Jurchen Scripts — 1119 AD and 1138 AD, Northeast China

Posted on March 2, 2011 by ducky

Jurchen "year"

The Khitan (AKA Liao) Empire was in charge in Manchuria (northeastern China) for a while, and the local Jurchen people used the Khitan script and Chinese script for their writing.  They rebelled and overthrew their Khitan overlords in 1115, and four years later, at the new emperor’s request, Wanyan Xiyin made a new script for Jurchen, called “Large Script”.  In 1138, Emperor Xizong made a new script (called “Small Script”).

Jurchen got most of its glyph shapes from Chinese script and Khitan script.  In addition to logograms, they had many phonetic characters which were used for word endings and for words which didn’t have a logogram.  The phonetic characters were usually syllables, but they also had standalone vowels and syllables that were “vowel+n”.  I have no idea how to classify that: sort of an inverse abjad?  This just shows how complex writing systems are!

Note that Jurchen came from Chinese and Khitan; Khitan came from Chinese but with inspiration from Old Uyghur; Old Uyghur came from Sogdian; Sogdian came from Aramaic or Syriac; Syriac came from Aramaic; Aramaic came from Phoenician.  It might have taken 2000 years, but Phoenician’s descendants spread eastwards 6000 miles, across a continent, before internal combustion engines.  That’s pretty cool.

Posted in inventor known, Logograms, National pride, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", Syllabaries | 1 Comment

Khitan scripts — 920 AD and 925 AD, Mongolia

Posted on March 1, 2011 by ducky

Khitan small seal "hen" (word)

Emperor Taizu of the Khitan (AKA Liao) people introduced a script in 920 AD for his nomadic Mongolian nation. They had been using Chinese script, but the Chinese script was  a poor fit for the Khitan language.  Spoken Khitan had many syllables per word, unlike more monosyllabic spoken Chinese.

Taizu’s script (called “Large Seal”) was logographic and only a few symbols have been decipered.  It clearly was influenced by Chinese, as there are a handful of symbols (particularly those used in dates and numbers) which are identical.

Only five years later, Taizu’s younger brother Diela came up with another script after a visit from the Uyghur ambassador.  The ambassador showed Diela the Old Uyghur script, and something in the Old Uyghar script convinced Diela that he could make a better script than one the Emperor endorsed.  This seems foolish to me, but I wasn’t there at the time, and Diela’s script (called “Small Seal”, duh) ended up in wide use amongst the Khitan people.

One innovation that Diela came up with was to show word boundaries by grouping syllable glyphs into word-blocks.  Words had one to seven syllables, and they would all be crammed into one word-block, with an arrangement like Maya script: two wide, left-to-right, top-to-bottom.  If there was an odd number, the last syllable would be horizontally centered, as shown in the block of glyphs above. The word blocks were then laid out linearly.

Small seal consisted of some logograms and some consisted of phonetic syllables, but only a fraction have been deciphered; the language died and there aren’t that many bilingual texts.

The Khitans used both scripts, but not in the same text (that we know of), and it isn’t clear why they used one sometimes and the other sometimes.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

Posted in Abjad, inventor known, language unknown, Logograms, previous script didn't quite work, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", Syllabaries, Undeciphered | 1 Comment

Old Uyghur — 700 AD, China

Posted on February 26, 2011 by ducky

Old Uyghar "b"/"p"

The Old Uyghur script descended from the “Uyghur” version of the Sogdian script, and was used from around 700 AD to around 1700 AD.  Woodblock printing and movable type printing was developed by Uyghurs in around 1250, around 200 years before Gutenberg’s printing press.  This makes Old Uyghur probably the earliest script to be printed with movable type.  Indeed, there are a large number of books in Old Uyghur found in Turfan, where movable type was developed.

Fear not, Euro-chauvanists: Gutenberg still has a lock on the development of the printing press.  While information is sketchy, it seems that Uyghurs placed the type face-up, inked it, laid a piece of paper down, and rubbed the paper to transfer the ink — a much slower process than running a press.

Old Uyghur had two principal differences from the Sogdian script

  1. They almost never left out the vowels, even the short ones (making it even closer to an alphabet than Sogdian).
  2. They rotated the whole language counter-clockwise.  The characters are written top-to-bottom, left-to-right, and the characters are also rotated 90 degrees from the Sogdian.  Old Uyghur is one of the few languages that is written vertically.

It is surprisingly common for glyphs to rotate by 90 degrees over the course of their lifetime (or when being borrowed), or to flip (especially when the writing direction changes).  It is less common for the direction of writing to rotate by 90 degrees.  There are probably two or three PhDs to be written to explain why many scripts rotate the glyphs and why Old Uyghur scripts rotated the whole line of writing.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot, The Uighurs

Posted in Alphabet, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!" | 2 Comments

Sogdian — 200 AD, Uzbekistan

Posted on February 25, 2011 by ducky

Sogdian "b"/"p"

Sogdiana was an important nation on the Silk Road in Central Asia from around 400 BC to 1000 AD.  Sogdian traders went far and wide as merchants, similar to the Phoenicians; like the Phoenicians, they spread their language and their script in disproportionate measure to their numbers.

The Sogdian script is variously described as being descended from Aramaic, Syriac, or Pahlavi.  Like Pahlavi, it uses Aramaic logograms, but unlike Pahlavi, it did not press more consonants into vowel duty than Aramaic already did.

Unlike Aramaic, Sogdian used those double-duty consonants for both long and short vowels.  Frequently, they would write an alef before the character when it was used as a short vowel instead of a long vowel — a handy disambiguation.

The fact that Sogdian usually wrote the short vowels means that it is verging on alphabetic.  It isn’t really a classic alphabet because it doesn’t have unique glyphs for the vowels, but it isn’t really a classic abjad because it does have short vowels.  Languages are messy and don’t fit into nice neat boxes!

Sogdian was around long enough that it developed three different sets of glyph shapes: Early Sogdian, Sutra script (around 500 AD), and what is somewhat confusingly called “Uyghar” script, not to be confused with the Old Uyghar alphabet (around 600 AD).  The Early Sogdian script had disconnected letters.  The next two were more cursive, i.e. connected, and also had different forms of the glyphs for the beginning, middle, and ending of words.  As I mentioned in the Hebrew script posting, this is a clever way to enhance readability without using extra horizontal space.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

Posted in Abjad, Alphabet, probably first in its area, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 2 Comments

Old Nubian — 700 AD, Sudan

Posted on February 24, 2011 by ducky

Old Nubian “ng”

Old Nubian script started around 700 BC in Sudan, but it wasn’t common (especially at first).  Most official and/or formal writing was in Greek or Coptic for quite some time.

Old Nubian script is mostly Coptic, but with three additional characters: two from Meroitic and one (shown above) that they think is a doubled Greek gamma.

In Nubian, the length of the consonants is important, but the length of the vowel is not.  In English, the length of a vowel or a consonant is not meaningful: if I say “housecat” and “housecaaaaaaaat”, those both refer to a common pet; if I say “buh-keeper” and “buhk-keeper”, most Canadians probably wouldn’t even hear the difference.  However, in some languages, the length of the vowel and the number of consonants is meaningful.  In Italian, if you only pronounce one “t” in “sette”, you’ve said “thirst” instead of “seven”.  In Japanese,”ba” is “aunt” and “baa” is “grandmother”.  In the Nubian script, they distinguished between double-consonants and single in writing, but they did not distinguish long vowels from short ones in writing.

Old Nubian made extensive use of abbreviations, especially abbreviations of sacred names (denoted by a horizontal line over them, as perhaps pioneered by Syriac). They also had symbols that were functionally very close to the modern Latin period and question mark, and sometimes used a double-slash as a verse separator.

The modern form of the language (Nobiin) is tonal, but there are no tone marks in Old Nubian.

Links: Wikipedia, Unicode proposal, AncientSudan

Posted in Alphabet, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | Leave a comment

Coptic — 150 BC or 300 AD, Egypt

Posted on February 23, 2011 by ducky

Coptic "sh"

Coptic is an alphabet which was and is used to write Egyptian.  Around 150 BC, Egyptians were writing Egyptian using the Greek script, occasionally with some Demotic characters for sounds that weren’t in Greek.  By around 300 AD, they had standardized on 24 characters from Greek and 6 from Demotic (with one more Demotic character in one of the Coptic spoken dialects).  It also had one glyph for the syllable “ti” (made of a ligature of “t” and “i”).

Punctuation was not standardized, however.  Some dialects of the script used an apostrophe-looking thing to separate words; some used umlaut-looking things to mark the beginning of some syllables; some used a circumflex-looking thing to mark syllables.

Coptic is also one of the few languages to have an upper and lower case.

Coptic was very important in linguistic history because it allowed scholars a bridge to the ancient Egyptian (which until the Coptic script had been written in logograms and consonants).  It became closely tied with the Christian Church, and is still used today as a liturgical language by Egyptian Christians.  This makes it one of the oldest continuously written languages still in use today after Chinese, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and Hebrew.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

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

Meroitic — 150 BC, Sudan

Posted on February 22, 2011 by ducky

Meroitic “se”

The two Meroitic scripts (one from the hieroglyphic, one from the Demotic) seem like the bastard love children of Egyptian and Old Persian, and Old Persian was a bit of a bastard love-child itself.

The two scripts have a one-to-one glyph correspondence, so they work the same.  Each is sort of an abjad, sort of an abugida, sort of a syllabary, sort of an alphabet.  The only type it is missing is logogram, but we can’t even be sure of that because the underlying language of the scripts is poorly understood.  (They are pretty sure about the correspondence of glyphs to pronunciation by correlating names in Meroitic script with those in other scripts.)

Like Old Persian, consonantal glyphs have an implied vowel “a”.  With a vowel following it, the syllable changes to use that vowel in it, sort of like an abugida — if you say that a following vowel “decorates” the consonant. However, the “e” glyph seemed to be a “killer mark”, to signify that that syllable wasn’t a syllable, just a consonant.  (This is similar to the Virama in Brahmi-derived abugidas.)  However, it’s not even a true killer: sometimes it would also be pronounced as an “uh” (schwa) sound.  They think.

In addition, there are four glyphs that are never followed by another letter.  They think that these were syllables that ended in “e” (an “eh”-sounding “e”, not a schwa-sounding “e”).  They think.

There are some writing systems that I am biased towards.  I think that Cree, Cherokee, Greek, and whichever came first of Brahmi and Kharosthi were brilliant.  Then there are some writing systems where I roll my eyes and ask, “What were you thinking???”  Meroitic joins Old Persian, Pahlavi, and Aztec in that category for me.  I have less patience for Pahlavi and Meroitic because they should have known better, from the examples of Greek on one side and Brahmi on the other.

About the only thing they did right IMHO was separate their words with either two or three vertical dots (like colons).

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot, Egyptsearch

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

Demotic — 650 BC, Egypt

Posted on February 21, 2011 by ducky

Demotic "k"

Demotic was significant in the history of language understanding, as it was one of the three scripts on the Rosetta Stone (along with Greek script and Egyptian hieroglyphics).  However, it is really only a font difference from hieratic (or hieroglyphics).

The differences in the glyphs are not small, however, as by the time it is generally dated, more than two thousand years had passed since the origin of hieratic.  (For an exaggerated example of how much drawings can drift from the original, see A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals.)  Demotic is more cursive and can be written more quickly.  However, demotic is also more ambiguous: some glyphs in demotic represent two or more glyphs in hieratic.

After Psamtik I reunified Upper and Lower Egypt, Demotic became the official script of the realm.  However, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 and his successors managed to hold on to it until 30 BC, when the Romans took over.  Egyptian, and hence Demotic, grew less and less important as Greek and then Latin became more important.  However, Demotic held on for a long time: the last writing in Demotic known is a piece of graffiti dated 11 Dec, 452 AD.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot, Ancient Scripts

Posted in Abjad, Evolved slowly from parent, government-mandated, Logograms, Rating: 2 "Not all that interesting" | 2 Comments

Pahlavi — 150 BC, Iran

Posted on February 20, 2011 by ducky

Pahlavi (Psalter) "s" and "h"

As a result of Alexander the Great tromping through Central Asia, Greek deposed Imperial Aramaic as the official language of the region.  However, although Alexander might have been great, didn’t have much staying power: he died at age 32.  His empire splintered messily after his death, and the majority of the empire dumped Greek after the dust settled.

In the area of modern Iran, Middle Persian filled the void left by Greek’s exit, although Aramaic was still very popular as a spoken lingua franca.  To write Middle Persian, they used a script called Pahlavi, which was descended from Aramaic, but they kept using the Aramaic script in to write Middle Persian as well.  Even when writing in the Pahlavi script, they used a lot of Aramaic words as logograms: they wrote the words in the Aramaic script in the middle of Pahlavi script, but pronounced them as Middle Persian words.  (This is similar to how Sumerian written words were still used in Akkadian, Assyrian, and Hittite.)  It would be as if when the collection of symbols “шляпа” showed up in the middle of English texts, they would be pronounced as “hat”.

