1.
Abjad
–
An abjad is a type of writing system where each symbol stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel. The name abjad is derived from pronouncing the first letters of the Arabic alphabet in order, the ordering of Arabic letters used to match that of the older Hebrew, Phoenician and Semitic alphabets, ʾ b g d. According to the formulations of Daniels, abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, abugidas mark the vowels with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, or a standalone glyph. Some abugidas use a symbol to suppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In a syllabary, a grapheme denotes a syllable, that is. This caused fatal effects on terminology in general and especially in Semitic philology, the first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs and this made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script wherever they went. Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet and Aramaic, the Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia. Impure abjads have characters for vowels, optional vowel diacritics. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators and this practice was at first rare and limited in scope, but it became increasingly common and more developed in later times. In the 9th century BC, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script for use in their own language, the phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when the vowels went unrepresented, so the script was modified. They did not need letters for the sounds represented by aleph, he, heth or ayin. The letters waw and yod were also adapted into vowel signs, along with he, the major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants. Abugidas developed along a different route. The basic consonantal symbol was considered to have an inherent a vowel sound, hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modify the vowel. In this way, the South Arabian alphabet evolved into the Geez alphabet between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD, similarly, around the 3rd century BC, the Brāhmī script developed. The other major family of abugidas, Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, was developed in the 1840s by missionary and linguist James Evans for the Cree. Evans used features of Devanagari script and Pitman shorthand to create his initial abugida, later in the 19th century, other missionaries adapted Evans system to other Canadian aboriginal languages
Abjad
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Writing systems
Abjad
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A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which may mean 'to
Baalat '. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads mt l b c lt.
2.
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
Logogram
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Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have their origins as logograms.
3.
Iranian languages
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The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, which in turn are a branch of the Indo-European language family. The speakers of Iranian languages are known as Iranian people, historical Iranian languages are grouped in three stages, Old Iranian, Middle Iranian, and New Iranian. Of the Old Iranian languages, the better understood and recorded ones are Old Persian and Avestan, Middle Iranian languages included Middle Persian, Parthian, and Bactrian. As of 2008, there were an estimated 150–200 million native speakers of Iranian languages, ethnologue estimates there are 86 Iranian languages, the largest among them being Persian, Pashto and Kurdish. The term Iranian is applied to any language which descends from the ancestral Proto-Iranian language, Iranian derives from the Persian and Sanskrit origin word Arya. The use of the term for the Iranian language family was introduced in 1836 by Christian Lassen, robert Needham Cust used the term Irano-Aryan in 1878, and Orientalists such as George Abraham Grierson and Max Müller contrasted Irano-Aryan and Indo-Aryan. Some recent scholarship, primarily in German, has revived this convention, the Eastern Iranian languages subdivided into, Southeastern, of which Pashto is the dominant member, Northeastern, by far the smallest branch, of which Ossetian is the dominant member. All Iranian languages are descended from an ancestor, Proto-Iranian. In turn, and together with Proto-Indo-Aryan and the Nuristani languages, the Indo-Iranian languages are thought to have originated in Central Asia. The Andronovo culture is the candidate for the common Indo-Iranian culture ca.2000 BC. It was situated precisely in the part of Central Asia that borders present-day Russia. Of that variety of languages/dialects, direct evidence of two have survived. These are, Avestan, the two languages/dialects of the Avesta, i. e. the liturgical texts of Zoroastrianism, Old Persian, the native language of a south-western Iranian people known as Persians. Indirectly attested Old Iranian languages are discussed below, Old Persian is the Old Iranian dialect as it was spoken in south-western Iran by the inhabitants of Parsa, who also gave their name to their region and language. The language of the Avesta is subdivided into two dialects, conventionally known as Old Avestan, and Younger Avestan. These terms, which date to the 19th century, are slightly misleading since Younger Avestan is not only much younger than Old Avestan, the Old Avestan dialect is very archaic, and at roughly the same stage of development as Rigvedic Sanskrit. Unlike Old Persian, which has Middle Persian as its known successor, such hypothetical Old Iranian languages include Carduchi and Old Parthian. Additionally, the existence of unattested languages can sometimes be inferred from the impact they had on neighbouring languages, such transfer is known to have occurred for Old Persian, which has a Median substrate in some of its vocabulary
Iranian languages
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Geographic distribution of modern Iranian languages
Iranian languages
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Iranian languages family tree
4.
Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. It combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters, cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts are derived from hieroglyphic writing, the writing system continued to be used throughout the Late Period, as well as the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period, with the closing of pagan temples in the 5th century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost, and the script remained undeciphered throughout the medieval and early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphs would only be solved in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, the word hieroglyph comes from the Greek adjective ἱερογλυφικός, a compound of ἱερός and γλύφω, supposedly a calque of an Egyptian phrase mdw·w-nṯr gods words. The glyphs themselves were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ γράμματα the sacred engraved letters, the word hieroglyph has become a noun in English, standing for an individual hieroglyphic character. As used in the sentence, the word hieroglyphic is an adjective. Hieroglyphs emerged from the artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from c.4000 BC have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing, proto-hieroglyphic symbol systems develop in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called Scorpion I recovered at Abydos in 1998. The first full sentence written in hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qaab. There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, by the Greco-Roman period, there are more than 5,000. However, given the lack of evidence, no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. Since the 1990s, and discoveries such as the Abydos glyphs, as writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic and demotic scripts. These variants were more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental, the Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts – hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule, and after Alexander the Greats conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It appears that the quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part. Some believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish true Egyptians from some of the foreign conquerors, another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms, which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally
Egyptian hieroglyphs
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A section of the
Papyrus of Ani showing cursive hieroglyphs.
Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Hieroglyphs on a funerary stela in
Manchester Museum
Egyptian hieroglyphs
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The
Rosetta Stone in the
British Museum
Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Hieroglyphs typical of the Graeco-Roman period
5.
Proto-Sinaitic
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It is also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, and Canaanite. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th century BC. The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC, the Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years, many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta. The date of the inscriptions is placed in the 17th or 16th century BC. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script and they are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term Proto-Canaanite is also applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions, the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, 25°57′N 32°25′E, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants rather than different consonants, some scholars think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe, and that the אל ʾl at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ʾel god. Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in some of the signs are treated as logograms or rebuses Excellent banquet of the celebration of ʿAnat. ʾEl will provide plenty of wine and victuals for the celebration and we will sacrifice to her an ox and a prime fatling. This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, according to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but most of the names of the letters would have remained the same. Below is a table showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. The Other section shows the corresponding Archaic Greek, Modern Greek, Etruscan, abjad Byblos syllabary Ugaritic script Albright, Wm. F
Proto-Sinaitic
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A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which may mean 'to Ba'alat'. The line running from the upper left to lower right may read mt l b c lt.
Proto-Sinaitic
–
Traces of the 16 and 12 characters of the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions. (Photos here and here)
6.
Phoenician alphabet
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The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad consisting of 22 letters, all consonants and it was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and it became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script, the Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are texts written in boustrophedon. The earliest known inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle. The script was not widely used until the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the 13th and 12th centuries BC, the Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script of the Bronze Age collapse period. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet -- such as Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian, and the Paleohispanic scripts -- were very successful. This simple system contrasted with the scripts in use at the time, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another reason for its success was the trading culture of Phoenician merchants. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt, Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script and its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, and it was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This idea was popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform, the theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian
Phoenician alphabet
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Phoenician alphabet
7.
Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Rather, it is a different type, the earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet. Over time, the alphabet developed into the form shown below, Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform, as the predominant writing system. Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised, its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, the Aramaic script would survive as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system. A group of 30 Aramaic documents from Bactria has been recently discovered, an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria, the widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, the Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD, the Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic, in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets, as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Karosthi. Aramaic is also considered to be the most likely source of the Brahmi script, ancestor of the Brahmic family of scripts, today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet. Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are written in the Syriac alphabet, Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. In Maloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken and they started to use the Syriac alphabet instead. In Aramaic writing, Waw and Yodh serve a double function, originally, they represented only the consonants w and y, but they were later adopted to indicate the long vowels ū and ī respectively as well. In the latter role, they are known as matres lectionis or mothers of reading. Ālap, likewise, has some of the characteristics of a mater lectionis because in initial positions, it indicates a glottal stop, among Jews, the influence of Hebrew often led to the use of Hē instead, at the end of a word
Aramaic alphabet
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Bilingual Greek and Aramaic inscription by the
Mauryan emperor
Ashoka the Great at
Kandahar,
Afghanistan, 3rd century BC
8.
Avestan alphabet
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The Avestan alphabet is a writing system developed during Irans Sassanid era to render the Avestan language. As a side effect of its development, the script was used for Pazend. In the texts of Zoroastrian tradition, the alphabet is referred to as din dabireh or din dabiri, the development of the Avestan alphabet was initiated by the need to represent recited Avestan language texts correctly. The various text collections that constitute the canon of Zoroastrian scripture are the result of a collation that occurred in the 4th century. It is likely that the Avestan alphabet was an ad hoc innovation related to this – Sassanid archetype – collation and this they passed on to their pupils in turn, so preserving for many generations the correct way to recite scripture. This was necessary because the priesthood considered precise and correct enunciation, further, the recitation of the liturgy was accompanied by ritual activity that leaves no room to attend to a written text. The development of the Avestan alphabet allowed these commentaries to interleave quotation of scripture with explanation thereof, the direct effect of these texts was a standardized interpretation of scripture that survives to the present day. For scholarship these texts are enormously interesting since they occasionally preserve passages that have otherwise been lost, though the existence of an Arsacid archetype is not impossible, it has proved to contribute nothing to Avestan philology. In contrast, Avestan was an alphabet, with explicit characters for vowels. The alphabet included many characters from cursive Pahlavi, while some are characters only exist in the Psalter Pahlavi variant. Some of the vowels, such as ə appear to derive from Greek minuscules, Avestan o is a special form of Pahlavi l that exists only in Aramaic signs. Avestan script, like Pahlavi script and Aramaic script also, is written right to left. In Avestan script, letters are not connected, and ligatures are rare, fossey lists altogether 16 ligatures, but most are formed by the interaction of swash tails. Words and the end of the first part of a compound are separated by a dot, beyond that, punctuation is weak or non-existent in the manuscripts, and in the 1880s Karl Friedrich Geldner had to devise one for standardized transcription. Two above and one below signify — in ascending order of dot size — colon, semicolon, one above and two below signify turned end of sentence and turned end of section. In total, the Avestan alphabet has 37 consonants and 16 vowels, there are two main transcription schemes for Avestan, the older style used by Christian Bartholomae, and the newer style used by Karl Hoffmann. Later, when writing Middle Persian in the script, another consonant was added to it to represent the /l/ phoneme that didnt exist in the Avestan language, the Avestan alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in October,2009 with the release of version 5.2. The characters are encoded at U+10B00—10B35 for letters and U+10B38—10B3F for punctuation, Avestan alphabet, Omniglot Pahlavi alphabet, Omniglot
Avestan alphabet
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Avestan
Avestan alphabet
–
Image showing the Avestan letter LE (leftmost letter) in a Pazand title for a published Avesta. The text (transliterated in the Hoffmann system) is pargart auual.
9.
Unicode range
–
The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. UCS has a capacity to encode over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is represented by a code point, which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111, used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software. The number of encoded characters is made up as follows,128,019 graphical characters 218 special purpose characters for control, ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably, however, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character, what one might think of as its address. Input methods can be through keyboard or a character palette. The UCS can be divided in various ways, such as by plane, block, character category, the x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros, the hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, an entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition, the format is the same as for any entity reference, &name, where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. Unicode and ISO divide the set of points into 17 planes. As of 2016 ISO and the Unicode Consortium has only allocated characters, the others remain empty and reserved for future use. Most characters are assigned to the first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane. This is to ease the transition for legacy software since the Basic Multilingual Plane is addressable with just two octets. The characters outside the first plane usually have very specialized or rare use. Each plane corresponds with the value of the one or two hexadecimal digits preceding the four ones, hence U+24321 is in Plane 2, U+4321 is in Plane 0
Unicode range
–
Example of fraction slash use. This
typeface (
Apple Chancery) shows the synthesized common fraction on the left and the precomposed fraction glyph on the right as a rendering the plain text string “1 1⁄4 1¼”. Depending on the text environment, the single string “1 1⁄4” might yield either result, the one on the right through substitution of the fraction sequence with the single precomposed fraction glyph.
10.
History of the alphabet
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The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet and its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. In this sense, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from Greek. Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE, Mesopotamian cuneiform, since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet. This was not done writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been significant influence on the creation of the first alphabet. The Rongorongo script of Easter Island may also be an invented alphabet. The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered, however, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el Hol, the table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters and this Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of the Semitic name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph. So, for example, the hieroglyph per was used to write the sound in Semitic, because was the first sound in the Semitic word for house, bayt. The script was used sporadically, and retained its pictographic nature, for half a millennium. The first Canaanite states to make use of the alphabet were the Phoenician city-states. The Phoenician cities were maritime states at the center of a vast trade network, two variants of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history of writing, the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, the Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan. The Syriac alphabet used after the 3rd century CE evolved, through Pahlavi and Sogdian, into the alphabets of northern Asia, such as Orkhon, Uyghur, Mongolian, the Georgian alphabet is of uncertain provenance, but appears to be part of the Persian-Aramaic family. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos, the letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. The Greeks used for some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which werent used in Greek speech
History of the alphabet
–
Greek alphabet on an ancient
black figure vessel. There is a
digamma but no ksi or omega. The letter phi is missing a stroke and looks like the omicron Ο, but on the underside of the bowl it is a full Φ.
History of the alphabet
–
Etruscan writing, the beginning of the writing with the
Latin alphabet.
11.
