Kharosthi
The Kharosthi script spelled Kharoshthi or Kharoṣṭhī, was an ancient Indian script used in Gandhara to write Gandhari Prakrit and Sanskrit. It was popular in Central Asia as well. An abugida, it was introduced at least by the middle of the 3rd century BCE during the 4th century BCE, remained in use until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century CE, it was in use in Bactria, the Kushan Empire and along the Silk Road, where there is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in the remote way stations of Khotan and Niya. Kharosthi is encoded in the Unicode range U+10A00–U+10A5F, from version 4.1. Kharosthi is written right to left, but some inscriptions show the left to right direction, to become universal for the South Asian scripts; each syllable includes the short /a/ sound by default, with other vowels being indicated by diacritic marks. Recent epigraphic evidence highlighted by Professor Richard Salomon of the University of Washington has shown that the order of letters in the Kharosthi script follows what has become known as the Arapacana alphabet.
As preserved in Sanskrit documents, the alphabet runs: a ra pa ca na la da ba ḍa ṣa va ta ya ṣṭa ka sa ma ga stha ja śva dha śa kha kṣa sta jñā rtha bha cha sma hva tsa gha ṭha ṇa pha ska ysa śca ṭa ḍhaSome variations in both the number and order of syllables occur in extant texts. Kharosthi includes only one standalone vowel, used for initial vowels in words. Other initial vowels use the a character modified by diacritics. Using epigraphic evidence, Salomon has established that the vowel order is /a e i o u/, rather than the usual vowel order for Indic scripts /a i u e o/; that is the same as the Semitic vowel order. There is no differentiation between long and short vowels in Kharosthi. Both are marked using the same vowel markers; the alphabet was used in Gandharan Buddhism as a mnemonic for remembering a series of verses on the nature of phenomena. In Tantric Buddhism, the list was incorporated into ritual practices and became enshrined in mantras. There are two special modified forms of these consonants: Various additional marks are used to modify vowels and consonants: Nine Kharosthi punctuation marks have been identified: Kharosthi included a set of numerals that are reminiscent of Roman numerals.
The system is based on an additive and a multiplicative principle, but does not have the subtractive feature used in the Roman number system. The numerals, like the letters, are written from right to left. There is no zero and no separate signs for the digits 5–9. Numbers in Kharosthi use an additive system. For example, the number 1996 would be written as 1000 4 4 1 100 20 20 20 20 10 4 2; the Kharosthi script was deciphered by James Prinsep using the bilingual coins of the Indo-Greek Kingdom. This in turn led to the reading of the Edicts of Ashoka, some of which, from the northwest of South Asia, were written in the Kharosthi script. Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Kharosthi script evolved or was the deliberate work of a single inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet but with extensive modifications to support the sounds found in Indic languages. One model is that the Aramaic script arrived with the Achaemenid Empire's conquest of the Indus River in 500 BCE and evolved over the next 200+ years, reaching its final form by the 3rd century BCE where it appears in some of the Edicts of Ashoka found in northwestern part of South Asia.
However, no intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, rock and coin inscriptions from the 3rd century BCE onward show a unified and standard form. An inscription in Aramaic dating back to the 4th century BCE was found in Sirkap, testifying to the presence of the Aramaic script in northwestern India at that period. According to Sir John Marshall, this seems to confirm that Kharoshthi was developed from Aramaic; the study of the Kharosthi script was invigorated by the discovery of the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, a set of birch bark manuscripts written in Kharosthi, discovered near the Afghan city of Hadda just west of the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994; the entire set of manuscripts are dated to the 1st century CE, making them the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered. Kharosthi was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2005 with the release of version 4.1. The Unicode block for Kharosthi is U+10A00–U+10A5F: Brahmi History of Afghanistan History of Pakistan Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan Kaschgar und die Kharoṣṭhī Dani, Ahmad Hassan.