Middle Persian is an Indo-European language, so vowels are much more important than in the Semitic Aramaic.  Despite having what were, in my opinion, many obviously better options that must have been well known (different glyphs for vowels like Greek or decorations for vowels like in Brahmi), the Middle Persians instead elected to expand the matres lectionis system and press even more consonants into double-duty as vowels.

If that wasn’t confusing enough, some of the glyphs that had been distinct in Aramaic ended up evolving into characters that looked the same.  Imagine if the “l” and “t” in English ended up looking alike!

(Partly the glyphs changed so much because the Persians used Pahlavi for a long time: from about 150 BC up until 900 AD as a common language, and well into the Middle Ages as a liturgical language for Zoroastrian.  There was enough time that various dialects of Pahlavi formed, including Inscriptional Pahlavi, Parthian, Psalter, and Book Pahlavi.  The glyph shapes could look quite different; some were connected (cursive); some were disconnected.  However, the differences in the script were essentially font differences, as all were used to write the Middle Persian language and all had Aramaic logograms.)

Finally, there were some sounds in Middle Persian that weren’t in Aramaic, so they overloaded some of the characters.  “l” in Aramaic became “l” and “r” in Middle Persian.

While Cherokee, Cree, Brahmi and Korean are examples of some of the most clever writing systems, in my opinion, Pahlavi has got to one of the stupidest.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

http://www.ancientscripts.com/pahlavi.html
Posted in Abjad, Evolved slowly from parent, Rating: 3 "I did not know that", stupid | 4 Comments

Syriac — 200 BC? 6 AD?, Syria

Posted on February 19, 2011 by ducky

Syriac "h"

There are wildly different starting dates given for Syriac, a script descended from Aramaic and used, over time, to write several different languages.  I believe this has to do with Syriac script evolving slowly into a distinct script, Syriac spoken language evolving slowly into a distinct spoken language, and lack of precision in distinguishing between the spoken language and the script.  (There are way more spoken language geeks than writing systems geeks, so that’s perhaps not surprising.)

It is clear that by 6 AD, Syriac script was a distinct script.  While several of the previous writing systems had a cursive form, in which letters were sometimes joined (e.g. hieratic Egyptian), as well as a discontinuous form, Syriac is unusual of the languages up to this point in only having a joined form.

Syriac script, like Hebrew script, has different forms of letters depending upon where in the word the letter is located.  Unlike Hebrew, which only has differences between ending and non-ending, Syriac also distinguishes between beginning and middle.  (Not all letters have three visually distinct glyph forms, but many do.)

A bitter schism in the Syrian community rent the Syrian language community in two in 431 AD.  Because the two groups basically stopped talking to each other, their spoken and written languages diverged.  Eventually, the child scripts developed their own unique identity in both glyph shape and in the representation of vowels.  The earlier script, called Estrangela, did not have vowels.  The Eastern script (also called Nestorite) developed arrangements of dots around the consonants to denote vowels in around 350 AD; the Western script (also called Serta) starting using tiny little Greek letters above or below the consonants to denote vowels around 700 AD.  There is some thought that the Eastern dots influenced the Hebrew script’s vowel pointing.

As was common back when writing materials were expensive, there were lots of abbreviations.  An interesting feature developed by Syriac was the use of a horizontal line (with dots at the beginning, center, and end of the line) over the characters that were the abbreviation, to help disambiguate (similar to our ending abbreviations with a dot). This might have been adopted by Greek for their “nomina sacra” abbreviations of sacred names.

They also would use a horizontal line over letters to indicate that they were being used as numbers.  (It was very common in many languages to use letters for numbers, e.g.  Roman numerals.)

In addition, Syriac has a diacritic to change a consonant from an hard, unaspirated form to a soft, aspirated form.  There is also an optional double-dot to denote plurals, and a single dot to denote a feminine form.

Syriac was the language of Christianity in Central Asia and eastward for several centuries, reaching even to Kerala in India, where there are still some native speakers.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot, How to write Syriac, Unicode chapter on Middle Eastern abjads

Posted in Abjad, Evolved slowly from parent, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 1 Comment