Hieratic
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Hieratic is a cursive writing system used in the provenance of the pharaohs in Egypt and Nubia. It developed alongside cursive hieroglyphs, from which it is separate yet intimately related and it was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, allowing scribes to write quickly without resorting to the time-consuming hieroglyphs. In the 2nd century AD, the term hieratic was first used by Saint Clement of Alexandria. It derives from the Greek phrase γράμματα ἱερατικά, as at time, hieratic was used only for religious texts, as had been the case for the previous eight. Hieratic can also be an adjective meaning f or associated with sacred persons or offices, in the Proto-Dynastic Period of Egypt, hieratic first appeared and developed alongside the more formal hieroglyphic script. It is an error to view hieratic as a derivative of hieroglyphic writing, indeed, the earliest texts from Egypt are produced with ink and brush, with no indication their signs are descendants of hieroglyphs. True monumental hieroglyphs carved in stone did not appear until the 1st Dynasty, the two writing systems, therefore, are related, parallel developments, rather than a single linear one. Hieratic was used throughout the period and into the Graeco-Roman Period. Around 660 BC, the Demotic script replaced hieratic in most secular writing, through most of its long history, hieratic was used for writing administrative documents, accounts, legal texts, and letters, as well as mathematical, medical, literary, and religious texts. During the Græco-Roman period, when Demotic had become the chief administrative script, in general, hieratic was much more important than hieroglyphs throughout Egypts history, being the script used in daily life. It was also the system first taught to students, knowledge of hieroglyphs being limited to a small minority who were given additional training. In fact, it is possible to detect errors in hieroglyphic texts that came about due to a misunderstanding of an original hieratic text. Most often, hieratic script was written in ink with a brush on papyrus, wood. Thousands of limestone ostraca have been found at the site of Deir al-Madinah, besides papyrus, stone, ceramic shards, and wood, there are hieratic texts on leather rolls, though few have survived. There are also hieratic texts written on cloth, especially on linen used in mummification, there are some hieratic texts inscribed on stone, a variety known as lapidary hieratic, these are particularly common on stelae from the 22nd Dynasty. During the late 6th Dynasty, hieratic was sometimes incised into mud tablets with a stylus, similar to cuneiform. About five hundred of these tablets have been discovered in the palace at Ayn Asil. At the time the tablets were made, Dakhla was located far from centers of papyrus production and these tablets record inventories, name lists, accounts, and approximately fifty letters
Hieratic
–
One of four official letters to
vizier Khay copied onto fragments of limestone (an
ostracon).
Hieratic
–
Hieratic
Hieratic
–
Exercise tablet with hieratic excerpt from
The Instructions of Amenemhat.
Dynasty XVIII, reign of
Amenhotep I, c. 1514–1493 BC. Text reads: "Be on your guard against all who are subordinate to you... Trust no brother, know no friend, make no intimates."
12.
Demotic (Egyptian)
–
The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. By convention, the word Demotic is capitalized in order to distinguish it from demotic Greek, the Demotic script was referred to by the Egyptians as sš n šˤ. The script was used for more than a thousand years, and it is written and read from right to left, while earlier hieroglyphics could be written from top to bottom, left to right, or right to left. Early Demotic developed in Lower Egypt during the part of the 25th dynasty. It is generally dated between 650 and 400 BCE, as most texts written in Early Demotic are dated to the 26th dynasty, during this period, Demotic was used only for administrative, legal, and commercial texts, while hieroglyphs and hieratic were reserved for other texts. Middle Demotic is the stage of writing used during the Ptolemaic Period, from the 4th century BCE onward, Demotic held a higher status, as may be seen from its increasing use for literary and religious texts. From the beginning of Roman rule of Egypt, Demotic was progressively less used in public life. In contrast to the way Latin eliminated minority languages in the part of the Empire. After that, Demotic was only used for a few ostraca, subscriptions to Greek texts, mummy labels, and graffiti. The last dated example of the Demotic script is dated to December 11,452 CE, Demotic is a development of Late Egyptian and shares much with the later Coptic phase of the Egyptian language. In the earlier stages of Demotic, such as those written in the Early Demotic script. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 and it is inscribed with three scripts, classical Greek and both Demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian. There are 32 lines of Demotic, which is the middle of the three scripts on the stone, the Demotic was deciphered before the hieroglyphs, starting with the efforts of Silvestre de Sacy. Egyptologists, linguists and papyrologists who specialize in the study of the Demotic stage of Egyptian script are known as Demotists, the table below shows some derivative similarities from Hieroglyphic to Demotic to the currently surviving Coptic Egyptian script. Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian Betrò, Maria Carmela, hieroglyphics, The Writings of Ancient Egypt. New York, Milan, Abbeville Press, Arnoldo Mondadori, thus Wrote Onchsheshonqy, An Introductory Grammar of Demotic. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, No.45
Demotic (Egyptian)
–
Demotic
Demotic (Egyptian)
Demotic (Egyptian)
13.
Meroitic script
–
The Meroitic script is an alphabetic script, used to write the Meroitic language of the Kingdom of Meroë in Sudan. It was developed in the Napatan Period, and first appears in the 2nd century BCE, for a time, it was also possibly used to write the Nubian language of the successor Nubian kingdoms. Its use was described by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, the Nubian form of the Greek alphabet retained three Meroitic letters. The script was deciphered in 1909 by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, a British Egyptologist, however, the Meroitic language itself has yet to be translated. In late 2008, the first complete royal dedication was found, the longest inscription found is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There were two forms of the Meroitic alphabet, monumental hieroglyphs, and a cursive. The majority of texts are cursive, unlike Egyptian writing, there was a simple one-to-one correspondence between the two forms of Meroitic, except that in the cursive form, consonants are joined in ligatures to a following vowel i. The direction of writing was from right to left, top to bottom. Monumental letters were oriented to face the beginning of the text, being primarily alphabetic, the Meroitic script worked differently than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some scholars, such as Harald Haarmann, believe that the letters of Meroitic are evidence for an influence of the Greek alphabet in its development. There were 23 letters in the Meroitic alphabet, including four vowels, the fourteen or so consonants are conventionally transcribed, ya, wa, ba, pa, ma, na, ra, la, cha, kha, ka, qa, sa, da. These values were established from evidence such as Egyptian names borrowed into Meroitic. That is, the Meroitic letter which looks like an owl in monumental inscriptions, however, this is a historical reconstruction, and while m is not in much doubt, the pronunciations of some of the other letters are much less certain. The three vowels i a o were presumably pronounced /i a u/, kh is thought to have been a velar fricative, as the ch in Scottish loch or German Bach. Ch was a sound, perhaps uvular as g in Dutch dag or palatal as in German ich. Q was perhaps a uvular stop, as in Arabic Qatar, S may have been like s in sun. An /n/ was omitted in writing when it occurred before any of other consonants within a word. Griffith first transcribed it as r, and Rowan believes that was closer to its actual value
Meroitic script
–
Meroitic
14.
Proto-Sinaitic script
–
It is also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, and Canaanite. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th century BC. The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC, the Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years, many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta. The date of the inscriptions is placed in the 17th or 16th century BC. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script and they are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term Proto-Canaanite is also applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions, the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, 25°57′N 32°25′E, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants rather than different consonants, some scholars think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe, and that the אל ʾl at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ʾel god. Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in some of the signs are treated as logograms or rebuses Excellent banquet of the celebration of ʿAnat. ʾEl will provide plenty of wine and victuals for the celebration and we will sacrifice to her an ox and a prime fatling. This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, according to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but most of the names of the letters would have remained the same. Below is a table showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. The Other section shows the corresponding Archaic Greek, Modern Greek, Etruscan, abjad Byblos syllabary Ugaritic script Albright, Wm. F
Proto-Sinaitic script
–
A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which may mean 'to Ba'alat'. The line running from the upper left to lower right may read mt l b c lt.
Proto-Sinaitic script
–
Traces of the 16 and 12 characters of the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions. (Photos here and here)
15.
