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Description

Subject Identifiers (2)

Occurrences of this Type (51)

  • A fictional script invented by J.R.R. Tolkien and used both for his fictional languages and for English. A special feature of this system is that characters do not have fixed sound values. Instead, a 'mode' with sound value assignments is developed independently for every language written with the script. (Tengwar)
  • A fictional writing system invented by Japanese nationalists in the 1930s as a historical hoax in order to be able to claim that the Japanese did not get their writing system from the Chinese, but actually invented a writing system of their own. (Jindai Moji)
  • A language spoken by 9 million people in Ghana, for which the Bureau of Ghana languages created a common standard Latin-based orthography of 22 characters in 1961. Of these characters 2 are not part of the traditional Latin script. (Akan)
  • A little-known fictional script that was the first to be developed according to the history of Tolkien's fictional universe. It is very similar to the Mongolian script, and was most likely inspired by it. (Sarati)
  • A phonetic writing system intended to be used to teach the deaf to learn spoken language. Was widely used to teach deaf students to speak with a standard accent. (Visible Speech)
  • A rune-like fictional script with clear similarities to the Germanic runes used in Europe. (Cirth)
  • A script developed by women and only used by women, in a small area of the Chinese province Hunan. The language written is the local dialect, but the script is an ideographic script. It is used by women to write letters, for decoration on fans and scarves, and for diaries. It seems quite clearly to have been a reaction to male oppression. (Nushu)
  • A script invented for writing Mandarin Chinese as a private amusement by script enthusiast Simon Ager, based on the sound system for Zhuyin, the Chinese syllabary. (Geyinzi)
  • A script invented in 1999 in order to replace the latin script for writing English. Designed to be phonetic and to have some of the characteristics of featural scripts. (Camion code)
  • A transliteration used to transliterate from Russian and Bulgarian written in Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. (Slovio)
  • A writing direction used in some ancient Greek writing, where lines alternate between being written left-to-right and right-to-left. The word comes from the way oxen turn at the end of each row when ploughing. (Boustrophedon)
  • Boustrophedon writing (with alternating line directions), but starting at the bottom and moving upwards. (Upwards boustrophedon)
  • Chu-nôm was adapted from Chinese to write Vietnamese, in a period when Vietnam was ruled by the Chinese and where Chinese was the official language in the country. Chu-nôm retained the Chinese characters with ther original meanings, but adding a number of new specifically Vietnamese characters, although in many cases Chinese characters for the same concepts already existed. (Chu-nôm)
  • Closely related to the Manichaean religion, and believed to have been created by Mani himself (the founder of the religion). The script was used to write Manichaean literature in many different languages to spread its teachings. Most characters have only medial and initial forms, but a few also have final forms. (Manichaean)
  • Created by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen around 1890. (Dania)
  • Cyrillic is essentially an adaptation of the Greek alphabet to the Slavic lanuages by the missionary monk St. Cyril, after whom it is named. (Cyrillic)
  • Developed by the National Academy of the Korean Language and adopted in 2000 as the official romanization system of South Korea. Similar to McCune-Reischauer, but more faithfully represents sound changes in consonants. (Revised Romanization of Korean)
  • Developed during WWII by Samuel E. Martin at Yale University together with colleagues for use by American soldiers. Today it is rarely used, and primarily by linguists. (Korean Yale romanization)
  • Developed in 1937 by two Americans. Was the official romanization system in South Korea until 2000 (at which point the revised system was adopted), but is still used in the West and in North Korea. (McCune-Reischauer)
  • Greek is the original alphabet, being developed from the Phoenician abjad. While abjads are well suited to Semitic languages like Phoenician they do not fit a language like Greek, which made the Greeks add vowel symbols to the Phoenician abjad, thus creating the first alphabet. (Greek)
  • Hiragana is used to write the grammatical parts of sentences, especially inflections, where the Chinese characters are used to write the word stem, and the inflected ending is then added in hiragana. The characters themselves are derived from Chinese characters, through extraction of part of the Chinese character. The current collection of 46 characters was fixed by a regulation from the Ministry of Education in 1900. The hiragana (and katakana) characters that were rejected in this reform are today known as hentaigana. (Hiragana)
  • Katakana is used to write foreign names, loanwords, onomatopoeic words, exclamations, and some specialized scientific terminology. The characters themselves are derived from Chinese characters, through extraction of part of the Chinese character. The current collection of 46 characters was fixed by a regulation from the Ministry of Education in 1900. The katakana (and hiragana) characters that were rejected in this reform are today known as hentaigana. (Katakana)
  • Language(s) spoken by the tribe of the (H)iberi parts of Spain and Portugal in the two first millennia B.C.E.. The language(s) is not Indo-European, and is not understood. (Iberian)
  • Named after its inventor, Beitha Kukju is obviously much too cumbersome to have caught on very widely. (Beitha Kukju)
  • Named after the city in Albania where it was used, Elbasan was briefly used to write Albanian, but never caught on widely. (Elbasan)
