades. Hieroglyphic writing was being used in the Maya region by the 3rd century BC, in the Late Preclassic a number of large cities developed in the Petén Basin, and Kaminaljuyu rose to prominence in the Guatemalan Highlands. Beginning around 250 AD, the Classic period is defined as when the Maya were raising sculpted monuments with Long Count dates. This period saw the Maya civilization develop a number of city-states linked by a complex trade network. In the Maya Lowlands two great rivals, Tikal and Calakmul, became powerful, the Classic period also saw the intrusive intervention of the central Mexican city of Teotihuacan in Maya dynastic politics. In the 9th century, there was a political collapse in the central Maya region, resulting in internecine warfare, the abandonment of cities. The Postclassic period saw the rise of Chichen Itza in the north, in the 16th century, the Spanish Empire colonized the Mesoamerican region, and a lengthy series of campaigns saw the fall of Nojpetén, the last Maya city in 1697. Classic period rule was centred on the concept of the divine king, kingship was patrilineal, and power would normally pass to the eldest son. A prospective king was expected to be a successful war leader. Maya politics was dominated by a system of patronage, although the exact political make-up of a kingdom varied from city-state to city-state. By the Late Classic, the aristocracy had greatly increased, resulting in the reduction in the exclusive power of the divine king. Maya cities tended to expand haphazardly, and the city centre would be occupied by ceremonial and administrative complexes, different parts of a city would often be linked by causeways. The principal architecture of the city consisted of palaces, pyramid-temples, ceremonial ballcourts, the Maya elite were literate, and developed a complex system of hieroglyphic writing that was the most advanced in the pre-Columbian Americas. The Maya recorded their history and ritual knowledge in screenfold books, there are also a great many examples of Maya text found on stelae and ceramics. The Maya developed a complex series of interlocking ritual calendars. As a part of their religion, the Maya practised human sacrifice, the Maya civilization developed within the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers a region that spreads from northern Mexico southwards into Central America. Mesoamerica was one of six cradles of civilization worldwide, the Mesoamerican area gave rise to a series of cultural developments that included complex societies, agriculture, cities, monumental architecture, writing, and calendrical systems
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Pictogram
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A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to a considerable extent pictorial in appearance, a pictogram may also be used in subjects such as leisure, tourism and geography. Some pictograms, such as Hazards pictograms, are elements of formal languages, pictograph has a rather different meaning in the field of prehistoric art, including recent art by traditional societies. Here it means art painted on surfaces, as opposed to petroglyphs that are carved or incised. Such images may or may not be considered pictograms in the general sense, early written symbols were based on pictographs and ideograms. Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese civilizations began to adapt such symbols to represent concepts, pictographs are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Pictographs are often used as simple, pictorial, representational symbols by most contemporary cultures, one example of many is the Rock art of the Chumash people, part of the Native American history of California. In 2011, UNESCOs World Heritage List added Petroglyph Complexes of the Mongolian Altai, because of their graphical nature and fairly realistic style, they are widely used to indicate public toilets, or places such as airports and train stations. Contemporary artist Xu Bing created Book from the Ground, a language made up of pictograms collected from around the world. A Book from the Ground chat program has been exhibited in museums, pictograms are used in many areas of modern life for commodity purposes, often as a formal language. In statistics, pictograms are chartsin which icons represent numbers to make it more interesting, a key is often included to indicate what each icon represents. All icons must be of the size, but a fraction of an icon can be used to show the respective fraction of that amount. For example, the table, can be graphed as follows, Key, =10 letters As the values are rounded to the nearest 5 letters. This is why road signs and similar material are often applied as global standards expected to be understood by nearly all. A standard set of pictographs was defined in the international standard ISO7001, other common sets of pictographs are the laundry symbols used on clothing tags and the chemical hazard symbols as standardized by the GHS system. Pictograms have been popularized in use on the web and in software, better known as icons displayed on a computer screen in order to help user navigate a computer system or mobile device
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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
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Writing system
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A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
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Logogram
