Questions tagged [writing-systems]
A writing system is a system to record spoken language visible on a permanent medium.
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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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Why do humans associate letters/characters with phonology when reading? Do people born with hearing impairment make that association?
In the video “Reading in the brain” from the MOOC “Miracles of human language”, the professor says that humans choose to store letters and characters in the 3D vision area of the brain because it is ...
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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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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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How unpredictable must vowels be for a writing system to classify as an abjad?
I've been pondering a conlang with a rather unusual orthography. I'm only stating this because no natural language has this sort of writing system. Essentially, its a system that only writes ...
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Why do many Arabic letters look exactly like other letters except for dots, yet have no similarity in sound?
Why do many Arabic letters look exactly like other letters except for dots, yet have no similarity in sound?
Examples:
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Origins of the alphabets for Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic languages
I am working on a program to learn some of the most popular non-Western languages: first, Arabic and Hebrew, second, Bengali and Hindu whose scripts are based on Sanskrit, and third, Chinese, Japanese,...
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Why is the day of the week capitalized only in Germanic languages and not in Romance languages?
In English, it is written as Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday and January February March April May June July August September November December. On the other hand, in Romance ...
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Are there any diacritics derived from superscripted "i" (and other letters)?
I know that umlaut (e.g. ä) derives from superscripted "e", ring (e.g. å) derives from superscripted "a", and tilde (e.g. ñ) derives from superscripted "n".
Is there a ...
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Closeness between written words and spoken words over different languages
In my understanding, the different languages exist in spoken form and (mostly) in written forms (what about sign languages?).
Some languages have developed a close relationship between the written ...
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Why is Devanagari currently used for Sanskrit?
Sanskrit was originally an oral language. It began to be written in the Brahmi script and then over time, most of the Brahmi-derived scripts, Gupta, Siddham, Nagari, Devanagari, Purvi Nagari etc. were ...
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Is the origin of the Mongolian script fully established?
I have read various theories about the origins of the Mongolian script, which I believe is known as the Hudum Mongol Bichig. Some claim it is ultimately descended from Sogdian runes(which means its ...
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What IPA Symbols Are Equivalent to Each of These Middle High German Diacritics?
I recently came across this article on the inclusion of certain superscript combining characters for use with representing Middle High German in Unicode. From what I understand, scribes and early ...
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What is the origin of ⟨c⟩ for /ts/?
In several languages' romanizations or orthographies, the letter C is used to represent the /ts/ sound. Where does this come from? Wikipedia notes that ⟨c⟩ is used for Cyrillic ⟨ц⟩ in the ...
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Why were vowels secondary citizens in many of the worlds sound-based writing systems?
Not considering logographic systems like Chinese, and outside Cuneiform (not sure if that is a logo system or something else), it appears at first glance that many of the world's writing systems ...
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Should orthographies represent phonemes or phones?
I am currently working with Salvadoran Nawat, an endangered language that has never had a standardized orthography due to being primarily oral. As part of the revitalization process, we need to ...
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Isn't it misleading to call written representations of spoken languages as written languages?
In the following sentences I would refer to anything that can be used to denote something as a symbol.
Any language uses some kind of symbol to denote different things. I presume that any language ...
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Is 'x' the written form for the speech sound ɛks in this sentence?
Consider the following spoken sentence written in phonetic transcription:
lɛt ɛks dɪˈnəʊt ən ˈɛlɪmənt ɒv ðə sɛt ------------1
(I don't know how to do phonetic transcriptions, I used a website for ...
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Numbers in Arabic Netspeak
I came across this list of numbers to represent sounds in Arabic netspeak:
2 is A
3 is a heavy (so heavy) A, sure you can't even pronounce it but you could replace with a regular A, no one would care
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Are there heuristics to tell if a character is from Chinese, Kanji, or Chu Nom?
Suppose I know nothing about Chinese writing systems but some basic strokes and radicals. When given a blocky-looking character, how do I tell if it's a character only used in Kanji, in Chữ Nôm, or in ...
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Are there any scripts derived from Chinese characters that diverged before Regular Script?
The Wikipedia article on clerical script lists several child systems such as Kanji, Kana, Hanja, Zhuyin, Sawndip, Chữ Hán etc. Are there any writing systems descended from seal script or earlier?
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Historically, when was whitespace used versus interpuncts versus no-separation?
The Wikipedia article on whitespace claimed until recently that the use of whitespace as a word separator was rare until its promotion by Alcuin of York in the Carolingian Renaissance. But I've found ...
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What are the principles of Middle Egyptian spelling?
In this question, the transliteration jdnw is given as the Middle Egyptian for the equivalent of "lieutenant". If I now want to render that in hieroglyphs, how would that work?
I could ...
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Questions about the "Hand of Irulegi"
The Hand of Irulegi is a recently found artifact from Navarra, Spain. It is dated in 1st c. BCE and carries an inscription touted as the oldest attestation of the Basque language.
The text can be ...
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Why was the letter K removed from the Welsh alphabet?
Honestly, why did they remove letter K from the alphabet?
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If the letter V occurs in a few native words, why isn't it included in the Irish Alphabet?
So, I read about the Irish alphabet once, and there was a phrase saying that "V" occurs in a few native words like "vácarnach" which means to quack in English. Shouldn't the letter ...
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Is there really any difference between the words Pictography, Ideography, Symbols and Picture-symbols?
I am currently absorbed in Megg's history for Graphic design and I came across certain terms that seem to have incredibly ambiguous meaning (Pictography, Ideography, Symbols & Signs) and one that ...
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Ways of classifying writing systems by appearance?
Are there any common groupings of writing systems by grapheme appearance? I'm currently writing about language identification and one specific goal I have as part of the work is to include steps for ...
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Why few languages do not have any written form?
There are many languages available in the world which have no written form like shanghainese , Hakka etc .
My question is, why a language do not have any written form ? What's the root cause of it ?
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What is the difference between written dialects, spoken dialects, and writing/encoding schemes?
I am working on a language website and am just encountering the need to specify spoken dialects. I already have a sort of scheme for representing written encodings (like Tibetan wiley romanization ...
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Any online resources on dongba language and hieroglyph？
I visited Yunnan last year and found the fascinating dongba hieroglyph of naxi people and their great epic poetry. I am curious about any online resources on this dongba hieroglyph?
I, personally, ...
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Why does “&” look nothing like e and t
“&” (ampersand) was from a ligature of e and t. but it looks nothing like e and t put together. Why?
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Do we know enough to become fluent in written Mayan?
There are about 7000 languages but only three origins of writing: The Middle East, China, and Mesoamerica. The most studied writing system in Mesoamerica is Mayan script. It was once the official ...
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Do these letters belong to Kannada?
I am native Kannada speaker. But I've never came across these vowels:
ಌ (U+0C8C)
ೡ (U+0CE1)
ೢ (U+0CE2)
ೣ (U+0CE3)
and these yogavahs:
ೱ (U+0CF1)
ೲ (U+0CF2)
Unlike ಱ, ೞ I've never saw/heard above ...
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Why was "zh" picked to represent /ʒ/, and where does it come from?
As a native French speakers I used to be puzzled by Zh being used for /ʒ/. At first because I didn't understand the need for it, since in French j is /ʒ/, and dj is /dʒ/. Then I understood why English ...
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What does the letter do ৡ in Bangla?
There are 14 অ বর্গীয় (O borgiyo) letters in Bengali. But couldn't find out in book what they are. I know that there are 11 vowel letters in Bengali. But while looking for অ বর্গীয়, I just found that ...
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How is "mim(م)" letter connected to "dal(د)"?
Whenever I go to mosque, there is always the following image near "ﷲ" name. However, I don't understand how "mim" letter is there. I know "mim" letter as "م". ...
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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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Is there a collective term for the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets?
I was just wondering if such a term exists, since they are very similar to each other, and all of them derive from the Greek alphabet, so I thought perhaps there might be a collective term for the ...
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Books on historical writing systems
Can you recommend books on the writing systems that are not widely used today (e.g. the Germanic runes, the Old Turkic script)?
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Is を as almost exclusively an object marker exceptional amongst alphabet usage?
The almost exclusive usage of を in Japanese to mark the object of a sentence- is that the only specialized use of a letter or are there other languages where one letter is designated as being for a ...
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Why are Urdu and Shahmukhi perceived as separate scripts?
It is known that the Urdu script is used to write Hindustani languages and Shahmukhi is used to write Punjabi and Saraiki languages.
But both the Perso-Arabic-based scripts are of the same Nastaliq ...
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Writing systems that do not preserve spoken order
Are there writing systems where there are cases of written form of words not preserving the order of speech, i.e. text(A) precedes text(B) in the written form, but speech(B) precedes speech(A)?
Only ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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