  • Newari is an important language, since it is the oldest written language in Nepal, having been written since the 14th century. It is the language of the Newars, the earliest settlers of the Kathmandu valley. (Newari)
  • Not all scripts have a definite writing directions, and so each writer chooses what direction to use. For some scripts there is no standard at all, while for others the writer can choose between a limited number of directions. (Variable)
  • Pahawh Hmong is an unusual script for several reasons. Typologically it is something of an oddity, being abugida-like, but with vowels as the primary symbols, rather than the consonants. Historically, it has been associated with a messianic movement among the Hmong people. (Pahawh Hmong)
  • Previously the most-used transliteration from Chinese to latin script, Wade-Giles has now largely been superseded by Pinyin. (Wade-Giles)
  • Primarily used by the semitic writing systems, but also by other writing systems. Many scripts using this direction write numbers left-to-right. Mixing right-to-left and left-to-right text produces bidirectional text, which is hard to read. (Right to left)
  • The American Library Association/Library of Congress transliteration for Arabic. (ALA-LC Arabic romanization)
  • The Oromo script is an independent invention based on the model of the Amharic script. Its inspiration seems to be the difficulty of writing Oromo with scripts designed for other languages, as well as nationalistic aspirations. The writing of Oromo was banned by Ethiopian authorities until the accession of Mengistu's regime in 1974. Today Oromo is written in the Latin script. (Oromo script)
  • The internationally recognised transliteration system accepted by the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, or DMG). Proposed in 1935 in the famous "Denkschrift" to the International Congress of Orientalists. (ISO 233)
  • The language of an ancient, possibly Celtic, people that lived in northern Spain in the last few centuries BC. The language is known from a small number of partially-understood inscriptions in the Roman alphabet, and in Iberian syllabic script, from c.300-100 BC. (Celtiberian)
  • The oldest Indian script, excepting the Indus script; almost certainly derived from Aramaic. It was developed in much the same way as Greek: in adapting an abjad to a non-Semitic language, a mechanism to indicate vowels was added. In Greek separate vowel symbols were added, but in Kharoshthi vowels are indicated through systematic modifications to the consonant symbols. (Kharoshthi)
  • The origin of the Futhark is uncertain. It may have been Latin, but it may also have been one of the other Italic scripts. The Futhark was first used in Denmark and Northern Germany and spread from there into Scandinavia and to the British Isles. (Runic)
  • The script is partly alphabetic and partly syllabic, and its ancestry is unknown, though clearly Greek or Semitic. It is older than North Iberian, which may have been derived from it, and also more sparsely attested. (South Iberian)
  • The writing direction used on this page, and the most common writing direction for scripts today. (Left to right)
  • This direction uses columns where one starts to read on the upper left and proceeds downwards to the bottom of the page. At the bottom of the page reading continues at the top of the next column to the right. (Top to bottom, left to right)
  • This direction uses columns where one starts to read on the upper right and proceeds downwards to the bottom of the page. At the bottom of the page reading continues at the top of the next column to the left. (Top to bottom, right to left)
  • This direction uses columns where one starts to read on the lower left and proceeds upwards to the top of the page. At the top of the page reading continues at the bottom of the next column to the right. (Bottom up, left to right)
  • This direction uses columns where one starts to read on the lower right and proceeds upwards to the top of the page. At the top of the page reading continues at the bottom of the next column to the left. (Bottom up, right to left)
  • This is a topic map with information about languages and the scripts used to write them. It has been authored by hand by Lars Marius Garshol. (Scripts and languages)
  • This is the script you are reading right now, the script used for English, and by far the most widespread script in the world today. The rise of printing and later computing made Latin even more important. (Latin script)
  • This script is not well understood, but from what is known of it the claim that it is an abugida seems well-founded. (Meroitic)
  • This script seems to have been derived from the South Iberian script, although this is not known for certain. It is partly alphabetic and partly syllabic. It is relatively sparsely attested. (Northeast Iberian)
  • Undeciphered script known only from 10 inscriptions found in the city of Byblos during excavations 1928-32. Several attempts at undeciphering have been made, but none accepted, as the material is too limited. It's believed to be a syllabary derived from Egyptian hieratic, used to write some semitic language. (Byblos syllabary)
  • Used by the Cretan civilization up to its conquest by mainland Greeks, Linear A is still undeciphered, and it is not known what language it was used to write. It is thought to be syllabic and ideographic (Linear A)
  • Used by the Newars to write Newari, as well as in Tibet for parts of translations from Sanskrit to Tibetan. (Ranjana)
  • Used in southern and eastern Sierra Leone, originally primarily for translations of the Quran. The first 42 characters of the script work as an abugida, but the remaining 150+ form a syllabary. Tuchscherer reports that it is still in use by about 100 people. (Mende Kikakui)
  • When the Japanese started using the Chinese characters to write their language, they needed to be able to write not just complete words, but also sounds (particularly for inflections). For this purpose they used a set of Chinese characters which were used for their sound, rather than for their meaning. This set of characters is the man'yoogana. (Man'yoogana)
 
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