Questions tagged [writing-systems]
A writing system is a system to record spoken language visible on a permanent medium.
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Boustrophedon-like writing system with single character orientation
Did a writing system ever develop that had a bi-directional writing style, alternating every line, with character orientation and order being preserved between lines? (Essentially Boustrophedon, ...
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2answers
75 views
Probability based algorithm to convert IPA into english language text
For a student job i'm creating a neural network-based method of determining the probability that two written names are referring to the same person (e.g. what is the probability that kelly m. refers ...
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4answers
5k views
Why were writing systems invented independently during roughly the same period across multiple civilizations?
Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years, and spoken language is believed to have been around for 50,000 to 150,000 years.
Writing is a relatively new phenomenon. According to this source, ...
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1answer
47 views
Why are meaning, sound, and writing “part of the outside world, not part of language”?
The linked question explains why writing isn't language, but the embolded sentence is alleging something different, that writing isn't even "part of language". Why?
Linguistics usually ...
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226 views
character v. glyph v. grapheme/morphogram v. ideogram v. logogram v. pictogram v. symbol vs. syllable
My 15 y.o. daughter is learning Chinese, but these different terms bafle us! How do they differ? Where do these other terms fit into Table 3.5, which contains merely FOUR of the terms in the title of ...
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1answer
88 views
Why's writing not language?
Writing is not language. How?
Doesn't the sentence — that I underlined in red on p 280 — contradict this? The author wrote that if "language is manifested instead as graphic marks, then we can ...
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1answer
113 views
Do any other languages use ruby characters(furigana) as extensively as Japanese
Just what the question asks.
I’ll note that Chinese does use it extensively with pinyin when teaching Chinese to western foreigners. However I’m referring to using in materials by and for native ...
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1answer
97 views
How do you tell a spelling mistake from a grammar mistake?
How do you tell a spelling mistake from a grammar mistake? For example:
Your the best.
This iz the end.
I likes music.
She preatend to be asleep.
One method is to read the erroneous sentence aloud (...
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10answers
3k views
Are there any diacritics not on the top or bottom of a letter?
I don't know of any besides the horn on Ơ and Ư and the middle tilde on ᵯ and some other consonants
I'm interested in particular in a diacritic precomposed with both "I" and "U"
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114 views
A term for sign/symbol that represents multiple letters
At the time the Quran was revealed, the Arabic letters that we know of today was different. As I understand it, they did not have the concept of letter in the meaning we understand today.
For example,...
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0answers
83 views
What is the official/correct orthography for Alsatian / Elsässisch German?
As per the Wikipedia article on the Alsatian language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect#Orthography) the orthography
includes the latin letters A,B,C ... X,Y,Z and the following vowels ...
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Glagolitic Ⰾ (l) is like Ⰴ (d). Is it related to Latin / Old Latin l / d lingua dingua, lacrima dacrima?
Glagolitic Ⰾ (l) is like Ⰴ (d). Is it related to Latin / Old Latin l / d lingua dingua, lacrima dacrima?
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118 views
Which writing systems have the highest/lowest stroke-to-sound ratios?
Preemptive note: This question is about sound-based writing systems, excluding logographic systems like Chinese. Transitional systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya script or Man’yōgana are also ...
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4answers
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Is the Cyrillic letter 'Z' the same as the number 3
Why do the Cyrillic 'Z'(З) and the number '3' seem to be the same glyph? Is there a difference that I'm just not seeing? They look identical to me
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1answer
171 views
Why did “s” use to look like “f”?
Example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Houghton_EC65.M6427P.1667aa_-_Paradise_Lost%2C_1667.jpg
Paradife loft.
There is no way that I can ever read that as:
Paradise lost.
The ...
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1answer
112 views
Can all scripts be used to write all different languages?
I am thinking about making an introductory book to some different "languages", for self learning. But I realize I'm blending the writing system with the pronunciation system, and am starting to get ...
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1answer
49 views
How are the Ogham stones inscribed?