Ugaritic script
–
The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform abjad used from around either the fifteenth century BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. Other languages were written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit. Arabic and Old South Arabian are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed proto-Semitic consonant phonemes, the script was written from left to right. Although cuneiform and pressed into clay, its symbols were unrelated to those of the Akkadian cuneiform, in most syllables only consonants were written, including the /w/ and /j/ of diphthongs. However, Ugaritic was unusual among early abjads in also writing vowels after the glottal stop, in function, is like Ugaritic s, but only in certain words – other s-words are never written with. Segert instead theorizes that it may have been syllabic /su/, and for this reason grouped with the syllabic signs /ʔi/. Probably the last three letters of the alphabet were originally developed for transcribing non-Ugaritic languages, and were applied to write the Ugaritic language. The three letters denoting glottal stop plus vowel combinations were used as simple vowel letters when writing other languages, the only punctuation is a word divider. At the time the Ugaritic script was in use, Ugarit was at the centre of the world, among Egypt, Anatolia, Cyprus, Crete. Ugaritic combined the system of the Semitic abjad with cuneiform writing methods, however, scholars have searched in vain for graphic prototypes of the Ugaritic letters in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Recently, some have suggested that Ugaritic represents some form of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, the letter forms distorted as an adaptation to writing on clay with a stylus. Other letters look similar as well,
Ugaritic script
–
The Ugaritic Alphabet
16.
South Arabian alphabet
–
The ancient Yemeni alphabet branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages of the Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaean, Himyaritic, the earliest inscriptions in the alphabet date to the 9th century BC in the Akele Guzai region, Eritrea. There are no vowels, instead using the mater lectionis to mark them, in Ethiopia and Eritrea it evolved later into the Geez script, which, with added symbols throughout the centuries, has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages. Zabūr is the name of the form of the South Arabian script that was used by the ancient Yemenis in addition to their monumental script. As yet only one thousand such texts have been discovered, of which perhaps some 26 have been published. It is usually written from right to left but can also be written left to right. When written from left to right the characters are flipped horizontally, the spacing or separation between words is done with a vertical bar mark. Letters in words are not connected together and it does not implement any diacritical marks, differing in this respect from the modern Arabic alphabet. The South Arabian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in October,2009 with the release of version 5.2, the Unicode block, called Old South Arabian, is U+10A60–U+10A7F. Note that U+10A7D OLD SOUTH ARABIAN NUMBER ONE represents both the one and a word divider. Photos from National Museum of Yemen, Photos from Yemen Military Museum, Eduard Glaser Carl Rathjens Stein, the Ancient South Arabian Minuscule Inscriptions on Wood, A New Genre of Pre-Islamic Epigraphy. Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap Ex Oriente Lux, die altsüdarabischen Minuskelinschriften auf Holzstäbchen aus der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München. Il trono della regina di Saba, Artemide, Roma. pp. 149–155, Ancient scripts on South Arabian SI Omniglots entry on South Arabian
South Arabian alphabet
–
South Arabian inscription addressed to the Sabaean "national" god
Almaqah
South Arabian alphabet
17.
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
–
The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, also spelt Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet, is a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Like the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the term was coined by Solomon Birnbaum in 1954, he wrote, To apply the term Phoenician to the script of the Hebrews is hardly suitable. Still, the script is nearly identical to the Phoenician script, archeological evidence of the use of the script by the Israelites for writing the Hebrew language dates to around the 10th century BCE. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet began to fall out of use by the Jews in the 5th century BCE, the present Jewish square-script Hebrew alphabet evolved from the Aramaic alphabet. The Samaritans, now fewer than 1000 people, have continued to use a derivative of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, the chart below compares the letters of the Phoenician script with those of the Paleo-Hebrew and the present Hebrew alphabet, with names traditionally used in English. According to contemporary scholars, the Paleo-Hebrew script developed alongside others in the region during the course of the late second and it is closely related to the Phoenician script. The earliest known inscription in the Paleo-Hebrew script was the Zayit Stone discovered on a wall at Tel Zayit, the 22 letters were carved on one side of the 38 lb stone - which resembles a bowl on the other. The find is attributed to the mid-10th century BCE, the script of the Gezer calendar, dated to the late 10th century BCE, bears strong resemblance to contemporaneous Phoenician script from inscriptions at Byblos. Clear Hebrew features are visible in the scripts of the Moabite inscriptions of the Mesha Stele, in 1855 a Phoenician inscription in 22 lines was found among the ruins of Sidon. Each line contained about 40 or 50 characters, a facsimile copy of the writing was published in United States Magazine in July 1855. The inscription was on the lid of a stone sarcophagus carved in fine Egyptian style. The writing was primarily a history of a king of Sidon buried in the sarcophagus. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was in use in the ancient Israelite kingdoms of Israel. Following the exile of the Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE, in the Babylonian exile, Jews began using a form of the Assyrian script, the Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. After the fall of the Persian Empire, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form, for a limited time thereafter, the use of the Paleo-Hebrew script among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton. The independent Hebrew script evolved by developing numerous cursive features, the features of the Phoenician alphabet being ever less pronounced with the passage of time. The aversion of the script may indicate that the custom of erecting stelae by the kings. Even the engraved inscriptions from the 8th century exhibit elements of the style, such as the shading
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
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Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
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Drawing of inscription on the Zayit Stone.
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
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Photograph of section of Zayit Stone: 10th cent. letters (right-to-left) waw, he, het, zayin, tet
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
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Illustration of script on a
Ketef Hinnom amulet, circa 700 BCE—the "Silver Scroll"
18.
Samaritan alphabet
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Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which was a variety of the Phoenician alphabet in which large parts of the Hebrew Bible were originally penned. All these scripts are believed to be descendants of the Proto-Sinaitic script and that script was used by the ancient Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans. The better-known square script Hebrew alphabet traditionally used by Jews is a version of the Aramaic alphabet which they adopted from the Persian Empire. After the fall of the Persian Empire, Judaism used both scripts before settling on the Aramaic form, for a limited time thereafter, the use of paleo-Hebrew among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton, but soon that custom was also abandoned. The Samaritan alphabet first became known to the Western world with the publication of a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 1631 by Jean Morin. In 1616 the traveler Pietro della Valle had purchased a copy of the text in Damascus, the table below shows the development of the Samaritan script. On the left are the corresponding Hebrew letters for comparison, column I is the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. Column X shows the form of the letters. Samaritan script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2, the Unicode block for Samaritan is U+0800–U+083F, Flôrenṭîn, Moše. Late Samaritan Hebrew, A Linguistic Analysis Of Its Different Types, a Samaritan Bible, at the British library Omniglot. com - Samaritan alphabet Link to free Samaritan font
Samaritan alphabet
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Samaritan alphabet
Samaritan alphabet
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The development of the Samaritan script
Samaritan alphabet
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Ancient inscription in
Samaritan Hebrew. From a photo c.1900 by the
Palestine Exploration Fund.
19.
Libyco-Berber
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Tifinagh is an abjad used to write the Berber languages. A modern alphabetical derivate of the script, known as Neo-Tifinagh, was introduced in the 20th century. Tifinagh is believed to have descended from the ancient Libyan or Libyco-Berber script, the latter writing system was widely used in antiquity by speakers of Berber languages throughout Africa and on the Canary Islands. It is attested from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, the scripts origin is uncertain, with some scholars suggesting it is related to the Punic alphabet or the Phoenician alphabet. There are two variants, eastern and western. The eastern variant was used in what is now Constantine, the Aures region and it is the best-deciphered variant, due to the discovery of several Numidian bilingual inscriptions in Libyan and Punic. 22 letters out of the 24 were deciphered, the western variant was more primitive. It was used along the Mediterranean coast from Kabylie to the Canary Islands, the Libyco-Berber script was a pure abjad, it had no vowels. The writing was usually from the bottom to the top, although right-to-left, the letters would take different forms when written vertically than when they were written horizontally. The Libyco-Berber script is used in the form of Tifinagh to write the Tuareg languages. Early uses of the script have been found on rock art, among these are the 1,500 year old tomb of the Tuareg matriarch Tin hinan, where vestiges of a Tifinagh inscription have been found on one of its walls. Occasionally, the script has been used to other neighboring languages such as Tagdal Songhay. Common forms of the letters are illustrated at left, including various ligatures of t and n, gemination, though phonemic, is not indicated in Tifinagh. The letter t, +, is combined with a preceding letter to form a ligature. Most of the letters have more than one form, including mirror-images of the forms shown here. When the letters l and n are adjacent to themselves or to each other, for example, since the letter l is a double line, ||, and n a single line, |, the sequence nn may be written |/ to differentiate it from l. Similarly, ln is ||/, nl |//, ll ||//, nnn |/|, traditionally, the Tifinagh script does not indicate vowels except word-finally, where a single dot stands for any vowel. In some areas, Arabic vowel diacritics are combined with Tifinagh letters to transcribe vowels, Neo-Tifinagh is the modern fully alphabetic script developed from earlier forms of Tifinagh
Libyco-Berber
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Arabic, Neo-Tifinagh, and French at a store in Morocco.
Libyco-Berber
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Libyco-Berber
Libyco-Berber
–
Tifinagh
Libyco-Berber
–
Neo-Tifinagh
20.
Tifinagh
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Tifinagh is an abjad used to write the Berber languages. A modern alphabetical derivate of the script, known as Neo-Tifinagh, was introduced in the 20th century. Tifinagh is believed to have descended from the ancient Libyan or Libyco-Berber script, the latter writing system was widely used in antiquity by speakers of Berber languages throughout Africa and on the Canary Islands. It is attested from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, the scripts origin is uncertain, with some scholars suggesting it is related to the Punic alphabet or the Phoenician alphabet. There are two variants, eastern and western. The eastern variant was used in what is now Constantine, the Aures region and it is the best-deciphered variant, due to the discovery of several Numidian bilingual inscriptions in Libyan and Punic. 22 letters out of the 24 were deciphered, the western variant was more primitive. It was used along the Mediterranean coast from Kabylie to the Canary Islands, the Libyco-Berber script was a pure abjad, it had no vowels. The writing was usually from the bottom to the top, although right-to-left, the letters would take different forms when written vertically than when they were written horizontally. The Libyco-Berber script is used in the form of Tifinagh to write the Tuareg languages. Early uses of the script have been found on rock art, among these are the 1,500 year old tomb of the Tuareg matriarch Tin hinan, where vestiges of a Tifinagh inscription have been found on one of its walls. Occasionally, the script has been used to other neighboring languages such as Tagdal Songhay. Common forms of the letters are illustrated at left, including various ligatures of t and n, gemination, though phonemic, is not indicated in Tifinagh. The letter t, +, is combined with a preceding letter to form a ligature. Most of the letters have more than one form, including mirror-images of the forms shown here. When the letters l and n are adjacent to themselves or to each other, for example, since the letter l is a double line, ||, and n a single line, |, the sequence nn may be written |/ to differentiate it from l. Similarly, ln is ||/, nl |//, ll ||//, nnn |/|, traditionally, the Tifinagh script does not indicate vowels except word-finally, where a single dot stands for any vowel. In some areas, Arabic vowel diacritics are combined with Tifinagh letters to transcribe vowels, Neo-Tifinagh is the modern fully alphabetic script developed from earlier forms of Tifinagh
Tifinagh
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Arabic, Neo-Tifinagh, and French at a store in Morocco.
Tifinagh
–
Libyco-Berber
Tifinagh
–
Tifinagh
Tifinagh
–
Neo-Tifinagh
21.
Paleohispanic scripts
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The Paleohispanic scripts are the writing systems created in the Iberian peninsula before the Latin alphabet became the dominant script. Most of them are unusual in that they are rather than purely alphabetic, despite having supposedly developed, in part. Some researchers conclude that their origin may lie solely with the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleoiberian scripts are classified into three major groups, southern, northern, and Greco-Iberian, with differences both in the shapes of the glyphs and in their values. Inscriptions in the scripts have been found mainly in the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. They represent only 5% of the inscriptions found, and mostly read from right to left and they are, the Espanca script, the Tartessian or Southwestern script, also known as South Lusitanian, the Southeastern Iberian script, also known as Meridional. Inscriptions in the scripts have been found mainly in the NE of the Iberian Peninsula. They represent 95% of the inscriptions found, and mostly read from left to right and they are, the Northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine, Dual variant Non-dual variant the Celtiberian script Western variant Eastern variant. This unique writing system has been called a semi-syllabary, in addition, the original format did not distinguish voiced from unvoiced plosives, so that ga stood for both /ga/ and /ka/, and da stood for both /da/ and /ta/. On the other hand, the continuants were written with simple alphabetic letters, as in Phoenician, if correct, this innovation would parallel the creation of the Latin letter G by the addition of a stroke to C, which had previously stood for both /k/ and /g/. The Tartessian script is typologically intermediate between a pure alphabet and the Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries, although the letter used to write a plosive was determined by the following vowel, as in a semi-syllabary, the following vowel was also written, as in an alphabet. This redundant typology re-emerged in a few texts of northeastern Iberian and Celtiberian scripts. The only known full Paleoiberian signary, on the undated Espanca tablet, follows the Phoenician/Greek order for the first 13 of its 27 letters, Α Β Γ Δ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Π. However, the order of what appears to be /u/ directly after Τ, the obvious question about the origin and evolution of these scripts is how a purely alphabetic script was changed into, or perhaps unconsciously reinterpreted as, a partial syllabary. It may be instructive to consider an unrelated development in the evolution of the Etruscan alphabet from Greek, Greek had three letters, Γ, Κ, and Ϙ, whose sounds were not distinguished in Etruscan. Nonetheless, all three were borrowed, becoming the letters C, K, and Q. When the Etruscan alphabet was adapted to Latin, the letter C stood for both /k/ and /g/, as Etruscan had had no /g/ sound to maintain the original sound value of Greek Г. Something similar may have happened during the evolution of the Paleoiberian scripts, in Tartessian script, vowels were always written after the plosives, but they were redundant — or at nearly so — and thus it seems they were dropped when the script passed to the Iberians. Among the velar consonants, ka/ga of southeastern Iberian and the southwestern script derives from Phoenician/Greek Γ, ke/ge from Κ, Phoenician/Greek labial letter Β was the source of southwestern be, southeastern ba, the use of Π is uncertain but may have been the source of bi
Paleohispanic scripts
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Paleohispanic scripts
Paleohispanic scripts
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Paleohispanic languages according to inscriptions (except Aquitanian - according to
anthroponyms and theonyms used in
Latin inscriptions).
Paleohispanic scripts
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A possible
southwestern signary (Based on Rodríguez Ramos 2000).
Paleohispanic scripts
–
Possible values of the
southeastern Iberian signary (Based on Correa 2004). Signs in red are the most debatable.
22.