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In written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or phrase. Chinese characters and Japanese kanji are logograms, some Egyptian hieroglyphs, the use of logograms in writing is called logography. A writing system that is based on logograms is called a logographic system, in alphabets and syllabaries, individual written characters represent sounds rather than concepts. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not necessarily have meaning by themselves, Writing language in this way is called phonemic orthography. Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems, the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China, a more recent attempt is Zlango, intended for use in text messaging, currently including around 300 icons. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the domain is the syllable. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ duck and sȝ son, though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same apart from their consonants and this can be illustrated with Chinese. Not all Chinese characters represent morphemes, some morphemes are composed of more than one character, for example, the Chinese word for spider, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was created by fusing the rebus 知朱 zhīzhū with the bug determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can be used separately, in Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse, a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese 王 hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king, in modern Mandarin, bimorphemic syllables are always written with two characters, for example 花儿 huār flower. These logograms, called hozwārishn, were dispensed with altogether after the Arab conquest of Persia, logograms are used in modern shorthand to represent common words. In addition, the numerals and mathematical symbols used in systems are logograms—1 one,2 two, + plus, = equals, and so on. In English, the ampersand & is used for and and et, % for percent, # for number, § for section, $ for dollar, € for euro, £ for pound, ° for degree, @ for at, etc. All historical logographic systems include a dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideographic component, called determinatives in the case of Egyptian and radicals in the case of Chinese. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are a combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters hanzi into six types by etymology. The first two types are single-body, meaning that the character was created independently of other characters, single-body pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms
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Typeface
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In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font was a set of type, one piece for each glyph. In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, font is frequently synonymous with typeface, in particular, the use of vector or outline fonts means that different sizes of a typeface can be dynamically generated from one design. The word font derives from Middle French fonte melted, a casting, the term refers to the process of casting metal type at a type foundry. In a manual printing house the word font would refer to a set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page. Unlike a digital typeface it would not include a definition of each character. A font when bought new would often be sold as 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase As, given the name upper and lowercase because of which case the metal type was located in, otherwise known as majuscule and minuscule. The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. Some metal type characters required in typesetting, such as dashes, spaces and line-height spacers, were not part of a specific font, line spacing is still often called leading, because the strips used for line spacing were made of lead. In the 1880s–90s, hot lead typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece or in entire lines of type at one time. In European alphabetic scripts, i. e. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, the main properties are the stroke width, called weight, the style or angle. The regular or standard font is sometimes labeled roman, both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique. The keyword for the default, regular case is often omitted for variants and never repeated, otherwise it would be Bulmer regular italic, Bulmer bold regular, Roman can also refer to the language coverage of a font, acting as a shorthand for Western European. Different fonts of the same typeface may be used in the work for various degrees of readability and emphasis. The weight of a font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height. A typeface may come in fonts of many weights, from ultra-light to extra-bold or black, four to six weights are not unusual, many typefaces for office, web and non-professional use come with just a normal and a bold weight which are linked together. If no bold weight is provided, many renderers support faking a bolder font by rendering the outline a second time at an offset, the base weight differs among typefaces, that means one normal font may appear bolder than some other normal font. For example, fonts intended to be used in posters are often quite bold by default while fonts for long runs of text are rather light, therefore, weight designations in font names may differ in regard to the actual absolute stroke weight or density of glyphs in the font
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Computing
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Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating a mathematical sequence of steps known as an algorithm — e. g. through computers. The field of computing includes computer engineering, software engineering, computer science, information systems, the ACM Computing Curricula 2005 defined computing as follows, In a general way, we can define computing to mean any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computers. For example, an information systems specialist will view computing somewhat differently from a software engineer, regardless of the context, doing computing well can be complicated and difficult. Because society needs people to do computing well, we must think of computing not only as a profession, the fundamental question underlying all computing is What can be automated. The term computing is also synonymous with counting and calculating, in earlier times, it was used in reference to the action performed by mechanical computing machines, and before that, to human computers. Computing is intimately tied to the representation of numbers, but long before abstractions like the number arose, there were mathematical concepts to serve the purposes of civilization. These concepts include one-to-one correspondence, comparison to a standard, the earliest known tool for use in computation was the abacus, and it was thought to have been invented in Babylon circa 2400 BC. Its original style of usage was by lines drawn in sand with pebbles, abaci, of a more modern design, are still used as calculation tools today. This was the first known computer and most advanced system of calculation known to date - preceding Greek methods by 2,000 years. The first recorded idea of using electronics for computing was the 1931 paper The Use of Thyratrons for High Speed Automatic Counting of Physical Phenomena by C. E. Wynn-Williams. Claude Shannons 1938 paper A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits then introduced the idea of using electronics for Boolean algebraic operations, a computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions called a computer program. The program has a form that the computer can use directly to execute the instructions. The same program in its source code form, enables a programmer to study. Because the instructions can be carried out in different types of computers, the execution process carries out the instructions in a computer program. Instructions express the computations performed by the computer and they trigger sequences of simple actions on the executing machine. Those actions produce effects according to the semantics of the instructions, computer software or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provides the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. Software refers to one or more programs and data held in the storage of the computer for some purposes. In other words, software is a set of programs, procedures, algorithms, program software performs the function of the program it implements, either by directly providing instructions to the computer hardware or by serving as input to another piece of software
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Font
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In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font was a set of type, one piece for each glyph. In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, font is frequently synonymous with typeface, in particular, the use of vector or outline fonts means that different sizes of a typeface can be dynamically generated from one design. The word font derives from Middle French fonte melted, a casting, the term refers to the process of casting metal type at a type foundry. In a manual printing house the word font would refer to a set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page. Unlike a digital typeface it would not include a definition of each character. A font when bought new would often be sold as 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase As, given the name upper and lowercase because of which case the metal type was located in, otherwise known as majuscule and minuscule. The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. Some metal type characters required in typesetting, such as dashes, spaces and line-height spacers, were not part of a specific font, line spacing is still often called leading, because the strips used for line spacing were made of lead. In the 1880s–90s, hot lead typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece or in entire lines of type at one time. In European alphabetic scripts, i. e. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, the main properties are the stroke width, called weight, the style or angle. The regular or standard font is sometimes labeled roman, both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique. The keyword for the default, regular case is often omitted for variants and never repeated, otherwise it would be Bulmer regular italic, Bulmer bold regular, Roman can also refer to the language coverage of a font, acting as a shorthand for Western European. Different fonts of the same typeface may be used in the work for various degrees of readability and emphasis. The weight of a font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height. A typeface may come in fonts of many weights, from ultra-light to extra-bold or black, four to six weights are not unusual, many typefaces for office, web and non-professional use come with just a normal and a bold weight which are linked together. If no bold weight is provided, many renderers support faking a bolder font by rendering the outline a second time at an offset, the base weight differs among typefaces, that means one normal font may appear bolder than some other normal font. For example, fonts intended to be used in posters are often quite bold by default while fonts for long runs of text are rather light, therefore, weight designations in font names may differ in regard to the actual absolute stroke weight or density of glyphs in the font
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Dingbat
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In typography, a dingbat is an ornament, character, or spacer used in typesetting, often employed for the creation of box frames. The term continues to be used in the industry to describe fonts that have symbols. Examples of characters included in Unicode, The advent of Unicode, such fonts are also sometimes known as pi fonts. Some of the symbols have been used as signature marks. The Dingbats block was added to the Unicode Standard in June 1993 and this code block contains decorative character variants, and other marks of emphasis and non-textual symbolism. Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats, the Dingbats block has four emoji that represent people or body parts.0. This code block contains ornamental leaves, punctuation, and ampersands, quilt squares and it is a subset of dingbat fonts Webdings, Wingdings, and Wingdings 2
29.
