Abecedaria

Additions to the Myanmar Script in Unicode

2006-04-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

I was surfing the internet looking for more on the diæresis (note that I have used the more correct U+00E6 today) when I received notification of a proposal that included this dear little thing. Not a diæresis after all, it is the proposed character MYANMAR VOWEL SIGN GEBA KAREN I U+1097.

The usual MYANMAR VOWEL SIGN I is U+102D. (I have just used Babelmap to confirm that I am reading this correctly.)

The argument reads that since both vowel signs can appear together in text, albeit a grammar text, they need to be represented by different codepoints, so the different glyph (shape) can be represented in plain text, and not just by a different font.

The entire document was recently released here. Preliminary proposal for encoding Karen, Shan, and Kayah characters in the UCS.

Here is a text from this document showing the Karen vowel sign I and the Myanmar vowel sign I. I recommend the entire document. Many new characters are proposed.

Update: The previous title 'Myanmar Block Unicode Proposal' was truly terrible. I was thinking that it was the Mayanmar 'block' in Unicode, not necessarily only Myanmar 'users' of the script. Then I went back to change the title and my wonderful spam blocker shut me out of blogger for a while. Thanks Paul for mentioning this.

Windows Character Map

2006-04-14T23:26:00.000-07:00

I was reading Language Hat's post on the peace jacket and let me tell you, I am very glad I am knitting my socks with variegated wool. There is no way I can have pretensions with something like that. I even paid money for a pattern instead of googling or making it up myself - ouch.

However, I always forget where to find all those letters with accents and whatnot on short notice so here is a reminder. The Windows Character Map can help with all this stuff. I have set it at the font with the widest range, MS Reference Sans Serif. There is the letter s with hook, but you can read the unicode name on the map. The character map is under programs> accessories> system tools. And this page is the best for finding a copy and paste letter when you need it. I will add it to my resources in the sidebar.

But most people really do just find a piece of text elsewhere and copy and paste. It took me a while to figure that out.

History of the Diæresis

2006-04-14T18:13:00.000-07:00

Rather than leaping into a search for the best way to keyboard Coptic, I have decided to step back and examine each of the three necessary diacritics in the Coptic alphabet first. These three are the diaeresis, the overline denoting a nomina sacra or abbreviation, and the jinkim which looks like a macron and gives the consonant a syllabic quality. There are other diacritics but these three occur most often in the manuscripts and have such a diverse and obscure history that I think I will start here and not worry about the others for now.

The papyri in this image, P52, represents the earliest dated instance of the diaresis that I have been able to find. This fragment is a portion of the crucifixion story and is dated 125 - 150 CE.

In this case the diaeresis is at the beginning of a word. In the second line the text reads 'oudena ina' and the diaeresis serves to indicate that the 'i' is pronounced separately from the 'a'. It actually begins a new word and new clause. There also appears to be a trace of a diaereis on the third letter of the top line.

This is the only discussion of the early history of the diaresis that I have found.

Fragments of an Unknown Gospel

The article goes on to discuss the 'correct' versus the 'incorrect' way to use the diaeresis, which seems like a tedious approach to me. I am relieved to find in antiquity the occasional lack of respect for rigid spelling standards.

I have also scanned through pages of prechristian papyri without finding the shadow of a diaeresis. I would love to hear more about this history and earlier diaereses if they exist.

Update: I misspelled diaeresis in the title and almost left it but 'diaresis' doesn't google as well as
'dieresis' or 'diaeresis.'

The Coptic Writing System

2006-04-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

The first image is the name 'Judas' from the third/ fourth century (?) manuscript the Gospel of Judas written in Coptic. The second is 'Judas' from the Codex Alexandrinus, a major fifth century Greek New Testament manuscript in the British Library.

Just to be clear. I am not commenting on these manuscripts other than describing the script they are written in. They are both written in Greek Uncials. To scholars studying these manuscripts, these two documents appear to be written in the same writing system, and they are. However, the Coptic script has a few more letters.

Greek letter shapes changed over the centuries and the uncials are no longer used, even for copies of the Greek New Testament. They exist in manuscripts studied in museums. Coptic, however, did not evolve in the same direction. The Coptic church still uses a system which resembles the Greek uncials. This website is posted in English and Coptic, so there it is on the web, the Coptic writing system.

The Coptic and Greek writing systems were disunified in Unicode last year. Yesterday, I linked to the two relevant Unicode blocks. Scroll to the bottom of this page for a discussion on the disunification.

I haven't tried a google search yet - some other time. You should google 'Gospel of Judas' in English, not Coptic, to read all about it. For more on Coptic with images of other manuscripts see this site.

Now, to get down to business. I am having a few of the usual problems. I did not include the diacritics in my image in yesterdays post. The three that should have been included are the combining diaeresis U+ 0308 , the combining macron U+ 0304 and the combining overline U+0305. The combining overline was perfect and I will use it sometime. But I could not get the other two in the right place. I am hoping for help on this.

I even tried to select text from the PDF file supplied by the National Geographic Society and, of course, do I need to say this. It appears to be a precomposed non-Unicode font. Then I went back to the Tenaspi Remenkimi site and it isn't Unicode either.

So the Coptic writing system appears on the net. It is visible and it is in the process of being implemented as a Unicode writing system. It will be interesting to watch.

Please comment if you can add to or correct any of this information. Or just to say "Hi".

Gospel of Judas

2006-04-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

These are the first three lines from the Gospel of Judas. (PDF) I watched the news conference tonight and then found the National Geographic site. I wasn't able to open the actual manuscript image pages at the time so I decided to work with the font.

I downloaded and installed the New Athena Unicode font from Dave McCreedy's Gallery of Unicode Fonts and copied these lines for myself below. The Coptic alphabet is found in the Coptic Unicode block and the Greek and Coptic block. Five of the seven characters in the Greek and Coptic block were necessary for this text. These letters are basic to Coptic, so don't lose them. Just so you know, it you are looking to input Coptic. Use both blocks. The disunification of Coptic from Greek in Unicode just occurred in the past year.

My text is below, a simple exercise in order to figure out where I would find the different characters. They are basically in the same order as Greek with a few others characters like U+03E2 : COPTIC CAPITAL LETTER SHEI and U+03E4 : COPTIC CAPITAL LETTER FEI.

I copied out the name of Judas Iscariot underneath the text here - this name can be seen at the end of the second line and the beginning of the third line.

One thing I did find was that it was much easier to copy a known name than the rest of the text. The text is in the Sahidic Coptic, the major literary variety of Coptic.

I couldn't access the actual images of the manuscript when I started out this evening, however, they are available and on a second try I was able to view a few select pages here. Some excerpts of the English text are here.

The National Geographic special is on this Sunday, April 9. Great previews of old manuscripts on the news tonight.

Update: Here is where you can download a Coptic keyboard.

Left-to-Right Marker

2006-03-17T18:43:00.000-08:00

The Left to Right marker is no great mystery. I knew it was there but I seem to have no ability to remember anything that I have not used. So now it is in the mix. Fortunately Mike has just written about (U+200e) here. This page will give all 15o ways to input the character. It somehow managed to be placed in the 'punctuation' block - I would never have thought of looking for it there.

Now the question is, where is it on the Windows Hebrew keyboard? There were various suggestions that I found scattered on the internet, things like alt + left shift, and shift + backspace, but I was not successful with these. However, entering code was successful.

I would be vaguely interested, just the same, in whether there is a one keystroke entry for the left-to-right marker, lrm, on the Hebrew keyboard, just so I can record google search result counts for bidi languages, you understand.

I started this post a couple of days ago. In the meantime I have had a little discussion about certain letters in the Greek range, i.e. stigma and others, that do not appear on the Greek keyboard. I have now put a link in the sidebar to the Unicode Character Search, which gives details on how to enter a character by code in different applications. Mike has had this link on his blog from the beginning and I simply did not follow it till now.

I am getting used to the idea of entering a character by code. This represents progress for me. It was probably only 6 months ago that I made fun of the idea of entering a character by its codepoint, which just goes to show that you should never give up on someone, especially yourself.

I started keyboarding with children about three years ago and looked at technology from their perspective. I would never have gone beyond that if not for one circumstance. I was sitting in a staff meeting one September watching the volunteer signup list make its way around the room. When it got to me there were two blanks left - coach of the basketball team and webmaster. I gulped and chose the latter. The fact that I had just learned to use email that same month did not seem to be an impediment.

It feels good to be back - this is better than jigsaw puzzles. As someone else said, I have no idea what all this is about but I enjoy it anyway. That makes two of us.

PS Language Hat has recently posted about Balashon a new website about Hebrew.

Update on the Tel Zayit Abecedary

2006-03-16T21:43:00.000-08:00

On March 8, 2006, Dr. Ron Tappy made a further presentation on the Tel Zayit abecedary. Here are some details from the Tel Zayit website which correspond to his talk.

Some find that there is a series of abstract leaps here from one thing to another. I find that the extension from the original inscription on stone to a bureacracy is somewhat bold. Maybe they both existed, but the connection seems tenuous.

Here are four statements from the Wikipedia entry.

However, Paul Iverson, of Case Western Reserve University recently sent an e-mail regarding Dr. Tappy's March 8th presentation at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Iverson has a particular interest in Greek epigraphy and philology. He sent this email to Chris Heard on Higgaion.

Iverson states,

And he sums up his arguments as follows,

There is a post on Abnormal Interests on the order of the inscription, and Dr. Joe Cathey comments here. An ealrier post on Higgaion makes some excellent points.

I would like to add my own little comment. I worked for several years on a study of literacy among the James Bay Cree. There are many conflicting and contradictory theories on the origins of this literate tradition, and I think some of them could possibly be cleared up in my lifetime. But that story starts in the 1800's .

Note: Image from the NY Times.

Byzantine Fonts (Beta)

2006-03-15T23:22:00.000-08:00

Click on this image to enlarge. This quotation is from Aristotle as quoted in a 1724 edition of Erasmus' Colloquies. The font is from Vernon Kooy. Translation help is requested. I can't find the original text. I can get the gist of this but haven't been able to come up with a word of mouth translation that would be acceptable to the good grammarian.

After looking at the charts of all 650 characters in this beautiful font many Byzantine manuscripts have become less opaque. This is simply the best resource for Byzantine ligatures that I have ever seen. I can spread out all the ligatures in front of me for comparison, and there are even some tachygraphy characters included. More about these later.

Here is a description from its creator.

The name of this font is Rgreekl, which stands for Renaissance Greek with Ligatures. It is a large font with approximately 650 characters and uses Unicode WGL4 numbering to accommodate the number of characters. However, It is not a Unicode font. It is beta encoded similar to other Greek fonts which use beta encoding.

This font is organized in such a way that it can be used either as a standard Greek font or a font with Ligatures. The basic Latin section contains control codes and keyboard characters for standard Greek with ligatures for kai\, ou and ou=. The Latin supplement section contains Unicode control codes, prepositional prefixes, alternate letter forms and essential diacriticals. These two sections are all that is necessary to write Greek in a Renaissance style. The Latin extended A section is used for two or three letter combinations which more adequately imitate the style of Renaissance typesetters. The Latin extended B section contains characters which are variants of those given in the previous section as well as some characters from earlier minuscule forms (used in some Renaissance fonts), entire words found in most Renaissance printed books and a number of combining characters used to make up other ligatures not previously included.

