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Category: Writing Systems
Does an equivalent of cursive exist in other alphabets?
Greek: there was a cursive modelled after Western cursive in the 19th/20th century. It fell out of use long before computers (I was never taught it in school); I have seen it in letters from the 50s. The main differences to what you might expect: kappa looking like a <u>; pi as an omega with […]
Why does the Greek alphabet have the letters Xi (ξ) and Psi (ψ)?
So… what did I find when I was looking at the history of the Greek alphabets, in Jeffrey’s monograph? http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… The second problem is that not all the sibilants were present in all the dialects. Most Greek scripts initially avoided xi, and wrote /ks/ as ΧΣ; Jeffery (1990:32) suspects the Ionians held on to it […]
What is the most beautiful Greek typeface?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-beautiful-Hebrew-typeface Originally Answered: What is your favourite Greek font, and why? GFS Complutum: Εταιρεία Ελληνικών Τυπογραφικών Στοιχείων There is a Romantic history to Greek typography. The first fifty years of printing started inauspiciously, with poor, crude carved out Greek letters. But they got steadily better, until their apogee in the Complutensian Polyglot Bible of the […]
What does your Greek handwriting look like?
https://www.quora.com/What-does-your-Arabic-handwriting-look-like Originally Answered: Can I see a sample of your Greek handwriting? I could say that I’m capable of writing neater than this, but I’d be lying. Twenty years ago: maybe. Two texts. For modern monotonic, my favourite song lyric, stixoi.info: Του κάτω κόσμου τα πουλιά. For ancient polytonic, the beginning to the Discourses of […]
If you want to include a word or phrase in Greek in a novel, should you write it in Greek letters or should you transcribe it by pronunciation?
A novel with mass readership, not in Greek, where you don’t want to alienate readers unnecessarily, and you care to give readers some notion of what it sounds like? Use transliteration rather than original script. Same as if you were putting Hindi (or whatever your language happens to be) into a non-Hindi (or whatever) novel. […]
Why do the spellings of ancient Roman and Greek names differ in English than in other languages?
Partly, source morphology. Partly, mediation via Latin. Partly, particularity of English. Remember first that Classical names in English came in via Latin most of the time. Hence Plato rather than Platon, and Hercules for Heracles. Second, not all final -ns are the same. So there’s no contradiction about Latin keeping the final -n in Xenophon […]
How has it happened and Kemal Ataturk did not adopt Greek Alphabet, although in the Ottoman empire the Greek (and Cyrillic) were spoken?
There was use of Greek script to write Turkish: Karamanli Turkish. Illustrated in https://www.quora.com/How-has-it… But without some concerted linguistic work, Greek script was not much better suited to Turkish than Arabic script was. No differentiation between <ı> and <u> for example: both ου. No systematic differentiation of <c> and <ç>, just as Greek (at the […]
Why is it possible for the Cyrillic script to be adopted in so many languages?
What made Roman script suited for adoption? The fact it was adopted a lot. Latin on its own is not particularly suited for a lot of phonemes, but it was the only game in town in Western and Central Europe, and that meant there was a long, long tradition of workarounds—both digraphs and diacritics. So […]
Why are there languages which are spoken the same but written in different script or alphabets?
Traditionally in Europe: religion. As a more general answer than religion, which covers the other answers here: culture. Scripts comes from a particular culture, and adherents of that culture adopt that script. If speakers of the same language belong to different cultures, they use different scripts. If there is a massive cultural shift in the […]
History: Which cultures or societies went from being literate to illiterate? As in a script becoming extinct or some other reason.
This is a mythological rather than factual answer, but: The Hmong people were illiterate, but they lived at the crossroads of a bunch of literate cultures—the Chinese, the Thai, the Vietnamese, the Laotians. The Hmong noticed. And they figured that they must not always have been the downtrodden illiterates that they were: surely they too […]