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Category: Writing Systems
Why are the Latin and Greek alphabets the only ones with capital/minuscule letters?
There are a few others, but they are mostly neighbours of Greek and Latin, or else motivated by them. Letter case – Wikipedia Writing systems using two separate cases are bicameral scripts. Languages that use the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Adlam, Varang Kshiti, Cherokee, and Osage scripts use letter cases in their written form […]
In Greek, when do you use Iota, Eta and Upsilon? What’s the difference?
So, here’s the mainstream answer. 🙂 Greek had iota, eta, and upsilon as different letters, because they used to be pronounced differently: Iota was always an /i/ Eta was a long /ɛː/. In fact, in many archaic variants of the Greek alphabet, it was written as an epsilon /e/; that was the case in Athens […]
What is the first language that had order for letters in alphabet, and how did people decide to use this particular order?
See Michael Moszczynski’s answer to How did the alphabet get its order? Who came up with the order of the alphabet? The first such language was Ugaritic, several centuries before Phoenecian. As Michael Moszczynski points out, two alphabetical orderings of Ugaritic survive, one via Phoenecian, and one via Ge’ez into Amharic. He concludes that, while […]
Could emoticons form the script of a new constructed language?
http://joehale.bigcartel.com/product/wonderland-emoji-poster Obviously, Vote #1/#2 Daniel Slechta’s answer to Could emoticons form the script of a new constructed language? and Daniel Ross’ answer to Could emoticons form the script of a new constructed language? (I disagree with Daniel Ross’ first point, that the emoji must be conventional and not iconic for them to be a language […]
From a stylebook perspective, what are the rules behind using asterisks and/or grawlixes to replace certain letters in curse words?
Unfortunately I don’t have style books to hand, but practice on this has varied in English. 100 years ago, the convention was to write only the first and the last letter of the obscenity, and to put dashes between them: d—d. The contemporary practices I have seen are to put ellipses between the first and […]
What does the “S” above the ICXC mean?
It’s not an S, per se; you’ll usually see it as just a bar, or a semicircle. Zeibura S. Kathau unearthed an instance that looked like a capital omega. It’s an abbreviation marker: Ι͞Ϲ Χ͞Ϲ is an abbreviation of IHϹΟΥΣ ΧΡΙϹΤΟϹ. The convention is particularly prevalent for Nomina sacra, divine names and titles. Here’s Wikipedia’s […]
How does it feel for Greek kids when they learn their alphabet is an important part of maths?
The other answers are correct, but the question goes to something broader. Greek kids will sooner or later find out that a lot of mathematical and scientific symbols used in other languages are Greek, just as they find out that a lot of scientific vocabulary in other languages is Greek. How do they feel? Unsurprised. […]
How is a sign identified as a letter, a picture, and a number?
For pictures, we hope for extreme iconicity. Writing systems often originate in pictures, but end up looking quite abstract and conventional. That applies even to Chinese. So if you have a lot of symbols, and only a few of them look like animals, you can conclude that the ones that look like pictures really are […]
Ancient Greek transliteration: why does the letter κ become c, and the letter υ become y?
Vote #1 Amy Dakin: Amy Dakin’s answer to Ancient Greek transliteration: why does the letter κ become c, and the letter υ become y? Bear in mind that K was imported into Latin from Greek, but it was a something of an affectation. It was never used seriously, so it was never going to be […]
What in your opinion is the ugliest/most unappealing script?
It’s a cute question. There are aesthetics to scripts. There has been a lot of aesthetic effort put in to the calligraphies and typographies of a lot of scripts. In fact, when I was perusing Omniglot, to find something that jumped out as ugly, I realised that the obvious candidates were minority—one-off scripts of small […]