The main source I used for this font was initially the Portus edition of Proclus Diadochus' Platonic Theology published in Frankfurt in 1618. In addition I have used and consulted various internet sources and the articles by Coleman, Ingram and Wallace as well as a number of books printed by Stephanus, Holbein, Manutius and Sheldon Theater.

I cannot say that this font is complete in the sense that every Renaissance Ligature is represented; many early printers had at least 500 sorts in their boxes and some had more than a thousand. The Renaissance printers imitated the minuscule current at their time, and the glyphs they used were determined by the minuscule. Thus this font can also be used as a late minuscule font.

If there is any sort (Glyph) conspicuously missing which the user finds essential, I would appreciate hearing from him/her in that regard, since I think a font of this type is never fully finished and is of necessity a work in progress.I use Babelmap to input this font. In my opinion Babelmap is an essential Unicode Input Utility tool which handles any font easily. It is easy to view and manipulate fonts visually with Babelmap. Download Babelmap here. Please email me, my email is in my profile, and I will give you Vernon Kooy's email address.

Update: Here is the text from the image above. . However, there are a couple of words and forms I cannot identify.

οτι μανθανουσιν Επισταμενοι τα γαρ αποστοματιζομενα μανθανουσιν οι Γραμματικοι το γαρ μανθανειν ομωνυμον το τε ξυνιεναι χρωμενον τη επιστημη και το λαμβανειν την επιστημην

PS: I am going to come back to the Left to Right Marker LRM tomorrow.

Update: I have corrected some of my rather careless errors. Next, I am posting Simon's Unicode text for this and a link for the original text. Thanks, Simon.

Ὅτι μανθανουσιν οἱ ἘπιϚάμενοι· τἀ γαρ ἀποϚοματιζόμενα μανθάνουσιν οἱ Γραμματικοί· τό γαρ μανθάνειν ὁμώνυμον, τό τε ξυνιέναι χρώμενον τῇ ἘπιϚήμῃ, ϰ τό λαμβάνειν τ ἘπιϚήμην.

Hebrew Searches

2006-03-15T22:35:00.000-08:00

My garden has gone untended too long. The box of chocolates sits by my computer and has not been passed around. The embroidery threads lie unsewn and the yarn is not knit.

My most sincere apologies. It is not for lack of material that I have been away. Many of the more curious items still await assembly. But an old problem reemerges tonight.

I was working on Hebrew vowels, which are happily keyed in on this online keyboard, second interface here. I have just conducted a google search of אֶרֶץ country, and then of ארץ. Now, no one has told me that they should be the same and maybe it doesn't matter. Nonetheless, I do like to know these things.

For אֶרֶץ there were 45,200 results in Google Israel, and for ארץ there were 3,800,000 results. (I am having some interesting problems here with the right-to-left business, because I really wanted to write the number '3,740,000' to the left of the Hebrew word but I was not able to. The numerics were attached to the Hebrew in a right-to-left sequence. I have to wonder if there is an override that can be used for the right-to-left algorithm. )

Well, this was not what I would call a delectable post. Maybe next time.

Hebrew Dictonary is here.

Roman Shorthand: Tironian Notes

2005-12-24T14:08:00.000-08:00

I have accepted that I must simply work at improving my reading knowledge of German. This shouldn't be impossible since I once studied German and spent one summer with a family near Tübingen. However, no polished German translations are about to turn up here under my authourship.

This is the first 20 words of Psalm 12:6-7 * in Tironian notes. The best resource that I have found so far on Tironian notes is Boge's Griechische Tachygraphie and this site with images of a manuscript by Karl Eberhard Henke. This will keep me busy for a while.

Tironian Notes are attributed to Tiro, who worked for Cicero. The National Court Reporters Assocation has a great article on The History of Shorthand By Anita Kreitzman. Here is the section on Roman shorthand.

"Shorthand in ancient Rome seems to have appeared as early as 200 B.C. with the poet Quintas Ennius, who devised a system of 1,100 signs. But it was not until Plutarch in 63 B.C. that definite and indisputable evidence of the use of shorthand is recorded. He writes of the debate on the Catilinian conspiracy that was recorded in shorthand in the Roman Senate as the famous orator Cicero expounded his views.

It is interesting that Cicero was indirectly responsible for the method of shorthand devised by Tiro. Tiro was a slave of Rome and had been granted his freedom by Marcus Tullius Cicero. Upon becoming a freedman he adopted the first two names of his master and thereafter was known as Marcus Tullius Tiro. Highly educated, "he then became Cicero's secretary and confidant," and as such had the opportunity and fortunately the intelligence and skill to invent a system of shorthand that was to be used in the Roman Senate and as a basis for future shorthand systems. Initially, his system involved abbreviations of the more popular words with the remainder of the text filled in from memory using context clues. Not a very accurate method, but Tiro continued to improve on his system by devising further abbreviations for common sentences and phrases used by the orators of the day. He is also credited with inventing the ampersand, which is still in use today.

In the Curia, as many as 40 shorthand writers were stationed in the different areas. They recorded what they could and their transcripts were then compared and compiled in order to record the complete orations of such greats as Cicero and Julius Caesar. Today, in our own Congress, a similar system is used except that the reporters work in relays.

Famous writers such as Horace, Livy, Ovid, Martial, Pliny, Facitus and Suetonius make mention of shorthand in ancient Rome. Julius Caesar, himself, was proficient in shorthand. And to be proficient in shorthand was not an easy task.