Brahmic family
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The Brahmic scripts are a family of abugida or alphabet writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia, and were used in Japan. They are used by languages of several families, Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian. They were also the source of the order of Japanese kana. Brahmic scripts descended from the Brahmi script, the most reliable of these were short Brahmi inscriptions dated to the 4th century BC and published by Coningham et al. Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period, the Siddhaṃ script was especially important in Buddhism, as many sutras were written in it. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan, the syllabic nature and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism. Southern Brahmi evolved into Old-Kannada, Pallava and Vatteluttu scripts, which in turn diversified into other scripts of South India, Bhattiprolu was a great centre of Buddhism during 3rd century BCE and from where Buddhism spread to east Asia. The present Telugu script is derived from Bhattiprolu Script or Kannada-Telugu script or Kadamba script, also known as old Telugu script, owing to its similarity to the same. Initially, minor changes were made which is now called Tamil Brahmi which has far fewer letters than some of the other Indic scripts as it has no separate aspirated or voiced consonants. Some characteristics, which are present in most but not all the scripts, are, other vowels are written by adding to the character. A mark, known in Sanskrit as a virama/halant can be used to indicate the absence of an inherent vowel, Each vowel has two forms, an independent form when not part of a consonant, and a dependent form, when attached to a consonant. Depending on the script, the dependent forms can be placed to the left of, to the right of, above, below. Consonants can be combined in ligatures, special marks are added to denote the combination of r with another consonant. Nasalization and aspiration of a dependent vowel is also noted by separate signs. The alphabetical order is, vowels, velar consonants, palatal consonants, retroflex consonants, dental consonants, bilabial consonants, approximants, sibilants, Each consonant grouping had four stops, and a nasal consonant. Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts, accordingly, The charts are not comprehensive. Glyphs may be unrepresented if they dont derive from any Brahmi character, the pronunciations of glyphs in the same column may not be identical
Brahmic family
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Calligraphy
Brahmic family
–
Spread of Brahmic family of scripts from India.
Brahmic family
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A fragment of
Ashoka's 6th pillar edict.
23.
Tibetan alphabet
–
The Tibetan alphabet is an abugida used to write the Tibetic languages such as Tibetan, as well as Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Ladakhi, and sometimes Balti. The printed form of the alphabet is called uchen script while the cursive form used in everyday writing is called umê script. The alphabet is closely linked to a broad ethnic Tibetan identity, spanning across areas in Tibet, Bhutan, India. The Tibetan alphabet is of Indic origin and it is ancestral to the Limbu alphabet, the Lepcha alphabet, the creation of the Tibetan alphabet is attributed to Thonmi Sambhota of the mid-7th century. Tradition holds that Thonmi Sambhota, a minister of Songtsen Gampo, was sent to India to study the art of writing, the form of the letters is based on an Indic alphabet of that period. The most important, an official orthography aimed to facilitate the translation of Buddhist scriptures, Standard orthography has not altered since then, while the spoken language has changed by, for example, losing complex consonant clusters. As a result, in all modern Tibetan dialects, in particular in the Standard Tibetan of Lhasa and this divergence is the basis of an argument in favour of spelling reform, to write Tibetan as it is pronounced, for example, writing Kagyu instead of Bka-rgyud. In contrast, the pronunciation of the Balti, Ladakhi and Burig languages adheres more closely to the archaic spelling, in the Tibetan script, the syllables are written from left to right. Syllables are separated by a tsek, since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, spaces are not used to divide words. The Tibetan alphabet has thirty basic letters, sometimes known as radicals, as in other Indic scripts, each consonant letter assumes an inherent vowel, in the Tibetan script its ཨ /a/. The alphabet ཨ /a/ is also the base for dependent vowels marks, although some Tibetan dialects are tonal, the language had no tone at the time of the scripts invention, and there are no dedicated symbols for tone. However, since tones developed from segmental features they can usually be predicted by the archaic spelling of Tibetan words. The unique aspect of the Tibetan script is that the consonants can be either as radicals, or they can be written in other forms. To understand how this works, one can look at the radical ཀ /ka/, in both cases, the symbol for ཀ /ka/ is used, but when the ར /ra/ is in the middle of the consonant and vowel, it is added as a subscript. On the other hand, when the ར /ra/ comes before the consonant and vowel, ར /ra/ actually changes form when it is above most other consonants, thus རྐ rka. However, an exception to this is the cluster རྙ /rnya/, similarly, the consonants ཝ /wa/, ར /ra/, and ཡ /ja/ change form when they are beneath other consonants, thus ཀྭ /kwa/, ཀྲ /kra/, ཀྱ /kja/. Besides being written as subscripts and superscripts, some consonants can also be placed in prescript, postscript, the third position, the post-postscript position is solely for the consonants ད /tʰa/ and ས /sa/. The superscript position above a radical is reserved for the consonants ར /ra/, ལ /la/, the vowels used in the alphabet are ཨ /a/, ཨི /i/, ཨུ /u/, ཨེ /e/, and ཨོ /o/
Tibetan alphabet
–
Polychrome text left of center is the primary
mantra of
Tibetan Buddhism, Sanskrit
Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ (
Tibetan: ༀམཎིཔདྨེཧཱུྃ,
Wylie: oMmanipad+mehU~M). Monochrome text right of center reads Sanskrit "Oṃ
Vajrasattva Hūm" (
Tibetan: ༀབཛྲསཏྭཧཱུཾ,
Wylie: oM badzrasatwa hUM), an invocation to the embodiment of primeval purity.
Tibetan alphabet
–
The number plate of a car registered in
Jammu and Kashmir, in Roman and Tibetan scripts.
24.
Hangul
–
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and as Chosŏngŭl/Chosŏn Muntcha in North Korea is the alphabet that has been used to write the Korean language since the 15th century. It was created during the Joseon Dynasty in 1443 by King Sejong the Great, in South Korea, Hangul is used primarily to write the Korean language as using Hanja in typical Korean writing had fallen out of common usage during the late 1990s. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 19 consonant and 21 vowel letters, however, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, such as 한 han, each of which transcribes a syllable. That is, although the syllable 한 han may look like a single character, each syllabic block consists of two to six letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel. These blocks are arranged horizontally from left to right or vertically from top to bottom. Each Korean word consists of one or more syllables, hence one or more blocks, of the 11,172 possible Hangul syllables, the most frequent 256 have a cumulative frequency of 88. 2%, with the top 512, it reaches 99. 9%. The modern name Hangul was coined by Ju Sigyeong in 1912, han meant great in archaic Korean, and geul is the native Korean word for script. Taken together, then, the meaning is great script, as the word han had also become one way of indicating Korea as a whole the name could also potentially be interpreted as Korean script. Korean 한글 is pronounced, and in English as /ˈhɑːn. ɡʊl/ or /ˈhɑːŋɡʊl/, when used as an English word, it is often rendered without the diacritics, hangul, and it is often capitalized as Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries. Hankul in the Yale romanization, a system recommended for technical linguistic studies, North Koreans call it Chosŏngŭl, after Chosŏn, the North Korean name for Korea. Because of objections to the names Hangeul, Chosŏngŭl, and urigeul by Koreans in China, until the early 20th century, Hangul was denigrated as vulgar by the literate elite, who preferred the traditional hanja writing system. They gave it such names as these, Achimgeul, in the original Hanja, it is rendered as 故智者不終朝而會，愚者可浹旬而學。 Gugmun Eonmun Amgeul. Am is a prefix that signifies a noun is feminine Ahaetgeul or Ahaegeul Hangul was promulgated by Sejong the Great, the Hall of Worthies, a group of scholars who worked with Sejong to develop and refine the new alphabet, is often credited for the work. The project was completed in late December 1443 or January 1444, the publication date of the Hunmin Jeong-eum, October 9, became Hangul Day in South Korea. Its North Korean equivalent, Chosongul Day, is on January 15, various speculations about the creation process were put to rest by the discovery in 1940 of the 1446 Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to articulatory phonetics, to assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people. However, it entered popular culture as Sejong had intended, being used especially by women, the late 16th century, however, saw a revival of Hangul, with gasa literature and later sijo flourishing. In the 17th century, Hangul novels became a major genre, by this point spelling had become quite irregular
Hangul
–
Korean writing systems
Hangul
–
Chosŏn'gŭl (top), and Hangul (bottom)
Hangul
–
A page from the Hunmin Jeong-eum Eonhae. The Hangul-only column, third from the left (나랏말 ᄊᆞ 미), has pitch-accent diacritics to the left of the syllable blocks.
Hangul
–
Calligraphy
25.
Devanagari alphabet
–
Devanagari, also called Nagari, is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines. The Nagari script has roots in the ancient Brāhmī script family, the Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE and it was fully developed by about the end of first millennium. Nagari has been the primus inter pares of the Indic scripts, the Devanagari script is also used for classical Sanskrit texts. The Devanagari script is closely related to the Nandinagari script commonly found in ancient manuscripts of South India. Devanagari script has forty-seven primary characters, of which fourteen are vowels, the ancient Nagari script for Sanskrit had two additional consonantal characters. The script has no distinction similar to the capital and small letters of the Latin alphabet, generally the orthography of the script reflects the pronunciation of the language. Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet and it is a descendant of the Gupta script, along with Siddham and Sharada. Medieval inscriptions suggest widespread diffusion of the Nagari-related scripts, with biscripts presenting local script along with the adoption of Nagari scripts, the 7th-century Tibetan king Srong-tsan-gambo ordered that all foreign books be transcribed into the Tibetan language. Other closely related scripts such as Siddham Matrka was in use in Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir. Nāgarī is the Sanskrit feminine of Nāgara relating or belonging to a town or city and it is a phrasing with lipi as nāgarī lipi script relating to a city, or spoken in city. The use of the name devanāgarī is relatively recent, and the older term nāgarī is still common, the rapid spread of the term devanāgarī may be related to the almost exclusive use of this script to publish Sanskrit texts in print since the 1870s. As a Brahmic abugida, the principle of Devanagari is that each letter represents a consonant. This is usually written in Latin as a, though it is represented as in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the letter क is read ka, the two letters कन are kana, the three कनय are kanaya, etc. This cancels the inherent vowel, so that from क्नय knaya is derived क्नय् knay, the halant is often used for consonant clusters when typesetting conjunct ligatures is not feasible. Consonant clusters are written with ligatures, for example, the three consonants क्, न्, and य्, when written consecutively without virāma form कनय, as shown above. Alternatively, they may be joined as clusters to form क्नय knaya, कन्य kanya and this system was originally created for use with the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, which have a very limited number of clusters. When applied to Sanskrit, however, it added a deal of complexity to the script
Devanagari alphabet
–
A 19th century
Rigveda manuscript in Devanagari.
Devanagari alphabet
–
Devanagiri script (vowels top, consonants bottom) in Chandas font
Devanagari alphabet
–
Devanagari text from Vayu Purana.
Devanagari alphabet
–
Devanagari देवनागरी
26.
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
–
Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of abugidas used to write a number of Aboriginal Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and Athabaskan language families. Canadian syllabics are used to write all of the Cree languages from Naskapi to the Rocky Mountains, including Eastern Cree, Woods Cree, Swampy Cree. They are also used to write Inuktitut in the eastern Canadian Arctic and they are used regionally for the other large Canadian Algonquian language, Ojibwe in Western Canada, as well as for Blackfoot, where they are obsolete. Among the Athabaskan languages further to the west, syllabics have been used at one point or another to write Dakelh, Chipewyan, Slavey, Tłı̨chǫ, syllabics have occasionally been used in the United States by communities that straddle the border, but are principally a Canadian phenomenon. In Cree, for example, the consonant p has the shape of a chevron, in an upward orientation, ᐱ, it transcribes the syllable pi. Inverted, so that it points downwards, ᐯ, it transcribes pe, pointing to the left, ᐸ, it is pa, and to the right, ᐳ, po. The consonant forms and the vowels so represented vary from language to language, *The obsolete sp- series, which is not supported by Unicode, is here represented by Latin and Cyrillic letters, there is no good substitution for spi. The clockwise 90° rotation relates vowels as the later series sh- does, because the script is presented in syllabic charts and learned as a syllabary, it is often considered to be such. This is unlike a syllabary, where each combination of consonant. All were written with a line to show the vowel was short. These were originally written midline, but are now superscripted, the consonants -l and -r were marginal, only found in borrowings, baby talk, and the like. These, and -h, could occur before vowels, but were written with the final shape regardless, the vowels fall into two sets, the back vowels -a and -o, and the front vowels -e and -i. Each set consists of a vowel, -a or -e. In all cases, back-vowel syllables are related through left-right reflection, how they relate to front-vowel syllables depends on the graphic form of the consonants. Symmetrical, vowel, p-, t-, sp-, are rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise, while those that are asymmetrical top-to-bottom, c-, k-, m-, n-, s-, y-, are rotated 180 degrees. The lower front-vowel syllables are derived this way from the low back-vowel syllables, for example, all scripts except the one for Blackfoot use the triangle for vowel-initial syllables. By 1841, when Evans cast the first movable type for syllabics and he instead filed across the raised lines of the type, leaving gaps in the printed letter for long vowels. This can be seen in early printings, later still a dot diacritic, originally used for vowel length only in handwriting, was extended to print, Thus today ᐊ a contrasts with ᐋ â, and ᒥ mi contrasts with ᒦ mî
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
–
An unpointed inscription in
Swampy Cree, using the conventions of
Western Cree syllabics. The text transliterates to Êwako oma asiniwi mênikan kiminawak ininiwak manitopa kaayacik. Êwakwanik oki kanocihtacik asiniwiatoskiininiw kakiminihcik omêniw. Akwani mitahtomitanaw askiy asay êatoskêcik ota manitopa.
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
–
Aboriginal peoples
in Canada
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
–
Evans' script, as published in 1841. Long vowels were now indicated by breaking the characters. The length distinction was not needed in the case of e, as Cree has only long ē.
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
–
The orientation of a perfectly symmetrical vowel triangle may be difficult to discern. In the type of this Ojibwe sign, left-pointing a is an equilateral triangle, but upright i is
isosceles.
27.
Hebrew alphabet
–
Historically, there have been two separate abjad scripts to write Hebrew. In the remainder of this article, the term Hebrew alphabet refers to the Jewish square script unless otherwise indicated, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written right to left. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud. In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters א ה ו י are also used as matres lectionis to represent vowels. There is a trend in modern Modern Hebrew toward the use of matres lectionis to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, the paleo-Hebrew alphabet was used in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, after the fall of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form. The square Hebrew alphabet was adapted and used for writing languages of the Jewish diaspora – such as Karaim, the Judeo-Arabic languages, Judaeo-Spanish. In the traditional form, the Hebrew alphabet is an abjad consisting only of consonants and it has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. Also, a system of points to indicate vowels, called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some extent Modern Hebrew, today, the trend is toward full spelling with the weak letters acting as true vowels. When used to write Yiddish, vowels are indicated, using letters, either with or without niqqud-diacritics, except for Hebrew words. To preserve the proper vowel sounds, scholars developed several different sets of vocalization, one of these, the Tiberian system, eventually prevailed. Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, and his family for generations, are credited for refining and maintaining the system. These points are used only for special purposes, such as Biblical books intended for study. The Tiberian system also includes a set of marks, called trope. These are shown below the normal form in the following table, although Hebrew is read and written from right to left, the following table shows the letters in order from left to right
Hebrew alphabet
–
A Jewish stele near the archeological excavations of the early medieval walls of
Serdica
Hebrew alphabet
–
Aleppo Codex: 10th-Century-AD
Hebrew Bible with
Masoretic pointing. Text of
Joshua 1:1
Hebrew alphabet
–
A replica of the Gezer Calendar in the
Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Hebrew alphabet
–
Hebrew script on the
bustier of
Jan van Scorel 's
Maria Magdalena, 1530.