Graphics
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Graphics are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage it includes, pictorial representation of data, as in computer-aided design and manufacture, in typesetting and the graphic arts, images that are generated by a computer are called computer graphics. Examples are photographs, drawings, Line art, graphs, diagrams, typography, numbers, symbols, geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings, Graphics often combine text, illustration, and color. Graphic design may consist of the selection, creation, or arrangement of typography alone, as in a brochure, flyer, poster, web site. Clarity or effective communication may be the objective, association with cultural elements may be sought, or merely. Graphics can be functional or artistic. C, many of these were found to record astronomical, seasonal, and chronological details. Records from Egypt predate these and papyrus was used by the Egyptians as a material on which to plan the building of pyramids, they also used slabs of limestone, from 600–250 BC, the Greeks played a major role in geometry. They used graphics to represent their mathematical theories such as the Circle Theorem, in art, graphics is often used to distinguish work in a monotone and made up of lines, as opposed to painting. Drawing generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, in which a tool is always used as if there were no tools it would be art. Graphical drawing is an instrumental guided drawing, woodblock printing, including images is first seen in China after paper was invented. In the West the main techniques have been woodcut, engraving and etching, etching is an intaglio method of printmaking in which the image is incised into the surface of a metal plate using an acid. The acid eats the metal, leaving behind roughened areas, or, if the surface exposed to the acid is very thin, the use of the process in printmaking is believed to have been invented by Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Germany, who decorated armour in this way. Etching is also used in the manufacturing of printed circuit boards, Line art is usually monochromatic, although lines may be of different colors. An illustration is a visual representation such as a drawing, painting, the aim of an illustration is to elucidate or decorate a story, poem or piece of textual information, traditionally by providing a visual representation of something described in the text. The editorial cartoon, also known as a cartoon, is an illustration containing a political or social message. Charts are often used to make it easier to understand large quantities of data, a diagram is a simplified and structured visual representation of concepts, ideas, constructions, relations, statistical data, etc. used to visualize and clarify the topic. A symbol, in its sense, is a representation of a concept or quantity, i. e. an idea, object, concept, quality. A map is a depiction of a space, a navigational aid which highlights relations between objects within that space
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Role-playing game
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A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines. There are several forms of RPG, the original form, sometimes called the tabletop RPG, is conducted through discussion, whereas in live action role-playing games players physically perform their characters actions. In both of these forms, an arranger called a game master usually decides on the rules and setting to be used, acting as referee, while each of the other players plays the role of a single character. Several varieties of RPG also exist in media, such as multi-player text-based MUDs and their graphics-based successors. These games often share settings and rules with tabletop RPGs, despite this variety of forms, some game forms such as trading card games and wargames that are related to role-playing games may not be included. Role-playing activity may sometimes be present in games, but it is not the primary focus. The term is sometimes used to describe roleplay simulation games and exercises used in teaching, training. Both authors and major publishers of tabletop role-playing games consider them to be a form of interactive and collaborative storytelling, events, characters, and narrative structure give a sense of a narrative experience, and the game need not have a strongly-defined storyline. Interactivity is the difference between role-playing games and traditional fiction. Whereas a viewer of a show is a passive observer. Such role-playing games extend an older tradition of storytelling games where a party of friends collaborate to create a story. Participants in a game will generate specific characters and an ongoing plot. A consistent system of rules and a more or less realistic campaign setting in games aids suspension of disbelief, the level of realism in games ranges from just enough internal consistency to set up a believable story or credible challenge up to full-blown simulations of real-world processes. There is also a variety of systems of rules and game settings. Games that emphasize plot and character interaction over game mechanics and combat sometimes prefer the name storytelling game and these types of games tend to minimize or altogether eliminate the use of dice or other randomizing elements. Some games are played with characters created before the game by the GM and this type of game is typically played at gaming conventions, or in standalone games that do not form part of a campaign. Tabletop and pen-and-paper RPGs are conducted through discussion in a social gathering
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Runes
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The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark or fuþark, the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc or fuþorc. Runology is the study of the runic alphabets, runic inscriptions, runestones, runology forms a specialised branch of Germanic linguistics. The earliest runic inscriptions date from around 150 AD, the characters were generally replaced by the Latin alphabet as the cultures that had used runes underwent Christianisation, by approximately 700 AD in central Europe and 1100 AD in northern Europe. However, the use of runes persisted for specialized purposes in northern Europe, until the early 20th century, runes were used in rural Sweden for decorative purposes in Dalarna and on Runic calendars. The three best-known runic alphabets are the Elder Futhark, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, and the Younger Futhark, the Younger Futhark is divided further into the long-branch runes, short-branch or Rök runes, and the stavlösa or Hälsinge runes. The Younger Futhark developed further into the Medieval runes, and the Dalecarlian runes, historically, the runic alphabet is a derivation of the Old Italic scripts of antiquity, with the addition of some innovations. Which variant of the Old Italic family in particular gave rise to the runes is uncertain, suggestions include Raetic, Venetic, Etruscan, or Old Latin as candidates. At the time, all of these scripts had the same angular letter shapes suited for epigraphy, the process of transmission of the script is unknown. The oldest inscriptions are found in Denmark and northern Germany, not near Italy, a West Germanic hypothesis suggests transmission via Elbe Germanic groups, while a Gothic hypothesis presumes transmission via East Germanic expansion. The runes were in use among the Germanic peoples from the 1st or 2nd century AD, no distinction is made in surviving runic inscriptions between long and short vowels, although such a distinction was certainly present phonologically in the spoken languages of the time. Similarly, there are no signs for labiovelars in the Elder Futhark The term runes is used to distinguish these symbols from Latin and it is attested on a 6th-century Alamannic runestaff as runa and possibly as runo on the 4th-century Einang stone. The name comes from the Germanic root run-, meaning secret or whisper, in Old Irish Gaelic, the word rún means mystery, secret, intention or affectionate love. Similarly in Welsh and Old English, the word rhin and rūn respectively means mystery, secret, secret writing, or sometimes in the sense of the word. Ogham is a Celtic script, similarly carved in the Norse manner, the root run- can also be found in the Baltic languages, meaning speech. In Lithuanian, runoti means both to cut and to speak, according to another theory, the Germanic root comes from the Indoeuropean root *reuə- dig. The Finnish term for rune, riimukirjain, means scratched letter, the Finnish word runo means poem and comes from the same source as the English word rune, it is a very old loan of the Proto-Germanic *rūnō. The runes developed centuries after the Old Italic alphabets from which they are historically derived. The formation of the Elder Futhark was complete by the early 5th century, specifically, the Raetic alphabet of Bolzano is often advanced as a candidate for the origin of the runes, with only five Elder Futhark runes having no counterpart in the Bolzano alphabet
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Complex text layout
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Complex text layout or complex text rendering refers to the typesetting of writing systems in which the shape or positioning of a grapheme depends on its relation to other graphemes. The term is used in the field of software internationalization, where each grapheme is a character, scripts which require CTL for proper display may be known as complex scripts. Examples include the Arabic alphabet and scripts of the Brahmic family, many scripts do not require CTL. For instance, the Latin alphabet or Chinese characters can be typeset by simply displaying each character one after another in rows or columns. However, even these scripts have alternate forms or optional features which require CTL to produce on computers, the main characteristics of CTL complexity are, Bi-directional text, where characters may be written from either right-to-left or left-to-right direction. Context-sensitive shaping and ligatures, where a character may change its shape, for example, a character in Arabic script can have as many as four different shape-forms, depending on context. Ordering, where the order of the characters is not the same as the logical order. Not all occurrences of these characteristics require CTL, for example, the Greek alphabet has context-sensitive shaping of the letter sigma, which appears as ς at the end of a word and σ elsewhere. The alternative approach is to include the instructions in the font file itself. Rendering software still needs to be capable of reading and following the instructions, examples of this latter approach include Apple Advanced Typography and Graphite. The OpenType format is intended for systems using the first approach. AAT and Graphite instructions can be embedded in OpenType font files
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Palaeography
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Palaeography or paleography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting. The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts, however, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Palaeography can be a skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of an alphabet in each given language has evolved constantly. Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to more quickly and sometimes to save space. Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbreviations enables the palaeographer to read, the palaeographer must know, first, the language of the text, and second, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal or notarial abbreviations. Philological knowledge of the language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a time or place can help palaeographers identify ancient or more recent forgeries versus authentic documents. Knowledge of writing materials is essential to the study of handwriting. Palaeography can be used to provide information about the date at which a document was written, scholars also tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity. It spread from the Mediterranean coast to the borders of India, becoming popular and being adopted by many people. The Aramaic script was written in a form with a direction from right to left. One innovation in Aramaic is the matres lectionis system to indicate certain vowels, Early Phoenician-derived scripts did not have letters for vowels, and so most texts recorded just consonants. Most likely as a consequence of changes in North Semitic languages. The letter aleph was employed to write /ā/, he for /ō/, yod for /ī/, Aramaic writing and language supplanted Babylonian cuneiform and Akkadian language, even in their homeland in Mesopotamia. The wide diffusion of Aramaic letters led to its writing being used not only in monumental inscriptions, Aramaic papyri have been found in large numbers in Egypt, especially at Elephantine – among them are official and private documents of the Jewish military settlement in 5 BC. In the Aramaic papyri and potsherds, words are separated usually by a small gap, at the turn of the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC, the heretofore uniform Aramaic letters developed new forms, as a result of dialectal and political fragmentation in several subgroups. The most important of these is the so-called square Hebrew block script, followed by Palmyrene, Nabataean, Aramaic is usually divided into three main parts, Old Aramaic Middle Aramaic, and Modern Aramaic of the present day. Old Aramaic appeared in the 11th century BC as the language of the first Aramaean states
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Punchcutting
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Punchcutting is a craft used in traditional typography to cut letter punches in steel from which matrices were made in copper for type founding in the letterpress era. Cutting punches and casting type was the first step of traditional typesetting, the cutting of letter punches was a highly skilled craft requiring much patience and practice. Often the designer of the type would not be involved in the cutting. The angle of the side of the punch was particularly significant, the punchcutter begins by transferring the outline of a letter design to one end of a steel bar. The outer shape of the punch could be cut directly, but the curves of a small punch were particularly difficult as it was necessary to cut deep enough. While this can be done with cutting tools, a counterpunch, a counterpunch could be used to create this negative space, not just where the space was completely enclosed by the letter, but in any concavity. Of course, the counterpunch had to be harder than the punch itself and this was accomplished by annealing the punch blank, and hardening and tempering the counterpunch. Such a tool solved two issues, one technical and one aesthetic, that arose in punchcutting, often the same counterpunch could be used for several letters in a typeface. For example, the space inside an uppercase P and R is usually very similar. Counterpunches were regularly used in this way to give typefaces a more consistent look, the counterpunch would be struck into the face of the punch. The outer form of the letter is then shaped using files, to test the punch, the punchcutter makes an imprint on a piece of paper after coating the punch with soot from an open flame. The soot left by the flame acts like ink to create an image on the paper, once the punches are ready a mold could then be created from the punch by using the punch on a softer metal to create a matrix. Then, type metal, an alloy of lead, antimony, one characteristic of type metal that makes it valuable for this use is that it expands as it cools, keeping the accurate dimensions of letters. This characteristic is shared by the used to cast sculptures. Bradford Industrial Museum Commemorative coin Letterpress printing Amoretti Brothers
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Typewriter
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A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for writing characters similar to those produced by printers movable type. A typewriter operates by means of keys that strike a ribbon to transmit ink or carbon impressions onto paper, typically, a single character is printed on each key press. The machine prints characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the used in movable type letterpress printing. At the end of the century, the term typewriter was also applied to a person who used a typing machine. After its invention in the 1860s, the quickly became an indispensable tool for practically all writing other than personal handwritten correspondence. It was widely used by writers, in offices. As with the automobile, telephone, and telegraph, a number of people contributed insights, historians have estimated that some form of typewriter was invented 52 times as thinkers tried to come up with a workable design. Some of the early typing instruments, In 1575 an Italian printmaker, Francesco Rampazzetto, invented the scrittura tattile, in 1714, Henry Mill obtained a patent in Britain for a machine that, from the patent, appears to have been similar to a typewriter. In 1802 Italian Agostino Fantoni developed a particular typewriter to enable his blind sister to write, in 1808 Italian Pellegrino Turri invented a typewriter. He also invented carbon paper to provide the ink for his machine, in 1823 Italian Pietro Conti di Cilavegna invented a new model of typewriter, the tachigrafo, also known as tachitipo. In 1829, William Austin Burt patented a machine called the Typographer which, the Science Museum describes it merely as the first writing mechanism whose invention was documented, but even that claim may be excessive, since Turris invention pre-dates it. Even in the hands of its inventor, this machine was slower than handwriting, Burt and his promoter John D. Sheldon never found a buyer for the patent, so the invention was never commercially produced, because the typographer used a dial, rather than keys, to select each character, it was called an index typewriter rather than a keyboard typewriter. Index typewriters of that era resemble the squeeze-style embosser from the 1960s more than they resemble the modern keyboard typewriter, by the mid-19th century, the increasing pace of business communication had created a need for mechanization of the writing process. Stenographers and telegraphers could take down information at rates up to 130 words per minute, from 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production. Charles Thurber developed multiple patents, of which his first in 1843 was developed as an aid to the blind, in 1855, the Italian Giuseppe Ravizza created a prototype typewriter called Cembalo scrivano o macchina da scrivere a tasti. It was a machine that let the user see the writing as it was typed. In 1861, Father Francisco João de Azevedo, a Brazilian priest, made his own typewriter with basic materials and tools, such as wood, in that same year the Brazilian emperor D
36.
Apostrophe
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The apostrophe character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English it is used for several purposes, The marking of the omission of one or more letters, the marking of plurals of individual characters. Apostrophe comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος, through Latin and French, the apostrophe looks the same as a closing single quotation mark, although they have different meanings. Such incorrect substitutes as ´ and are common in unprofessional texts, the apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna. It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice, introduced by Geoffroy Tory, the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision. It was also used in place of a final e when it was elided before a vowel. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure, from the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision or because the letter no longer represented a sound. English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings and the noun ending -es, so apostrophe followed by s was often used to mark a plural, especially when the noun was a loan word. The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have made to the possessive. By the 18th century, apostrophe + s was used for all possessive singular forms. This was regarded as representing the Old English genitive singular inflection -es, the plural use was greatly reduced, but a need was felt to mark possessive plural. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural s, however, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. The apostrophe is used to indicate possession and this convention distinguishes possessive singular forms from simple plural forms, and both of those from possessive plural forms. For singulars, the possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English. Summary of rules for most situations Possessive personal pronouns, serving as either noun-equivalents or adjective-equivalents, do not use an apostrophe, even when they end in s. The complete list of those ending in the s or the corresponding sound /s/ or /z/ but not taking an apostrophe is ours, yours, his, hers, its, theirs. Other pronouns, singular nouns not ending in s, and plural nouns not ending in s all take ’s in the possessive, e. g. someone’s, a cat’s toys, women’s. Plural nouns already ending in s take only an apostrophe after the s when the possessive is formed
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Exclamation mark
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The exclamation mark or exclamation point is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume, and often marks the end of a sentence. Similarly, an exclamation mark is often used in warning signs. Other uses include, In mathematics it denotes the factorial operation, at the beginning of an expression to denote logical negation, e. g. A means the logical negation of A, also called not A. Graphically the exclamation mark is represented as a stop point with a vertical line above. One theory of its origin is that it is derived from a Latin exclamation of joy, the modern graphical representation is believed to have been born in the Middle Ages. Medieval copyists wrote the Latin word io at the end of a sentence to indicate joy, over time, the i moved above the o, and the o became smaller, becoming a point. The exclamation mark did not have its own dedicated key on standard manual typewriters before the 1970s, instead, one typed a period, backspaced, and typed an apostrophe. In the 1950s, secretarial dictation and typesetting manuals in America referred to the mark as bang, appeared in dialogue balloons to represent a gun being fired, although the nickname probably emerged from letterpress printing. This bang usage is behind the names of the interrobang, an unconventional character, and a shebang line. In the printing world, the mark can be called a screamer, a gasper. In hacker culture, the mark is called bang, shriek, or, in the British slang known as Commonwealth Hackish. For example, the password communicated in the spoken phrase Your password is em-nought-pee-aitch-pling-en-three is m0ph. n3, the exclamation mark is common to languages using the Latin alphabet, although usage varies slightly between languages. The exclamation mark was adopted in languages written in other scripts, such as Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Devanagari. A sentence ending in an exclamation mark may be an exclamation, or an imperative, or may indicate astonishment or surprise, They were the footprints of a gigantic hound. Exclamation marks are occasionally placed mid-sentence with a similar to a comma, for dramatic effect, although this usage is obsolescent, On the walk. Informally, exclamation marks may be repeated for emphasis. The exclamation mark is used in conjunction with the question mark. This can be in protest or astonishment, a few writers replace this with a single, nonstandard punctuation mark, the interrobang, which is the combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark
