Glyph of the Day

Venetic "a"

Venetic was an Indo-European language related to Latin, spoken on the Italian peninsula in the vicinity of what became Venice.  Venetic was one of several scripts in what is now Italy, representing quite a few languages: Latin, Etruscan, Venetic, Faliscan in a small area smack in the middle,Umbrian in the central part of Italy, South Picene on the central Adriatic, Oscan in southern Italy, Nuceria in southern Italy, Lugano in northern Italy/southern Switzerland, Raetic in northeastern Italy, and Camunic in northwestern Italy.  The scripts were very similar, but not identical, and derived from a western dialect of the Greek script, occasionally going through Etruscan first.

While Venetic did not use interword separator marks, Oscan used interpuncts to separate words and Umbrian used double dots (“:”).  Some languages were written right-to-left, some left-to-right, some boustrophedonically.  It seems like they didn’t care all that much which direction to go.

How could so many writing systems exist in such a small (to Canadians) place?  Two factors: the population density was much lower and most people didn’t travel much.  Traders went all over, colonizers went all over, soldiers went all over, but ordinary folks didn’t go very far.  Not only were ordinary folks limited to walking speed, but they also were limited by how much food they could bring with them (no grocery stores along the way!), and — with limited literacy and expensive or heavy writing materials — no maps and no guidebooks.  If you wanted to travel, you needed to go with someone who knew the way.

All of the Italic scripts we know of (not just Etruscan and Latin and Venetic) started being written around 600-400 BC.  Venetic and all the other non-Latin scripts died out under the Roman cultural dominance by around 100-200 AD.

Links: Ancient Scripts, Adolfo Zavronim (in Italian), Wikipedia

Lycian nasalized "e"

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 been pulled from the neighbouring Carian script.

The glyphs that they used are not hugely interesting, but what the Lycians put between the glyphs was: as near as I can tell, Lycian was the first script to ever put spaces between words.

Other writing systems had tried other word separators — vertical bars particularly were popular — but in my opinion those are not as useful.  Some reading researchers believe that the Bouma shape — essentially the outline of a word — is useful in word recognition.  Thus your eye might recognize a word that has tall-letter, short-letter, tall, tall, short as the word “little” even without looking carefully at each letter.  It is easier to see the shape of the word if there is space delimiting it instead of a similar-looking symbol.

It is very hard to read scripto continuo, text without separation.  It is telling that there is a moment in St. Augustine’s Confessions where Augustine recounts his astonishment at discovering St. Ambrose reading silently, without even moving his lips.  Augustine took this ability as a mark of unusual genius.

We might laugh at the thought that reading liplessly is unusual, but try reading somethingthatisallsmooshedtogetherwithoutanypunctuationata llitisdifficultyoumightstartmovingyourlipstoo.

UPDATE/COMMENT: I hear that the above paragraph doesn’t render well at some point sizes.  Sorry, but I can’t really fix it with WordPress.  If I remove the space in the middle of the last sentence, it becomes all one line, with no wrapping, which can run into the right column.

One thing that I have been intrigued by as I have learned about writing systems is how significantly technology affects the writing system; I am amused that the technology I use to write this blog prevents me from displaying Latin script in the form that Latin script started out in!

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

Unknown Carian letter

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 of the Greek alphabet and, from what the archaeolinguists knew from non-Carian sources, the language wasn’t that unusual.  Carian did have a bunch of additional symbols, but that wasn’t the biggest problem.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that John D. Ray finally cracked the code.  His insight was that the Carian alphabet did not use the same pronunciation as the Greek alphabet!  For example, a triangle was “l” and not “d” as in Greek.  Gamma was “th” and not “g”.

Once they let go of the idea that the Carian glyphs had to be pronounced like the Greek letters, it was relatively straightforward to see Carian as a close descendent of Luwian.  The presence of inscriptions in Egypt turns out to be due to a mobile labour force: Carians served as mercenaries for Egyptian rulers.

The Carians must have either forgotten about Luwian hieroglyphics or gotten bored with them.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts

Latin "a"

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, and a significant part of Asia.  It has significant auxiliary use in Asia, e.g. as a second language and showing pronunciation for Chinese.

There is a Roman legend that the goddess Carmenta modified the Greek script to make the Latin script, but scholars believe that Latin script came from Etruscan script.  Like Etruscan of the time, Latin was originally written right-to-left, but Latin eventually shifted to left-to-right.  Latin jettisoned several Etruscan letters that were not needed, corresponding to the “ph”, “th”, and “kh”, and an “s” sound (roughly the Greek phi, theta, chi, and one not found in the modern Greek alphabet).

According to some Roman sources, Spurius Carvilius Ruga invented the “G” symbol to distinguish the “k” sound from the “g” sound, both of which had been written with a “C” (descended from the Greek “gamma”).  He jettisoned the “z” (which was only used to write Greek loanwords), and put “G” in its place.

Later, after the Romans conquered Greece, they decided they writing Greek words was important after all.  They grabbed the “Z” again; they also snagged the Greek “Y” (which in the variant the Etruscans had grabbed was shaped like a “V” and ended up being pronounced as “u”).  The Romans stuck the “Y” and “Z” at the end of the alphabet (which is an extremely common place to put new letters).

Note that while Americans pronounce the letter “Z” as “zee”, almost all other English speakers (including Canadians) pronounce it as “zed” — like the Greek “zeta”.

The alert reader will note that I used capital letters (also called majuscule) for all the Latin script letters here, and that there is no mention of “W”, “J”, and “U”, which are not in the Greek alphabet.  These are not typos. Early Latin only had what we think of as upper case letters, no spaces between words, and the “W”, “J”, and”U” did not exist in Latin at first.  There was no “w” sound in Latin, “I” was also used for the “j” sound, and “V” was also used for “u”.

Early Latin did used vertically centered dots called interpuncts to separate words, but this went out of fashion even before the Romans did.

Note: I put that Latin Majescule originated in 690 BC, but really, we don’t know that precisely.  We know that Etruscan and Latin both were around in the vicinity of 700 BC, and we know that Etruscan came first, but we don’t know exactly what date the first Etruscan words were written nor how long after that the first Latin words were written.  It might have been six months between the two, it might have been fifty years.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot