Category Archives: Alphabet

Lycian — 600 BC?, Turkey

Posted on February 5, 2011 by ducky

The Lycians lived in southwest Turkey, not far from Greece, but spoke a descendant of Luwian.   They made a new alphabet by adding a few characters to the Dorian dialect of the Greek  alphabet.  Some of the letters might have … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphabet, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 1 Comment

Carian — 650 BC?, Turkey

Posted on February 4, 2011 by ducky

There are a fair number of texts in Carian in both southwestern Turkey and in Egypt, but archeologists had a devil of a time figuring out what they said.  This was a bit odd, as the Carians used a variant … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphabet, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 1 Comment

Latin Majuscule — 690 BC, Italy

Posted on February 3, 2011 by ducky

Latin script and its variants are the most widely used writing systems in the world.  Latin script is the primary writing system in most of Europe, almost all of North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica, large portions of Africa, … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphabet, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 8 Comments

Etruscan — Italy, 700 BC

Posted on February 2, 2011 by ducky

Somewhat unusually, the Etruscan writing system is completely understood, but the Etruscan language is not.  With the early Cypriot script, archeological linguists can guess that the symbols in early Cypriot writing system corresponded to the same pronunciation and orthography as … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphabet, language unknown, Rating: 3 "I did not know that" | 3 Comments

Greek — 800 BC, Greece

Posted on January 31, 2011 by ducky

Greek legend says that a Phoenician, Cadmus, brought writing to the Greeks.  This is not hard to believe, as the earliest Greek glyphs look very similar to Phoenician.  However, the Greek alphabet had something from the beginning that no other … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphabet, previous script didn't quite work, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!" | 9 Comments

Bopomofo — 1913 AD, China

Posted on January 10, 2011 by ducky

Because Chinese is a (mostly) logographic language, it isn’t obvious how to pronounce written characters.  To deal with that, in 1913, the government of China developed a system to write the pronunciation of characters.  Its official name is Zhuyin Fuhao, … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphabet, government-mandated, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", Syllabaries | 3 Comments