The ancient Roman scribe did not have paper, pen, pencil or ink. How, then, did they record the events? The medium was a tablet with raised edges covered with a wax layer. As many as 20 such tablets could be fastened together to form a book. A stylus, similar to a pencil, was used for the actual writing. The point was ivory or steel, the other end flat in order to easily smooth the wax when the notes were no longer needed and a new tablet required. Ironically, it was with such instruments that Caesar was stabbed to death. Had Caesar the foresight to see his fate, perhaps he would not have pursued his interest in shorthand.

Others who demonstrated an avid interest in shorthand writing included Titus Vespasian Caesar, who was so skilled at shorthand that he participated in "contests for wagers and personally taught the art to his stepson," and Augustus Octavianus, an expert shorthand writer who "appointed three classes of stenographers for the imperial government." He considered the skill so important that he taught it to his grandchildren. And even Seneca, the great orator and philosopher, who became so fascinated with shorthand that he improved Tiro's system by adding several thousand abbreviations of his own."

Somehow I could not abreviate this article and extract the interesting parts - it is all too fascinating. I am off to study Karl Eberhard Henke.

Notes:

Image is from "Du Charactère Sténographique de Toute Écriture." Yves Duhoux. Studia Minora Facultatis Philosophicae Universitatis Brunensis N 6-7, 2001-2002. Unfortunately Duhoux does not give the location for the Latin manuscript but it was also mentioned in M. Proux. 1910. Manuel de paléographie latine et française. Album. Paris.

Karl Eberhard Henke:Tironische Noten. MGH-Bibliothek Hs. B 16. Digitale Ed. [Manuskript ca. 1954] / Konzeption u. Bildbearbeitung: Arno Mentzel-Reuters

Boge, Hebert. Griechische Tachygraphie und Tironische Noten. 1973. Akademie Verlag. Berlin.

William Moon Blind Alphabet

2005-12-23T14:55:00.000-08:00

This is the Moon writing system from the early 1840's in England. It is still in use by a limited number of older people in England..

Below is the Cree syllabary. The characters for the p, t, ch, m series are in the same order as the Moon alphabet, when it is grouped by shape. The Cree p,t,k,ch finals also appear as a group in the Moon alphabet.

The fact that these two systems are so similar cannot be a coincidence. These systems appeared within two years of each other, 1841 in Canada and 1843, in England. I suggest that they had a common ancestor in the shorthand descended from John Willis shorthand.

The Moon Code, as it is known, was invented in England between 1843 and 1847 by William Moon who was himself blind. The Moon code was a full alphabetic orthography in which each symbol stood for a letter of the Roman alphabet. However, is is taught by organizing the symbols into an arrangment of similar shapes. It is still used today.

A direct predecessor of the Moon alphabet was the Lucas system. "The script invented in 1832 by Thomas Lucas at Bristol, England, consisting of embossed characters in the sort of symbols used by stenographers, was used in both China and India." The Lucas system can be seen here.

The evolution of Cree from the Frere and Lucas systems has already been written about at Tiro Typeworks.

I am only adding the pieces about the Moon alphabet which shows the order of the symbols, and the John Willis shorthand. More here.

Notes: A Simplified Alphabet. The Ramseyer-Northern Bible Society Museum Collection at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

The Silver Gospel

2005-12-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

Lat night the men were discussing history as usual and the Goths came up in conversation. I mentioned casually that there was a Bible translation into Gothic in the fourth century. They were ruminating on military campaigns. However, one guest paused in thought and said, "Gothic, fourth century - I didn't think it was written that early."

So here it is. This is the Lord's Prayer in the Silver Gospel and there are almost endless internet resources on it. It is officially called the Codex Argenteus and is a copy of the Gothic Bible which was translated by the Gothic bishop Wulfila, who designed the Gothic alphabet.

More about the Codex Argenteus and its significance in studying early Gothic here.

"The manuscript, the Codex argenteus, is probably written in Ravenna during the Ostrogothic empire, and probably for the Ostrogothic king, Theodoric the Great, in the beginning of the sixth century. It is written on very thin purple-coloured vellum of high quality with gold and silver ink. The silver text is dominating, and therefor the manuscript is called the »silver book«, or » codex argenteus «. It was made to be an admirable book, which may be difficult to see today, when hastily looking at its roughly handled remnants in Carolina Rediviva in Uppsala. Probably it originally had a splendid binding with pearls and precious stones. The text of the Silver Bible is one of the oldest and most comprehensive documents in the Gothic language known today. Beside the Silver Bible, there are very few text lines in Gothic handed down to posterity."

Now for the good stuff. There is a Project Wulfila with resources on the Gothic language and each word of the Lord's Prayer above can be read in Gothic and compared to the English and the Greek. The Lord's prayer is in Matt.6:9 starting in the middle of the verse. Notice that the word order of the Gothic follows the word order of the Greek, since it is a very literal translation. Each word of the Gothic is clickable so you can crosscheck. I believe this is the earliest record of a language ancestor to English. (direct ancestor - not PIE)

Notes: The image above is from Alfabetos de Ayer y de Hoy.

Thanks for this comment from Curtis.

Gothic is classified as East Germanic, while English is West Germanic; Gothic is at best a cousin to English, not a direct ancestor. See e.g. http://softrat.home.mindspring.com/germanic.html, http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90067.

John Willis Shorthand

2005-12-21T23:54:00.000-08:00

I confess. I can't remember where I read that X was used for Christ in the 16th century. I'll find it soon. However, as I went through my notes on shorthand I realized that I now have this image. It is the shorthand system developed by John Willis in The Art of Stenographie, 1602. Here X is 'ch'. The question is whether X alone would represent Christ.

