{"id":274,"date":"2011-02-24T23:10:52","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T07:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=274"},"modified":"2018-02-24T12:52:12","modified_gmt":"2018-02-24T20:52:12","slug":"old-nubian-700-ad-sudan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/old-nubian-700-ad-sudan\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Nubian — 700 AD, Sudan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Old Nubian “ng”<\/p><\/div>\n

Old Nubian script started around 700 BC in Sudan, but it wasn’t common (especially at first).\u00a0 Most official and\/or formal writing was in Greek<\/a> or Coptic<\/a> for quite some time.<\/p>\n

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

In Nubian, the length of the consonants is important, but the length of the vowel is not.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 However, in some languages, the length of the vowel and the number of consonants is meaningful.\u00a0 In Italian, if you only pronounce one “t” in “sette”, you’ve said “thirst” instead of “seven”.\u00a0 In Japanese,”ba” is “aunt” and “baa” is “grandmother”.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Old Nubian made extensive use of abbreviations, especially abbreviations of sacred names<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

The modern form of the language (Nobiin<\/a>) is tonal, but there are no tone marks in Old Nubian.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia, Unicode proposal<\/a>, AncientSudan<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Old Nubian script started around 700 BC in Sudan, but it wasn’t common (especially at first).\u00a0 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}