Kharoshthi Primer, Lahore Museum Publication Series - 16, Lahore, 1979 Falk, Harry. Schrift im alten Indien: Ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1993 Fussman's, Gérard. Les premiers systèmes d'écriture en Inde, in Annuaire du Collège de France 1988-1989 Hinüber, Oscar von. Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990 Nasim Khan, M.. Ashokan Inscriptions: A Palaeographical Study. Atthariyyat, Vol. I, pp. 131–150. Peshawar Nasim Khan, M.. Two Dated Kharoshthi Inscriptions from Gandhara. Journal of Asian Civilizations, Vol. XXII, No.1, July 1999: 99-103. Nasim Khan, M.. An Inscribed Relic-Casket from Dir; the Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. V, No. 1, March 1997: 21-33. Peshawar Nasim Khan, M.. Kharoshthi Inscription from Swabi - Gandhara; the Journal of Humanities and Soc
Northeastern Iberian script
The northeastern Iberian script known as Levantine Iberian or Iberian because the Iberian script was the most used, was the main means of written expression of the Iberian language. The language is expressed by the southeastern Iberian script and the Greco-Iberian alphabet. To understand the relationship between northeastern Iberian and southeastern Iberian scripts, one should point out that they are two different scripts with different values for the same signs. However, it is clear they have a common origin and the most accepted hypothesis is that northeastern Iberian script was derived from the southeastern Iberian script; some researchers have concluded that it is linked to the Phoenician alphabet alone, but others believe the Greek alphabet had a role. All the paleohispanic scripts, with the exception of the Greco-Iberian alphabet, share a common distinctive typological characteristic: they represent syllabic value for the occlusives, monophonemic value for the rest of the consonants and vowels.
In a writing system they are neither alphabets nor syllabaries, but are rather mixed scripts that are identified as semi-syllabaries. The basic signary contains 28 signs: 15 syllabic and 8 consonantic; the northeastern script was nearly deciphered in 1922 by Manuel Gómez-Moreno Martínez, who systematically linked the syllabic signs with the occlusive values. The decipherment was based on the existence of a large number of coin legends that could be linked to ancient place names known from Roman and Greek sources. There are two variants of the northeastern Iberian script: the dual variant is exclusive to the ancient inscriptions from the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE and its distinctive characteristic is the use of the dual system; this system was discovered by Joan Maluquer de Motes in 1968 and allows differentiation of the occlusive signs between voiced and unvoiced by the use of an additional stroke. The simple sign represents the voiced value whilst the complex sign represents the unvoiced value.
The non-dual variant is exclusive of the modern inscriptions from the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. The inscriptions that use the northeastern Iberian script have been found in the northeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula: along the coast from Roussillon to Alicante, but with a deep penetration in the Ebro Valley; the northeastern Iberian inscriptions have been found on different object types, representing 95% of the total finds, nearly all the scripts were written from left to right. The oldest northeastern Iberian script date to the 4th or maybe the 5th century BCE; the modern ones date from the end of the 1st century BCE or maybe the beginning of the 1st century CE. In recent years four northeastern Iberian abecedaries or signaries have been published: the Castellet de Bernabé signary, the Tos Pelat signary, the Ger signary and the Bolvir signary, all of them belonging to the dual variant of the script. Greco-Iberian alphabet Iberian scripts Paleohispanic scripts Celtiberian script Southeastern Iberian script Tartessian script Paleohispanic languages Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula Correa, José Antonio: «Representación gráfica de la oposición de sonoridad en las oclusivas ibéricas », AION 14, pp. 253–292.
Ferrer i Jané, Joan: Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores, Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 957–982. Ferrer i Jane Joan: «Els sistemes duals de les escriptures ibèriques», Palaeohispanica 13, pp. 451-479. Gómez-Moreno, Manuel: «De Epigrafia ibérica: el plomo de Alcoy», Revista de filología española 9, pp. 34–66. Hoz, Javier de: «El nuevo plomo inscrito de Castell y el problema de las oposiciones de sonoridad en ibérico», Symbolae Ludouico Mitxelena septuagenario oblatae, pp. 443–453. Maluquer de Motes, Joan: Epigrafía prelatina de la península ibérica, Barcelona. Quintanilla, Alberto: «Sobre la notación en la escritura ibérica del modo de articulación de las consonantes oclusivas», Studia Palaeohispanica et Indogermánica J. Untermann ab Amicis Hispanicis Oblata, pp. 239–250. Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús: Análisis de epigrafía íbera, Vitoria-Gasteiz. Untermann, Jürgen: Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum. III Die iberischen Inschriften aus Spanien, Wiesbaden. Velaza, Javier: Epigrafía y lengua ibéricas, Barcelona.
Media related to Iberian scripts at Wikimedia Commons The levantine Iberian writing- Jesús Rodríguez Ramos
Tifinagh
Tifinagh is an abjad script used to write the Tamazight languages. A modern alphabetical derivative of the traditional script, known as Neo-Tifinagh, was reintroduced in the 20th century. A modified version of the traditional script, called Tifinagh Ircam, is used in a number of Moroccan elementary schools in teaching the Berber language to children as well as a number of publications; the word tifinagh is thought to be a Tuareg pun meaning itif nnegh i.e. our discovery. Tifinagh or Libyc was used in antiquity by speakers of Libyc languages throughout North Africa and on the Canary Islands, it is attested from the 2nd millennium BC to the 3rd century AD. The script's origin is considered by most scholars as being of local origin, although some scholars however suggest it is related to the Phoenician alphabet. There are four known variants: Western Libyc, Bu Njem Libyc and Saharan Libyc; the eastern variant covers the North-West of Tunisia as well as Eastern Algeria, the Western limit of its use is placed at the East of Sétif although inscriptions of the Eastern type can exceptionally be in Kabylia, it shows a clear Phoenician influence.
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 covers the western half of Algeria, as well as the Canary Islands, it shows no Phoenician influence. Its inscriptions are fewer and shorter and rougher; the characteristic of this alphabet is that it includes additional signs 13, that the Eastern one is unaware of, whose value could not be given. Some of these characters are identical to the Touareg letters of the alphabet. There are graffiti discovered at Bou Njem, the antique Gholaia in Libya, on the wall of an old monument which dated from the 3rd century; the writing is horizontal, made up of nine inscriptions. This variant was influenced by Latin to the point of constituting a special alphabet; this variant was widespread in pre-saharan and saharan Libya, territory of the Gaetuli and Garamantes, where it was used by the inhabitants to engrave their messages. It is unknown and badly located.
The ancient Tifinagh script was a pure abjad. Gemination was not marked; the writing was from the bottom to the top, although right-to-left, other orders, were found. The letters would take different forms when written vertically than when they were written horizontally; the Libyco-Berber script is used today in the form of Tifinagh to write the Tuareg languages, which belong to the Berber branch of the Afroasiatic family. Early uses of the script have been found in various sepulchres. Among these are the 1,500 year old monumental tomb of the Tuareg queen Tin Hinan, where vestiges of a Tifinagh inscription have been found on one of its walls. According to M. C. A. MacDonald, the Tuareg are "an oral society in which memory and oral communication perform all the functions which reading and writing have in a literate society… The Tifinagh are used for games and puzzles, short graffiti and brief messages."Occasionally, the script has been used to write other neighbouring languages such as Tagdal, which belongs to a separate Songhay family.
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 common form, including mirror-images of the forms shown here; when the letters l and n are adjacent to themselves or to each other, the second is offset, either by inclining, raising, or shortening it. For example, since the letter l is a double line, ||, n a single line, |, the sequence nn may be written || to differentiate it from l. Ln is |||, nl |||, ll ||||, nnn |||, etc. 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, or y, w may be used for long ī and ū. Neo-Tifinagh is the modern alphabetic script developed from earlier forms of Tifinagh, it is written left to right.