The earliest shorthand for English was that of Timothie Bright, 1588. Apart from the basic symbols which are presented in Joanna Drucker's The Alphabetic Labyrinth, I have not seen Bright's system. However, it is possible that X was used for Christ in one or both of these systems.

There is a Bible in the John Willis shorthand system here at University College in London. There are a few other shorthand items there also. One day maybe I will be able to have a look for myself. Any Londoners out there anxious to look at a shorthand Bible from the early 17th century?

Notes: This image of John Willis shorthand is found in World's Writing Systems by Peter T Daniels and William Bright

Merry Xmas

2005-12-19T23:07:00.000-08:00

This is a verse from the Bible in James Bay Cree, published in 2001 by the Canadian Bible Society. It says "Then Simon Peter answered, you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. (of God who lives, the son.)" Matthew 16:16

The ninth word from the beginning is X for Christ. The Chi sign X is used for the name of Christ in this New Testament published in 2001. In Unicode it is U+166D : CANADIAN SYLLABICS CHI SIGN.

There is another way to write "Christ" in Cree. Here is a verse of Silent Night in Western Cree. At the beginning of the fourth line Christ’s name is written phonetically. However, ‘r’ is not a Cree sound and the syllabic used for ‘r’ shows that this is a non-Cree word. The double consonants are also foreign to Cree, so the name of Christ is identifiable as a foreign word in Cree when spelled out phonetically.

The use of the Greek letter chi for Christ has a long history. The first shorthand for Christ seems to have been ΧΡΣ P46. This site explains that the Nomina Sacra were used not as abbreviations but to set apart holy words in text.

Two kinds of shorthand were used from the third century up until the 16th century in Greek manuscripts. First, the nomina sacra, where a closed set of frequently occuring siginificant names were abbreviated to create a logographic entity. Second, there were ligatures which shortened or combined two or three letters, especially grammatical endings, later even including the accent in the ligature.

Χριστος has been represented by Χρς, or Χς, and by ΧΡ in art and other representation. I have not found the ΧΡ in manuscripts and would not expect it since the manuscript form always includes the grammatical ending.

A quick glance at some facsimiles of Greek manuscripts* shows that the words ιησους, χριστος, θεος, ανθρωπος, πατερ, ματερ, πνευμα and some other words were represented by their initial and final one or two letters which represent the grammatical ending. This could be ς,υ,ν,οι, ι &c.

For this reason, I am assuming that the transition from Χς to Χ happened with the beginning of the use of the vernacular languages in Europe, when the ending was no longer relevant. There would be no reason to retain the last letter and X alone came to represent Christ. There is also no reason to see a sign of disrespect in the transition from Χς to Χ. And so Xmas first appeared in English texts in the 16th century.

Χ retained the meaning of Christ for those who knew Greek but possibly also in some form of British shorthand at least up until the last century. It occurs in the Cree writing system devised by James Evans in 1841 and now called Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, pictured at the beginning of this post. It is recognized that Evans drew on his knowledge of early British shorthand for the Cree syllabary. However, he must also have studied Greek so either way he would be familiar with the chi X symbol.

* Barbour, Ruth. Greek Literary Hands. 1981. Clarendon Press. Oxford.

I have previously posted on the use of the Greek chi symbol here and Greek Literary Hands here.

Update:

Further information on the Chi sign X and its first use in English are at the folloing links.

http://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/ISGODAGI.HTM
http://christmas.123holiday.net/
http://www.christmascarnivals.com/trivia/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1538036/posts

This is a general hodgepodge of information but one site claims that Wycliffe used the sign X for Christ. It should be possble to check that out.

Delphi Tablet: Der Erfinder

2005-12-13T21:40:00.000-08:00

It is rather slow going on the Delphi tablet. The book is in German and while I have had a generous offer of help on the German, I simply have no idea which part of the book I want to know about most. So I am slogging away, dipping into a little here and there.

The epigram describing the Delphi writing system, or set of indiosyncratic symbols, whatever one wants to call them, is dated "In the time of the Delphic Archon Charixenos." (277/276 BCE) The inventor's name , begins with M. According to Boge, who quotes Bousquet, this must be the philosopher Menedemos of Eritrea, an accomplished politician, teacher, architect, artist and sculptor, who was priest in Delphi at that time.

There seems to be a year or two of variance on these dates so there is some doubt, but that is the best I can do for now.

It is interesting to note that Greek has letters for double consonants like 'ps', 'dz', 'ks', and English still has 'ks'. There isn't much more about the double consonants of Delphi but there is a lot more to learn about classical tachygraphy.

To view previous posts on the Delphi tablet, use the 'search this blog' button and enter "Delphi Tablet".

Thanks for the additional comments, Gary.

Judeo-Portuguese

2005-12-11T22:46:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Don Osborn for mentioning this in qalam.

Old Portuguese in Hebrew Script: convention, contact, and convivência

"This dissertation explores the process undertaken by medieval writers to produce Portuguese-language texts using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Through detailed philological analyses of five Judeo-Portuguese texts, I examine the strategies by which Hebrew script is adapted to represent medieval Portuguese in the context of other Roman-letter and Hebrew-language writing. I focus on the writing system in order to challenge the conception of such texts as marked or marginal, a view that misleadingly equates language and script.

I argue that the adaptation of Hebrew script for medieval Portuguese is neither derivative of Roman-letter writing nor entirely dependent upon the conventions of written Hebrew. Nor is it an adaptation performed anew by each writer and influenced primarily by spoken language. The perspective I adopt thereby rejects the premise that the patterns manifested in this unconventional orthography are ad hoc creations by its writers, that it requires extra effort from its readers, or that it is less 'native' than the dominant, more conventionalized, Roman-based adaptation that normally bears the title 'written Portuguese.' "

More about Texts in Hebrew Script here.

"Medieval Judeo-Portuguese texts can be found in libraries all around the world. The oldest known document is a treatise on the art of manuscript illumination dating from 1262, written in Portuguese with Hebrew characters – O livro de como se fazem as cores. It is a document of prime importance for the history of Hebrew manuscript illumination, as the instructions contained in the text were used for the illumination of an elaborate Bible manuscript in Corunna, Galicia, in 1476 (Blondheim 1929-1930).

The oldest known liturgical text is a Spanish Mahzor in Hebrew script, published in Portugal around 1485, which includes ritual instructions in Portuguese Aljamiado (Metzger 1977). "

I have found images of Ladino or Sephardic manuscripts on the internet but none so far that are Judeo-Portuguese. Maybe some other time.

Delphi Tablet III

2005-12-07T22:17:00.000-08:00

I posted in October on the Delphi tablet here and here. This image is piece #6323. However, I only have time for the first four lines at the moment.

Ἧ πολὺ κ[αλ]ίστωι σε θεαί, Μ[..., γέρησαν
Δώρωι Π[ιερ]ίδες παρθένοι ε[ὺπλόκαμοι]
Αίπερ σοι [τό]δε μούνωι ὲπιχθ[ονίων ἀνθρώπον,
Ὤπασα[ν] ἐξευρεῖν πείρατα πά[ντα τέχνης.] *

With this translation into German,

Wirklich mit einem sehr schonen Geschenk haben dich, M...
die schonehaarigen pierischen Jungfrauen geehrt
die dich als einzigen Mensche auf Erden damit
begabt haben, jegliche Grenzen der Kunst zu erfinden

Truly with a very great gift
have the beautiful haired Pieridean maidens
honoured you, who is the only human on earth
to whom it has been given to invent the very finisher of all arts

In plain English,

The Muses have truly honoured
you with a great gift,
for you to be the sole inventor
on earth of the ultimate art.

I have disagreed with the German translator somewhat on this phrase, πείρατα πάντα τέχνης. Or maybe I am unfamiliar with the German term 'Grenze der Kunst.' Πείρατα can refer to boundaries or borders, but it also is used for the goldsmiths tools, the finishers of art.

Here is Liddell and Scott.

I - an end as in the ends of the earth
II - the end or issue of a thing: the furthest point, the utmost verge: the chief or most important object.
III - that which finishes, a godsmith's tools are called πείρατα τέχνης, the finishers of art.

I am inclined to think now of this system on the Delphi tablet as a poetic device, or a way to represent phonology, or even an early example of a constructed script. After all, the name of the inventor was mentioned, although it has not been preserved in this fragment.

Any further comments are welcome, whether to improve my translation or otherwise.

* The bracketed letters have been cited by Boge from J. Bousquet, 1956.

Bibliography

Boge, Herbert. Griechische Tachygraphie und Tironische Noten. 1973. Akademie Verlag. Berlin.

Syriac Again

2005-12-06T22:57:00.000-08:00

Okay, I goofed. I posted today a draft from November 30, 2005 and there it is.

This gives me a chance to post Tim May's comment with his Syriac text plus vowels, where it can be more easily read.

By comparing the Syriac and Latin versions, and referring to the Omniglot page, I've managed to render the first sentence of Malcuno Zcuro in Unicode. There are probably some errors - I don't really know anything about Syriac spelling, and there are a lot of diacritics that basically look like a dot. Also the editor I was using didn't render the text quite perfectly in some cases, leaving me uncertain as to the correct order. But it should be mostly correct.

ܥܶܡܪܺܝ ܫܶܬ݂ ܐܷܫܢܶܐ ܚܙܶܐ ܗ݇ܘܰܝܠܺܝ ܢܰܩܠܰܐ ܒܶܟܬ݂ܳܘܳܐ ܕܥܰܠ ܗ݇ܘ݂ ܥܳܒܳܐ ܒܬ݂ܽܘܠܳܐ ܕܟܶܬܘܰܐ ܐܷܫܡܶܗ »ܫܰܪ̈ܒܶܐ ܕܰܐܬ݂ܶܢ ܒܪܺܝܫܶܗ-ܕܚܰܕ݇« ܨܽܘܪܬܳܐ ܗܕ݂ܺܝܪܳܬܐ.

Cəmri šeṯ əšne ḥzewayli naqla bkṯowo dcal u cobo-bṯulo dkətwa əšme »Šarbe daṯən briše-dḥa« ṣurto hḏirto.

If you want to see it in a form more closely resembling the original, the Beth Mardutho fonts include several Serto variants. You can see samples on the Syriac page of David McCreedy's Gallery of Unicode Fonts. (Incidentally, Estrangelo Edessa, in Windows, is actually one of the fonts from this package.)

Hebrew Online Keyboard with Vowels

2005-12-04T20:07:00.000-08:00

I was back visiting the Lesser Of Two Weevils to pick up a few tips on how she can input and display Hebrew vowels so easily. I found this online keyboard with vowels. How cool is that! I don't want to lose it since I have been looking for one for ever so here it is.

And she has a post which may elucidate the Golem legend. Here is an excerpt from her post on the The Power of the Word. (This also gives me a chance to input and display Hebrew.) The topic of her post is the word דִבְּר diber, 'to speak', from dabar 'word'. The point is that this is a keyboard that takes no time to learn, just click around. Okay, so it is a picker. It works.

Here is Talmida on 'the word'.

In finishing my translation in 2 Kings 14 I ran into an expression that I found very satisfying.

Verse 27 begins,

וְלֹא-דִבֶּר יְהוָה לִמְחוֹת אֶת-שֵׁם יִשְׂרָאֵל
/v'lo-diber adonai limhhot et-shem yisrael.
Word for word, that works out to this: and not - he spoke the Lord to erase name of Israel.This spoke (no pun intended) to me in a very powerful way.

One of the things that I feel drawing me (calling me?) to study Hebrew is that the Hebrew words themselves are important -- not just their meanings, but the words. I'm not quite sure how--and I don't think I'm ready to study Kabbalah just yet--but I sense that there is something just beyond my grasp and that the way to reach it is to master Biblical Hebrew, and when that's done, I will see my way clear to the next step God wants me to take. I've blogged about this a bit before.

This passage resonated so powerfully with me I want to shout it out! The verb diber means, to speak. The noun form, davar, means word, thing, affair. If you look in a modern Hebrew New Testament, the Gospel of John tells us that "in the beginning was davar". There's a reason for that.

The most common English translations have a similar spin on this verse of 2 Kings:

And the LORD said not that he would blot out the name of Israel (KJV)
But the LORD had not said that he would blot out the name of Israel (NRSV)
And the Lord did not say that he would blot out the name of Israel (D-R)

But check out the Judaica Press version:
And the Lord did not speak to eradicate the name of Israel (JPCT)

Thanks, Talmida.

I have not forgotten Syriac, or the Delphi tablet, but unfortunately those posts are a little more work since they require images. Sorry.

Scalable Vector Graphics

2005-12-04T00:44:00.000-08:00

When I asked about missing characters the other day Simos sent this comment about Webfonts, SVG and the new Firefox 1.5.

You can follow the tutorial at w3.org,http://www.w3.org/International/O-MissCharGlyphFor missing fonts in the system, you may specify a Webfont (downloaded dynamically) or even use SVG fonts.

The new version of Mozilla Firefox 1.5 was released a few days ago and it probably is the first browser with SVG support. Have a look at the sample page with SVG fonts, athttp://www.carto.net/papers/svg/samples/text.shtml

I will take time to absorb some of this but I am trying to familiarize myself with some of these ideas. There have been many things that I thought I would never try but I have ended up familiar with; so I'm thinking about this.

I ended up reading on this page.

SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics, a new, completely open standard recommended and developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the development of which is seconded by many notable software groups and scientific communities. SVG offers all the advantages of Flash, the de-facto standard of the day (refer to above), plus the following features: embedded fonts, extensible markup language (XML), stylesheets (CSS), interactivity and animation. With the help of the DOM, full HTML compatibility is obtained. For a more detailed description, please go to the main section of this article.

Embedded fonts and extensible markup language. Yes, I think this relates. The best thing about this page is that it really spells things out. Each acronym actually comes with the full name written after it. How cool is that. Now I finally know what pdf means!

It also spells out the difference between 'de jure 'standards and 'de facto' standards. I think I figured that out but now I have a nice Latin way to express it.

And on to this page.

Dangers of Right to Left

2005-12-04T00:27:00.000-08:00

I've had a busy time at work lately so I have been doing some reactional surfing on the net and not so much hard work taking screenshots of this and that. I also got to feeling a little lonely for some female company. :-) It had to happen!

I found a great blog with the most lovely Hebrew vowels. I haven't spent time trying to display these yet but I've seen it done a few places.

At The Lesser of Two Weevils I read this post and thought that maybe it was a good thing that I hop around from one writing system to another after all.

Talmida writes:

Turns out there IS a downside to studying God's language. You could flunk an eye exam.

Without any conscious thought whatsoever, I read the eyecharts from right to left today. The optometrist was quite concerned (what on earth is she seeing?) until we figured out what I was doing.

It's odd -- if there are legible words, my brain apparently says "read", and I start at the left. But since it was just random letters, I'm guessing that my brain concluded "decipher!" and started at the right as I do in Hebrew. Even when I was made aware of what I was doing, I had to force myself to read from the left. My eye wanted to begin at the right to turn the letters in to words.

What an interesting phenomenon.

I've also added Fontblog and Blogamundo to my sidebar. I've been reading these blogs on and off for a month or two and just haven't edited the sidebar. There is some great stuff there.

Website Etiquette

2005-12-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

Here is something I have been wondering for some time. Should one try to make a post display well in more than one browser? I have been using Internet Explorer most of the time. I installed Firefox a couple of months ago and have used it whenever I visited a site with too many empty boxes. Fairly frequently actually.

I have had the philosophy so far that I should try to make my own posts display well in IE. This means that I always checked which font displayed all the characters that I wanted to use and then defined the font. This only applies for polytonic Greek and Extended Latin as far as I know. All the complex scripts like Tamil and Syriac seem to display without a problem.

However, when I went to post the transcriptions for Syriac I could not find a font, already bundled in Windows, that had both U+02BF : MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING and U+1E6D : LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH DOT BELOW. COMBINING DOT BELOW 0323 does occur in Lucida Sans Unicode but it is significantly out of position.

Therefore, I am unable to properly display the transcription for Syriac in my post unless I recommend that the post be viewed in Firefox, or that the viewer download a special font. Of course, this is what others have been doing all along. I somehow thought that it wouldn't be necessary for this blog.

The question now is whether one should post these characters at all knowing that others might be in a position to view only empty boxes. I will chose not to for now since this is not a specialist blog on Syriac.

I haven't really tried to display a transcription for Tamil either. When it comes to working with transcriptions the computer does not compare to good old pencil and paper.