I earlier asked How to convert Old Irish Latin script to Ogham? and am not quite complete with the answer. I have a similar question still trying to dig into how to build an Ogham generator. But ...
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204 views
Why do we make a distinction between letters and punctuation marks?
In English, for example, the word "don't" is made up of 4 letters ("d", "o", "n" and "t"), and one punctuation mark ("'").
However, there seems to me to be no reason for this distinction. Without any ...
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1answer
66 views
Is there a database or standard (ISO etc.) which maps Unicode or ISO-15924 scripts with the ISO-639/Glottolog etc. languages that use them
Is there a database or standard (ISO etc.) which maps Unicode or ISO-15924 scripts with the ISO-639/Glottolog etc. languages that use them, so that I can make queries like the following on it:
For an ...
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1answer
125 views
Are there logographic writing systems for the blind? Do blind users of logographic writing systems struggle like how deaf users of alphabets do?
I'm not a linguist, but I borrowed a textbook from my university library and read the chapter on writing systems. The textbook is Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction by William O'Grady. In it, ...
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1answer
228 views
Was the Thai letter ด really derived from ต?
Understanding the relative chronology of implosivization in Thai and Khmer, and how it interacted with the development of the scripts, is difficult (at least for me). In the first answer to this ...
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3answers
248 views
Why does capitalization exist?
For background, I'm a systems developer, not a linguist. There's a tendency to dismiss any grammar rules in my line of work namely because of how "strict" (read: dumb, simple) the computers and ...
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Is thorn cognate with Bactrian sho? [closed]
There is a letter thorn that suffered a great loss in Old English with its size being doubled and this double sound is hidden in plain sight. I think that thorn may be related to the Bactrian sho ...
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1answer
886 views
The term “proto” in “proto-language”
I noticed that both Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Indo-European have the title of "proto", although the Proto-Sinaitic has actual scripts which were found and studied, i.e. it is a fact that it existed, ...
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2answers
287 views
What is the modern general communication language writing system with simplest letter symbols?
I would like to know what is the modern, formal, writing system with simplest (most minimal) letter symbols by these means:
Total number of letters comprised only or mostly from line segments (...
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1answer
108 views
Where can I find the letters of documented writing systems, as text, online?
I was looking for the letters of the Safaitic writing system of Ancient North Arabian (ANA) as text, online.
Safaitic is a well documented and researched writing system that was a prominent (if not ...
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2answers
207 views
How similar are the prototype writing systems of Ugarit-Tyre (“Phoenician”) and Safaitic?
I understand that that in the ancient Levant, two main writing system patterns were used by the different peoples of the region: Phoenician and Ancient North Arabian.
I further understand that both ...
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3answers
2k views
How well do Semitic languages preserve consonants over time?
I'm not too familiar with the details of Semitic languages, but as far as I can tell it seems the tri-consonantal roots of words are relatively important. If the consonants change over time, did they ...
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1answer
103 views
How are words seperated in Arabic? Is empty character sufficient always?
I am trying to count Arabic words in some verses in Quran. What is the universal rule to seperate words in Arabic, particularly in Arabic used in Quran?
My computer program uses empty character to ...
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9answers
4k views
Languages which changed their writing direction
I am interested in account of languages that had undergone a change in the writing direction somewhere in the history.
We might say, for example, that Greek was used to be written also (not sure if ...
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0answers
151 views
How can I tell if a vowel is “empty”?
In Hittite cuneiform, every glyph with a phonetic meaning is either V (a vowel), CV (a consonant followed by a vowel), VC, or CVC. As a result, there's no way to represent three consonants in a row ...
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1answer
177 views
How do I know if a cuneiform character is a logogram or determinative?
When I'm looking at a Hittite text, occasionally I'll come across a glyph that has no phonetic meaning. This generally means one of two things: either it's a logogram, or it's a determinative. Either ...