Until virtually no books or websites were published in this alphabet, with activists favouring the Latin scripts for serious use. In Morocco, use of Neo-Tifinagh was suppressed until recently; the Moroccan state imprisoned people using this script during the 1980s and 1990s. In 2003, the king took a "neutral" position between the claims of Latin script and Arabic script by adopting Neo-Tifinagh. However, many independent Berber-language publications are still published using the Berber Latin alphabet. Outside Morocco, it has no official status. In Algeria all Berber publications use the Berber Latin Alphabet; the Algerian Black Spring was caused by the repression of Berber languages. In Libya, the government of Muammar Gaddafi banned Tifinagh from being used in public contexts such as store displays and banners. After the Libyan Civil War, the National Transitional Council has shown an openness towards the Berber language
Proto-Sinaitic script
Proto-Sinaitic referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, is a term for both a Middle Bronze Age script attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula and the reconstructed common ancestor of the Paleo-Hebrew and South Arabian scripts. 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, a late date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, by extension locates the invention of the alphabet in Egypt or Canaan respectively." However the discovery of the Wadi El-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River shows that the script originated in Egypt. The evolution of "Proto-Sinaitic" and the various "Proto-Canaanite" scripts during the Bronze Age is based on rather scant epigraphic evidence; the "Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions" were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie.
To this may be added a number of short "Proto-Canaanite" inscriptions found in Canaan and dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC, more the discovery in 1999 of the "Wadi El-Hol inscriptions", found in Middle Egypt by John and Deborah Darnell. The Wadi El-Hol inscriptions 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. Many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, included large numbers of Canaanites, allowed to settle the eastern Delta. Most of the forty or so inscriptions have been found among much more numerous hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions, scratched on rocks near and in the turquoise mines and along the roads leading to the temple; 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 human 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. In 1916, Alan Gardiner, using sound values derived from the alphabet hypothesis, translated a collection of signs as לבעלת lbʿlt Only a few inscriptions have been found in Canaan itself, dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC, they are all short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, may have been written by Canaanite caravaners, soldiers from Egypt or early Israelites. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term "Proto-Canaanite" is applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions, respectively; 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 at approx. 25°57′N 32°25′E, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions.
The inscriptions are graphically similar to the Serabit inscriptions, but show a greater hieroglyphic influence, such as a glyph for a man, not read alphabetically: The first of these is a figure of celebration, whereas the second is either that of a child or of dancing. 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 rebbe. Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in which 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. We will sacrifice to her an ox and a prime fatling." This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, with celebrations for the goddess Hathor involving inebriation. Proto-Canaanite referred to as Proto-Canaan, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite, is the name given to the Proto-Sinaitic script, when found in Canaan.
The term Proto-Canaanite is used when referring to the ancestor of the Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew script before some cut-off date 1050 BC, with an undefined affinity to Proto-Sinaitic. While no extant inscription in the Phoenician alphabet is older than c. 1050 BC, "Proto-Canaanite" is a term used for the early alphabets as used during the 13th and 12th centuries BC in Phoenicia. However, the Phoenician and other Canaanite dialects were indistinguishable before the 11th century BC. A possible example of "Proto-Canaanite" was found in 2012, the Ophel inscription, when during the excavations of the south w
Anglo-Saxon runes
Anglo-Saxon runes are runes used by the early Anglo-Saxons as an alphabet in their writing. The characters are known collectively as the futhorc, from the Old English sound values of the first six runes; the futhorc was a development from the 24-character Elder Futhark. Since the futhorc runes are thought to have first been used in Frisia before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, they have been called Anglo-Frisian runes, they were used from the 5th century onward, recording Old English and Old Frisian. They were supplanted in Anglo-Saxon England by the Old English Latin alphabet introduced by Irish missionaries. Futhorc runes were no longer in common use by the eleventh century, though manuscripts show that accurate understanding of them persisted into at least the twelfth century. There are competing theories about the origins of the Anglo-Saxon futhorc. One theory proposes that it was developed in Frisia and from there spread to England. Another holds that runes were first introduced to England from Scandinavia where the futhorc was modified and exported to Frisia.
Both theories have their inherent weaknesses, a definitive answer may come from further archaeological evidence. The early futhorc was identical to the Elder Futhark, except for the split of ᚨ a into three variants ᚪ āc, ᚫ æsc and ᚩ ōs, resulting in 26 runes; this was necessary to account for the new phoneme produced by the Ingvaeonic split of allophones of long and short a. The earliest ᚩ ōs rune is found on the 5th-century Undley bracteate. ᚪ āc was introduced in the 6th century. The double-barred ᚻ hægl characteristic of continental inscriptions is first attested as late as 698, on St Cuthbert's coffin. In England the futhorc expanded. Runic writing in England became associated with the Latin scriptoria from the time of Anglo-Saxon Christianization in the 7th century; the futhorc started to be replaced by the Latin alphabet from around the 7th century, but it was still sometimes used up until the 10th or 11th century. In some cases, texts would be written in the Latin alphabet, þorn and ƿynn came to be used as extensions of the Latin alphabet.
By the Norman Conquest of 1066, it was rare and disappeared altogether shortly thereafter. From at least five centuries of use, fewer than 200 artefacts bearing futhorc inscriptions have survived. Several famous English examples mix runes and Roman script, or Old English and Latin, on the same object, including the Franks Casket and St Cuthbert's coffin; the coffin is an example of an object created at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon church that uses runes. A leading expert, Raymond Ian Page rejects the assumption made in non-scholarly literature that runes were associated in post-conversion Anglo-Saxon England with Anglo-Saxon paganism or magic; the letter sequence and letter inventory of futhorc, along with the actual sounds made by those letters could vary depending on location and time. That being so, an authentic and unified list of runes is not possible; the sequence of runes given above comes from the Anglo-Saxon rune poem. The first 24 of these runes directly continue the elder futhark letters, do not deviate in sequence.
The next 5 runes represent additional vowels, comparable to the five forfeda of the ogham alphabet. While the rune poem and some manuscripts present ᛡ as "ior", ᛄ as "ger", epigraphically both are variants of ger. R. I. Page designated ior a pseudo-rune; the runes above were not included in the rune poem. Calc appears in manuscripts, epigraphically on the Ruthwell Cross, the Bramham Moor Ring, the Kingmoor Ring, elsewhere. Gar appears in manuscripts, epigraphically on the Ruthwell Cross and on the Bewcastle Cross; the unnamed ᛤ rune only appears on the Ruthwell Cross, where it seems to take calc's place as /k/ where that consonant is followed by a secondary fronted vowel. Cweorð and stan only appear in manuscripts; the unnamed ę rune only appears on the Baconsthorpe Grip. The unnamed ᶖ rune only appears on the Sedgeford Handle. There is little doubt that calc and gar are modified forms of cen and gyfu, that they were invented to address the ambiguity which arose from /k/ and /g/ spawning palatalized offshoots.
R. I. Page designated cweorð and stan pseudo-runes, noting their apparent pointlessness, speculating that cweorð was invented to give futhorc an equivalent to Q; the ę rune is a local innovation representing an unstressed vowel, may derive its shape from ᛠ. The unnamed ᶖ rune is found in a personal name, where it stands for a diphthong. Anglo-Saxon expert Gaby Waxenberger speculates that ᶖ may not be a true rune, but rather a bindrune of ᛁ and ᚩ, or the result of a mistake. Sundry runic combinations are found in the futhorc corpus. For example, the sequence ᚫᚪ appears on the Mortain Casket where ᛠ could theoretically have been used. A rune in Old English could be called a "rúnstæf", or "rúne". Futhorc inscriptions hold diverse contents. Ocher has been detected on at least one English runestone. Bind runes are not uncommon in futhorc, were used most to ensure the runes would fit in a limited space. Futhorc logography is attested to in a few manuscripts; this was done by having a rune stand for a similar sounding word.
In the sole extant manuscript of the poem Beowulf, the
Celtiberian script
The Celtiberian script is a Paleohispanic script, the main writing system of the Celtiberian language, an extinct Continental Celtic language, occasionally written using the Latin alphabet. This script is a direct adaptation of the northeastern Iberian script, the most used of the Iberian scripts. All the Paleohispanic scripts, with the exception of the Greco-Iberian alphabet, share a common distinctive typological characteristic: they represent syllabic values for the stop consonants, monophonemic values for the rest of consonants and vowels, they are thus to be classed as neither syllabaries. There is no agreement about; the basic Celtiberian signary contains 26 signs rather than the 28 signs of the original model, the northeastern Iberian script, since the Celtiberians omitted one of the two rhotic and one of the three nasals. The remaining 26 signs comprised 15 syllabic signs and 6 consonants; the sign equivalent to Iberian s is transcribed as z in Celtiberian, because it is assumed that it sometimes expresses the fricative result of an ancient dental stop, while the Iberian sign ś is transcribed as s.
As for the use of the nasal signs, there are two variants of the Celtiberian script: In the eastern variant, the excluded nasal sign was the Iberian sign ḿ, while in the western variant, the excluded nasal sign was the Iberian sign m. This is interpreted as evidence of a double origin of the Celtiberian script. Like one variant of the northeastern Iberian script, the western variant of Celtiberian shows evidence of having allowed the voiced stops g and d to be differentiated from their respective voiceless counterparts, k and t, by adding a stroke to the voiceless signs; this is known as the ‘dual system’ in Paleohispanic scripts, which otherwise do not distinguish between pairs of voiceless and voiced stops. The Celtiberian inscriptions have been found in the Ebro valley and near the sources of the Tagus and Douro rivers, where Roman and Greek sources place the Celtiberian people; the Celtiberian inscriptions were made on different types of objects. There are just under two hundred surviving inscriptions, one of, exceptionally long: the third Botorrita bronze plaque with more than three thousand signs containing a census of nearly 250 people.
Always the direction of the writing is left to right. The fact that nearly all the Celtiberian inscriptions were found out of archaeological context does not allow a precise chronology to be established, but it seems that the earliest inscriptions in the Celtiberian script date from the 2nd century BCE while the latest ones date from the 1st century BCE. Celtiberian language Greco-Iberian alphabet Iberian scripts Paleohispanic scripts Northeastern Iberian script Southeastern Iberian script Tartessian script Paleohispanic languages Ferrer i Jané, Joan: «Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 957–982. Hoz, Javier de: «La lengua y la escritura celtibéricas», Celtiberos. Tras la estela de Numancia, pp. 417–426. Jordán, Carlos: Celtibérico, Zaragoza. Jordán, Carlos: «¿Sistema dual de escritura en celtibérico?», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 1013–1030. Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús: «Sobre el origen de la escritura celtibérica», Kalathos 16, pp. 189–197.
Untermann, Jürgen: Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum. IV Die tartessischen, keltiberischen und lusitanischen Inschriften, Wiesbaden. Schmoll, Ulrich: «Die iberischen und keltiberischen Nasalzeichen», KZ 76, 280-295. Villar, Francisco: «Las silibantes en celtibérico», Lengua y cultura en la Hispania prerromana, pp. 773–812. Villar, Francisco: Estudios de celtibérico y toponimia prerromana, Salamanca. Blanco, António Bellido, Sobre la escritura entre los Vacceos, in ZEPHYRUS – revista de prehistoria y arqueologia, vol. LXIX, Enero-Junio 2012, Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, pp. 129–147. ISSN 0514-7336 The letters of the Celtiberian script A transcription of a Botorrita plaque Detailed map of the Pre-Roman Peoples of Iberia The Celtiberian script - Jesús Rodríguez Ramos Ferrer, Joan. "Preliminary proposal to encode the north-eastern Iberian script for the UNICODE standard"
Geʽez script
Geʽez known as Ethiopic, is a script used as an abugida for several languages of Eritrea and Ethiopia. It originated as an abjad and was first used to write Geʽez, now the liturgical language of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Beta Israel, the Jewish community in Ethiopia. In Amharic and Tigrinya, the script is called fidäl, meaning "script" or "alphabet"; the Geʽez script has been adapted to write other Semitic, languages Amharic in Ethiopia, Tigrinya in both Eritrea and Ethiopia. It is used for Sebatbeit, Meʼen, most other languages of Ethiopia. In Eritrea it is used for Tigre, it has traditionally been used for Blin, a Cushitic language. Tigre, spoken in western and northern Eritrea, is considered to resemble Geʽez more than do the other derivative languages; some other languages in the Horn of Africa, such as Oromo, used to be written using Geʽez, but have migrated to Latin-based orthographies. For the representation of sounds, this article uses a system, common among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages.
This differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. See the articles on the individual languages for information on the pronunciation; the earliest inscriptions of Semitic languages in Eritrea and Ethiopia date to the 9th century BC in Epigraphic South Arabian, an abjad shared with contemporary kingdoms in South Arabia. After the 7th and 6th centuries BC, variants of the script arose, evolving in the direction of the Geʽez abugida; this evolution can be seen most in evidence from inscriptions in Tigray region in northern Ethiopia and the former province of Akkele Guzay in Eritrea. By the first centuries AD, what is called "Old Ethiopic" or the "Old Geʽez alphabet" arose, an abjad written left-to-right with letters identical to the first-order forms of the modern vocalized alphabet. There were minor differences such as the letter "g" facing to the right, instead of to the left as in vocalized Geʽez, a shorter left leg of "l", as in ESA, instead of equally-long legs in vocalized Geʽez.
Vocalization of Geʽez occurred in the 4th century, though the first vocalized texts known are inscriptions by Ezana, vocalized letters predate him by some years, as an individual vocalized letter exists in a coin of his predecessor Wazeba. Linguist Roger Schneider has pointed out anomalies in the known inscriptions of Ezana that imply that he was consciously employing an archaic style during his reign, indicating that vocalization could have occurred much earlier; as a result, some believe that the vocalization may have been adopted to preserve the pronunciation of Geʽez texts due to the moribund or extinct status of Geʽez, that, by that time, the common language of the people were later Ethio-Semitic languages. At least one of Wazeba's coins from the late 3rd or early 4th century contains a vocalized letter, some 30 or so years before Ezana. Kobishchanov and others have suggested possible influence from the Brahmic family of alphabets in vocalization, as they are abugidas, Aksum was an important part of major trade routes involving India and the Greco-Roman world throughout the common era of antiquity.
According to the beliefs of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the original consonantal form of the Geʽez fidel was divinely revealed to Henos "as an instrument for codifying the laws", the present system of vocalisation is attributed to a team of Aksumite scholars led by Frumentius, the same missionary said to have converted the king Ezana to Christianity in the 4th century AD. It has been argued that the vowel marking pattern of the script reflects a South Asian system, such as would have been known by Frumentius. A separate tradition, recorded by Aleqa Taye, holds that the Geʽez consonantal alphabet was first adapted by Zegdur, a legendary king of the Ag'azyan Sabaean dynasty held to have ruled in Ethiopia c. 1300 BC. Geʽez has 26 consonantal letters. Compared to the inventory of 29 consonants in the South Arabian alphabet, continuants are missing of ġ, ẓ, South Arabian s3, as well as z and ṯ, these last two absences reflecting the collapse of interdental with alveolar fricatives.
On the other hand, emphatic P̣ait ጰ, a Geʽez innovation, is a modification of Ṣädai ጸ, while Pesa ፐ is based on Tawe ተ. Thus, there are 24 correspondences of Geʽez and the South Arabian alphabet: Many of the letter names are cognate with those of Phoenician, may thus be assumed for Proto-Sinaitic. Two alphabets were used to write the Geʽez language, an abjad and an abugida; the abjad, used until c. 330 AD, had 26 consonantal letters: h, l, ḥ, m, ś, r, s, ḳ, b, t, ḫ, n, ʾ, k, w, ʿ, z, y, d, g, ṭ, p̣, ṣ, ṣ́, f, p Vowels were not indicated. Modern Geʽez is written from left to right; the Geʽez abugida developed under the influence of Christian scripture by adding obligatory vocalic diacritics to the consonantal letters. The diacritics for the vowels, u, i, a, e, ə, o, were fused with the consonants in a recognizable but irregular way, so that the system is laid out as a syllabary; the original form of the consonant was used when the vowel was the so-called inherent vowel. The resulting forms are shown below in their traditional order.
For some vowels, there is an eighth form for the diphthong -wa or -oa
