Questions tagged [writing]
The writing tag has no usage guidance.
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Origin of a special Sinhala letterform
In Sinhala, the usual form of the short U diacritic is that of a hook on the bottom of a letter:
a) ක + ු -> කු, කූ
b) ම + ු -> මු, මූ
This takes an exceptional form for the letter R, like ...
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Romance dialects : sound-to-spelling correspondance?
Romance languages differ greatly in between dialects. What are exemples of Romance languages that have the same writing system, but are written phonetically, with differences between dialects?
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Is there a writing norm in Occitan in which [y] is written as <ü> and [u] as <u>?
Maybe also [y] as <ù> or [u] as <ò>?
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Why does Sinhala script mark mid vowels in such a strange way?
The vowels E and O are written with a diacritic that goes to the left of the consonant, despite the script being left-to-right, and also O seems to be E+A which doesn't make much sense to me. What ...
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Was cuneiform ever drawn on a surface, as opposed to carved?
Cuneiform's glyphs are well-known for the odd way they were made; stamping. I wonder though, given that it remained in used for thousands of years, was this the only way it was ever utilized? Was ...
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Noun Phrase - complement vs. postmodifier
Let's look at these two noun phrases:
1 - The chapter of the book.
2 - A mother of two kids.
Could you please help me understand why 'of the book' is a postmodifier while 'of two kids' is a complement?...
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Did the Phoenician letter 𐤄 have any meaning on its own or in earlier writing systems?
Obviously Phoenician was an alphabetical writing system, where characters combine phonetically to build words. But Wikipedia claims (implies?) both that the Phoenician letter "he" evolved ...
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A Question on 'Topical Progression': How to Address Internal Inconsistencies in the Framework
(This question has been moved from English Language Stack Exchange on account of relevancy.)
In my mission to improve my writing, I have come across a concept called 'topical progression' (discussed ...
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How do I draw the Vietnamese ơ and ư characters?
How do I draw the Vietnamese ơ and ư characters? (Surprisingly, I can’t find this information via Google like I can for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters.)
Specifically, how do I draw the horn ...
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How do Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs differ?
The Wikipedia article on the History of Writing contains the following quote:
the earliest solid evidence of Egyptian writing differs in structure
and style from the Mesopotamian and must therefore ...
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Why does text in Cyrillic or Japanese contain Latin characters for technical/scientific terms?
Through a question on a sister site, I stumbled upon a Bulgarian document that includes drawings and measurements.
What stroke me is that the text in Cyrillic contains Latin characters when it comes ...
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What's the name of the principle that derives the sound of a symbol from the name of the thing that that the symbol depicts?
What do we call it when the Initial sound of a word, eg. beth vel sim. "house", is assigned to a symbol of that word, eg. the floorplan of a house(?), to use the sign as the unique ...
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Where did the Greek consonant cluster "ps" come from
Where did the Greek consonant cluster "ps" come from? I tried finding resources to track down this fun-sounding consonant cluster but came with no information. I was thinking about a voicing ...
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Beta vs eszett character difference
How to write the Greek letter beta and the German letter eszett so that they look different enough?
I've seen variants of beta with the final arc ending on the vertical line and ones which have a ...
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Could the at symbol '@' be considered a vocative marker?
Specifically, the at-symbol as used e.g. on Twitter or Github (or many other sites besides), e.g. '@somename, what do you think about this?' or '@foobar, I'm waiting!' Comparing it with English/German ...
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Is there a list of endangered writing systems?
Is there a list of endangered writing systems? I couldn't find any.
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I read that Julius Caesar read silently in front of his men and this amazed them -- was Caesar's ability rare?
It seems to me that at this time, written words were basically instructions for reading out loud.
I would guess that while Caesar was exceptionally educated for his time and that indeed the men who ...
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What made some languages change normal writing orientation?
For Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese, writing was done in 漢字 (English spelling may vary), going down and stopping and switching to the next line on the left and repeating the process again. ...
