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Questions which apply solely or mostly to the written forms of languages as opposed to their spoken forms.

6 votes

Is capitalization a recurring feature across writing systems?

A supplement to tripleee's answer: Although most Brahmi-descendant scripts in India and South-East Asia do not have separate upper-case letters, Javanese does have 7 letters that are used instead of o …
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3 votes
Accepted

Why no 'i' in Albanian for digits from 0 to 9?

I do not accept that this is a trivial question. In Proto-Indo-European (as usually reconstructed) the only one of the lower numbers that has the vowel /i/ is *tri-, the zero-grade of *trei- "three". …
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1 vote
Accepted

Base language of Mitanni Texts

The Mitanni texts are in Hurrian, a non-Indo-European and non-Semitic language. As you mentioned, they contain some loanwords and proper names taken from proto-Indo-Aryan. This form of Hurrian is writ …
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5 votes

How are numerals written in Arabic?

No, he will write the digits from left to right (the opposite of the direction of writing words) as: 123 or ۱۲۳.
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0 votes

What is the longest sequence of vowels in one word that you know of?

Avestan āuuōiia “woe!” has seven (orthographic) vowels in succession. Avestan kāuuaiiasca “and evil rulers” has eight. (In both cases this is a one-to-one transliteration of the Avestan script, whic …
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1 vote

Gir15 cuneiform is esh2 homograph?

Yes, eš2 and gir15 are two "readings" (as one says in Assyriology) of the same sign.
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3 votes
Accepted

Use of Arabic script for Farsi

ق occurs in Arabic and Turkish/Mongolian loanwords. غ occurs in Arabic, Turko-Mongolian and a few words of Iranian (but usually not Persian) origin. Arabic was the official language in Islamic Iran f …
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1 vote

Do written languages evolve along the lines of the script?

I do not think that any of these changes can be explained in terms of the script. All Old Iranian final short vowels were lost already in Middle Persian. New Persian final –a (Western Persian –e) is f …
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2 votes

Which language was regularly written in the most alphabets?

Ossetic: first in Greek script; then in Church Slavonic script; then (in South Ossetia) Georgian script; then in amplified Cyrillic (Russian script with several newly invented characters); then Latin …
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5 votes

To what extent is a language's morphology tied to orthography, and why do we not consider or...

It is not correct to say “that the Latin word 'signum' evolved into 'sign', which in turn evolved into 'signify'”. The English words “sign” and “signify” are both borrowed from Old French, which had t …
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