28.
Pahlavi script
–
Pahlavi or Pahlevi denotes a particular and exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are the use of a specific Aramaic-derived script, the Pahlavi script, Pahlavi compositions have been found for the dialects/ethnolects of Parthia, Persis, Sogdiana, Scythia, and Khotan. Independent of the variant for which the Pahlavi system was used, Pahlavi is then an admixture of written Imperial Aramaic, from which Pahlavi derives its script, logograms, and some of its vocabulary. Spoken Middle Iranian, from which Pahlavi derives its terminations, symbol rules, Pahlavi may thus be defined as a system of writing applied to a specific language group, but with critical features alien to that language group. It has the characteristics of a language, but is not one. It is a written system, but much Pahlavi literature remains essentially an oral literature committed to writing. If this etymology is correct, Parthav presumably became pahlaw through a semivowel glide rt change to l, the term has been traced back further to Avestan pərəthu- broad, also evident in Sanskrit pŗthvi- earth and parthivi of the earth. Common to all Indo-Iranian languages is a connotation of mighty, the earliest attested use of Pahlavi dates to the reign of Arsaces I of Parthia in early Parthian coins with Pahlavi scripts. There are also several Pahlavi texts written during the reign of Mithridates I, such fragments, as also the rock inscriptions of Sassanid kings, which are datable to the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, do not, however, qualify as a significant literary corpus. It is in an archaic script than Book Pahlavi. After the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Pahlavi script was replaced by the Arabic script, except in Zoroastrian sacred literature, the replacement of the Pahlavi script with the Arabic script in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirids in 9th century Khurasan. In the present-day, Pahlavi is frequently identified with the dialect of south-west Iran, formerly and properly called Pārsi. This practice can be dated to the immediately following the Islamic conquest. Tables showing the letters and their names or pronunciations are available on line, the Pahlavi script is one of the two essential characteristics of the Pahlavi system. Its origin and development occurred independently of the various Middle Iranian languages for which it was used, the Pahlavi script is derived from the Aramaic script as it was used under the Achaemenids, with modifications to support the phonology of the Iranian languages. It is essentially a typical abjad, where, in general, only vowels are marked with matres lectionis. In addition to this, during much of its later history, similarly, certain words continued to be spelt with postvocalic ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ even after the consonants had been debuccalized to ⟨h⟩ in the living language. The Pahlavi script consisted of two widely used forms, Inscriptional Pahlavi and Book Pahlavi, a third form, Psalter Pahlavi, is not widely attested
Pahlavi script
–
Parthian (above), along with Greek (below) and Middle Persian was being used in inscriptions of early
Sassanian kings. Shapur inscription in
Naqsh-e Rajab
Pahlavi script
–
Parthian version of
Shapur I 's inscription at
Ka'ba-ye Zartosht.
Pahlavi script
–
Coin of
Ardashir I (r. 224–42) with Inscriptional Pahlavi writings.
Pahlavi script
–
Inscriptional Pahlavi text from
Shapur III at
Taq-e Bostan, 4th century
29.
Palmyrene script
–
Palmyrene was a historical Semitic alphabet used to write the local Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic. It was used between 100 BCE and 300 CE in Palmyra in the Syrian desert, the oldest surviving Palmyrene inscription dates to 44 BCE. The last surviving inscription dates to 274 CE, two years after Palmyra was sacked by Roman Emperor Aurelian, ending the Palmyrene Empire, use of the Palmyrene language and script declined, being replaced with Greek and Latin. Two forms of Palmyrene were developed, The rounded, cursive form derived from the Aramaic alphabet and later a decorative, both the cursive and monumental forms commonly used typographic ligatures. Palmyrene used a system which built up numbers using combinations of their symbols for 1,2,3,4,5,10. It is similar to the used for Aramaic which built numbers using their symbols for 1,2,3,10,20,100,1000. There are some styles in which the r-letter is the same as the d-letter with a dot on top, ligation after b, ḥ, m, n, and q before some other consonants was common in some inscriptions but was not obligatory. There are also two fleurons that tend to appear near numbers, examples of Palmyrene inscriptions were printed as far back as 1616 but accurate copies of Palmyrene/Greek bilingual inscriptions were not available until 1756. The Palmyrene alphabet was deciphered in the 1750s, literally overnight, by Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy using these new, Palmyrene was added to the Unicode Standard in June,2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for Palmyrene is U+10860–U+1087F
Palmyrene script
–
Palmyrene inscribed tablet in the
Musée du Louvre
Palmyrene script
–
Funerary slabstone bearing a Palmyrene inscription (
Musée du Louvre)
Palmyrene script
–
Relief with Palmyrene/Greek bilingual inscription (
Musée du Louvre)
Palmyrene script
–
Column at
Palmyra with Palmyrene/Greek bilingual inscription in honor of Julius Aurelius Zenobius
30.
Syriac alphabet
–
The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from the 1st century AD. Syriac is written right to left. It is a script where some, but not all. The alphabet consists of 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the vowel sounds are supplied either by the readers memory or by optional diacritic marks. In addition to the sounds of the language, the letters of the Syriac alphabet can be used to represent numbers in a similar to Hebrew. When Arabic began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent, Malayalam was also written with Syriac script and was called Suriyani Malayalam. These writings are usually called Karshuni or Garshuni, Garshuni is often used today by Neo-Aramaic speakers in written communication such as letters and fliers. There are three variants of the Syriac alphabet, ʾEsṭrangēlā, Maḏnḥāyā, and Serṭā. The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is ʾEsṭrangēlā, although ʾEsṭrangēlā is no longer used as the main script for writing Syriac, it has received some revival since the 10th century. It is often used in publications, in titles and inscriptions. In some older manuscripts and inscriptions it is possible for any letter to join to the left, vowel marks are usually not used with ʾEsṭrangēlā. The East Syriac dialect is written in the Maḏnḥāyā form of the alphabet. Other names for the script include Swāḏāyā, ʾĀṯūrāyā, Kaldāyā, the Eastern script resembles ʾEsṭrangēlā more closely than the Western script, being somewhat a midway point between the two. Some transliteration schemes find its inclusion necessary for showing spirantization or for historical reasons, whether because its distribution is mostly predictable or because its pronunciation was lost, neither the East nor West variants of the alphabet have a sign to represent the schwa. The West Syriac dialect is written in the Serṭā form of the alphabet, also known as the Pšīṭā, Maronite. Most of the letters are derived from ʾEsṭrangēlā, but are simplified. A cursive, chancery hand is evidenced in the earliest Syriac manuscripts, from the 8th century, the simpler Serṭā style came into fashion, perhaps because of its more economical use of parchment. The Nabataean alphabet was based on this form of Syriac handwriting, lowercase Omega, used only in the vocative interjection ʾō
Syriac alphabet
–
Estrangela alphabet
Syriac alphabet
–
11th century book in Syriac Serṭā.
Syriac alphabet
–
Isho or Eesho, the
Aramaic name of
Jesus
.jpg)