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How is "duhduhb" written properly in Amharic?
I learned the word "dub-dub" the other day meaning moron in Amharic.
After a couple of searches I found this page which says:
Duhduhb = Moron
I tried having a stab at how it might be written, ...
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Zellig Harris and the alphabet
I would be very interested if someone could provide me with a useful link to read Zellig Harris's text on the origin of the alphabet. The reference is:
Harris, Zellig S. 1933. “Acrophony and ...
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Are there any historical runic transcriptions that utilize two runes to represent a sound change? (particularly in the Anglo Saxon rune sets)
Anglo Saxon did not distinguish by voicing usually, particularly with the sounds /s~f~z~v/. After the adoptions of the Latin Alphabet letters "f" and "s" were doubled when representing a voiceless ...
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Why the writing and reading in English are different?
I do not encounter so big problems with the English language although I'm not a native English speaker. But I'm curious why some languages (like English or French) are written different from the way ...
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Arabic calligraphy: moving characters or signs; other symbols
In Arabic calligraphy, it seems to me that some characters or signs are sometimes moved in some weird place.
In this picture, for example, letter ء is moved before ا of word شاء and it looks to ...
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Replacing Chinese characters with pinyin forever as Vietnamese did
I know both languages to a certain extent. By no means I am fluent; reading is still a challenge, especially in Chinese, thus I am not allowed to firmly stand by my opinion.
I often ponder on the big ...
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Comparative Methodology
Firstly many apologies if this question is not appropriate for this forum; I am a mathematician and a mathematics education researcher. However, I am posting on this forum because I am doing research ...
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Is it possible to write complex sentence without subordinate (or dependent) clause? [closed]
My first language is NOT english. Currently I am preparing for IELTS exam at the moment. Today I saw a youtube video about IELTS writing task. In this video, the teacher gave an example of complex ...
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Language with the highest ratio of diacritics to letters in typical text
Vietnamese uses a high number of diacritics. Are there any languages that are even higher, in terms of either the maximum or the mean of the number of diacritics added to letters?
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Has the way cursive capital "B"s been written changed since the 1950s? [closed]
Hopefully the Linguistics Stack Exchange is the best place to ask my question.
The opening credits of a cartoon called Gerald Mc Boing Boing uses cursive. To me, it looks like lowercase "b"s are used ...
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How can I improve my writing fluency in English? [closed]
So this is a problem I've been struggling with for quite some time now. English is a second language for me despite the fact that I've spend a lot of my childhood years in Australia (grades 1 through ...
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What language is this character from? [closed]
A colleague of mine owns a ring and asked me what language this character is from:
I speak Japanese so I could pretty much rule out that and Chinese (her first guess). It's not Korean nor Thai either;...
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How is it that such varied sounds (in major European Languages) came to be represented by the same letter "j"?
The letter "j" is pronounced differently in the following major European languages:
English: just /d͡ʒʌst/
Spanish: justo /ˈxus.to/
German: junge /ˈjʊŋə/
French: juste /ʒyst/
How is ...
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Please help me identify this language (image) [closed]
I found this inscription on something I recently purchased, not sure what it is. Can you please help identify it?
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Origin of Alphabetic/Phonemic Scripts
Dixon (the Australianist) has claimed that the Phoenician/Canaanite script is the ultimate source of all known alphabetic (purely essentially-phonemic) scripts on Earth; all other scripts are not ...
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What was the most usual and most recent system of writing Korean without any hangul at all?
It's proving quite difficult to learn some of the facts about written Korean before hangul was given official status by the government.
We know that metal movable type printing was inventing in Korea ...
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On the idea that Classical Chinese may *not* be direct ancestor of modern Chinese languages
It's known that Literary Chinese (or Classical; wényán ), the language of historical Chinese texts, differs completely from modern Mandarin as well as from other spoken Chinese languages, not only in ...
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