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2answers
300 views
The Cyrillic script among the Slavic people
Today the Cyrillic script is used by the East Slavs, such as the Russians and the Bulgarians, but the West Slavs (e.g. the Czechs, the Poles) and some South Slavs (e.g. the Croats, the Slovenes) use ...
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6answers
447 views
Do multi-dimensional writing systems exist?
I am not sure whether linguistics board is the right place to ask this question, but since I couldn't find any better place here is the question:
Most (all?) of the writing systems are using the ...
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1answer
121 views
relationship between writing systems, scripts, and font. Terminology clarification required
I want a clarification on terminology. A language is written in a particular script . but there are various styles for writing a script. For e.g. arabic is written in arabic script, and it can be ...
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0answers
154 views
Does an alphabet with the uniform letter frequency distribution exist?
A language employs some kind of alphabet for writing. One could naïvely expect that each letter bears the same amount of entropy. But in reality that is not the case. For example in English each ...
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0answers
77 views
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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0answers
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Learning a script as an adult
It is well-known that it is difficult to compete with native speakers when learning a language as an adult. But is there a similar phenomenon with writing systems? Can non-natives (e.g. of Arabic or ...
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2answers
121 views
Other Extensible Scripts Besides Latin
Besides the Latin script with its menagerie of diacritics and modified glyphs, what other phonetic scripts are extensible to such a degree to accommodate new sounds?
I know the Greek alphabet and ...
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0answers
99 views
Are there examples of symbols similar to modern emoji or emoticons that were used before 20th century?
In other words, any symbols (ideograms) used to convey emotions that fit the description of "ancient emoji".
I'm mostly interested in ancient and medieval attested symbols, but anything from before ...
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2answers
185 views
Rejecting writing down a language for various reasons
I remembered reading somewhere about a language that its speakers believe the written words are sacred (or some other reasons) they chose to refrain from putting spoken words into written forms even ...
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4answers
1k views
Is it possible to have a word-based language completely without word inflection?
First, sorry if I'm not using the correct terminology here.
By "word-based", I mean typical Indo-European languages (plus Uralic) where there are only tens of characters (e.g. "A to Z" (Latin) or "А ...
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2answers
634 views
When was the first bicameral script developed?
The Wikipedia article on letter case says this without citing any references:
Both majuscule and minuscule letters existed, but the difference between the two variants was initially stylistic ...
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2answers
184 views
(How) did Hittite borrow words from Sumerian?
It was always my understanding that Hittite borrowed the cuneiform script from the Sumerians via Akkadian. This would prevent Hittite from borrowing lexemes from Sumerian unless Akkadian borrowed them ...
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3answers
412 views
Alphabet size affects complexity of written ideas?
Do relatively simple alphabets (Rotokas, Hawaiian) limit the complexity of written ideas? Example: could Rotokas be used to write a technical manual for the space shuttle?
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1answer
364 views
Which alphabetic writing system first had spaces between words?
Just recently, I believed that spaces between words were first invented with the Carolingian minuscule, invented by the English scholar Alcuin of York. As I just discovered, spacing wasn't first ever ...
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Looking for a character like the greek theta, θ, but with two middle lines
I'm looking for a character in any writing system or even a known symbol (more common is better) that would roughly look like the Greek theta θ, but with two lines in the middle.
If there is none, it ...
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3answers
1k views
Is a vowel only writing system possible?
An abjad is a writing system in which only consonants are normally written, is the opposite possible?
I've recently discovered that English actually has far more vowel-sounds than we have vowel ...
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1answer
57 views
Is there distinct jargon for syllabaries depending on their inventory?
The dictionary definition of a syllabary is "a set of written characters representing syllables and (in some languages or stages of writing) serving the purpose of an alphabet." I would personally ...
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2answers
120 views
If the Romanization of Logographic (and other) Languages is Fully Accurate
Wondering if the translation of languages such as Chinese and Japanese into Romanized versions is accurate. That is, it doesn't lose information. For example, in Romanization of Chinese, they say ...