Syriac Vowels

2005-11-30T21:47:00.000-08:00

Last time I posted on Syriac I was asking myself about Syriac vowels. The vowels in the Eastern and Western versions of Syriac are quite different. I had actually assumed that they would be reflected in different fonts. I was surprised when I found out they they are encoded separately. I have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

It seems to me that it would create two separate encodings for the same word and more difficulties for searching. Someone please tell me this is not so. I also suppose that there was some good reason that this was done. I'll be keeping an eye open for some discussion of this if it ever comes up.

The same effect occurs in Cree. Here are the Eastern Finals in the top row and the Western Finals below. They are also encoded separately.

Thanks to Omniglot for these images. I also see that Omniglot has a Cree text on this page, which represents Cree as I have seen it written. There are no points other than the mid-dot and Western Finals. It is a fast fluent way to write, close to shorthand, as each spoken syllable is represented by a simple stroke on paper and the final vowels are a brief tick. That was how it was originally used.

Well, I digress. This is enough for tonight since neither of these scripts are searcable on the internet yet. I wait to see what happens. Google is an established English way of life now, but for some scripts it is still a very log way off.

Syriac Keyboards

2005-11-29T22:45:00.000-08:00

I thought that I would try out the Syriac keyboards tonight. There are two. The first one is not romanized and does not relate to any other keyboard I know.

I tried out the second one. It is called a 'phonetic' keyboard which seems to mean, in this case, a romanized keyboard. It matches the QWERTY keyboard as much as possible.

However, take a good look at these keyboards - these images are close to life size. Now I have to say that I have tried onscreen keyboards from lots of different developers and they are all the same in this respect - they are completely unreadable by anyone over 40 and by many children.

Frankly, it is somewhat reassuring for me to know that I have this onscreen keyboard in the accessibility options, as long as I don't actually intend to use it.

Next step. I opened Wordpad and set it for Estrangelo Edessa font size 26. Then I keyed in the letters across the QWERTY keyboard with this result. Beautiful. It was a keeper.

Nowever, I had one more step to complete. I switched to BabelPad and keyed in the same sequence then I clicked on u ̈ and produced the second image.

In this display the letters are in their 'logical' left to right order. Using right to left is no big deal for me since I have studied Hebrew ... once upon a time ... but if I work in logical order then the cursor goes with me and not against me. That makes it worth considering. The major advantage is that I now have the independent forms not the connected ones.

Now, if only I knew some Syriac to type. I have found the image from yesterday's post and type in the wordlist. (Minus the two words which have letters that are too small for me to decipher.)

ܛܘܪܐ - turā mountain
ܡܕܝܬܐ - mdittā city
ܡܠܟܐ - malkā king
ܡܠܟܬܐ - malktā queen
ܥܡܐ - ʿammā people
ܟܬܒ - ktab to write
ܢܦܠ - npal to fall
ܥܪܩ - ʿraq to flee
ܫܡܥ - šmaʿ to hear

Syriac is absolutely beautiful and keying it in was a dream. Learning more Syriac actually seems possible. I don't have any unusual abilities in the area of visual memory so there are only a few scripts that I am truly comfortable with. I hope that Syriac will become one of those. I was pleasantly surprised by all the books on Syriac available from Amazon. Neat.

I did notice, however, that there were extra symbols, superscripts or diacritics in the text of the Syriac (Jacobite) script version of the Little Prince. I have no idea what they are. Vowels I would guess, but I don't really know.

The only difficulty I had with this post was that there is no SMALL LETTER T WITH DOT BELOW in the Lucida Sans Unicode Font, which is where I found the left half ring. A problem for another day.

Inside Malcuno Zcuro

2005-11-27T22:22:00.000-08:00

Wolfgang has kindly sent a view of the inside of Malcuno Zcuro, both in the Syriac script and in the Latin script. The book also has a wordlist at the bottom of each page which makes it even more attractive for language learners. Click on these images to enlarge.

I am reposting Wolfgang's email since he provides this interesting information.

Saint-Exupery's "Le Petit Prince" was translated by the "Circle of Aramaic Students" at Heidelberg University, Germany.

I contacted the professor who initiated the Aramaic translation. He assured me that "zcuro" is the correct translation for "little" as far as the Tur Abdin dialect is concerned. He assumes that the persons who came up with "zeuro" must have consulted a dictionary of the Old Aramaic language.

BTW a copy of "Malkuno Zcuro" (ISBN 3-937467-15-7) can be obtained from the following book company:
http://www.verlag-tintenfass.de/
info@verlag-tintenfass.de

And yes I did consult a dictionary of Old Aramaic. However, I have since looked at a few books that are available at Amazon.com on Syriac. These include a dictionary, grammar and various other books. In one I found an example of Syriac vocabulary transcribed with the left half ring for the 'ayn as had been suggested earlier by Simon. However, in the Little Prince orthography the 'ayn is written with a 'c'.

Books available at Amazon.com on Syriac are A Compendious Syriac Dictionary and an Introduction to Syriac: An Elementary Grammar With Readings from Syriac Literature with this editorial review.

Syriac is the Aramaic dialect of Edessa in Mesopotamia. Today it is the classical tongue of the Nestorians and Chaldeans of Iran and Iraq and the liturgical language of the Jacobites of Eastern Anatolia and the Maronites of Greater Syria.

Syriac is also the language of the Church of St. Thomas on the Malabar Coast of India. Syriac belongs to the Levantine group of the central branch of the West Semitic languages. Syriac literature flourished from the third century on and boasts of writers like Ephraem Syrus, Aphraates, Jacob of Sarug, John of Ephesus, Jacob of Edessa, and Barhebraeus.

After the Arab conquests, Syriac became the language of a tolerated but disenfranchised and diminishing community and began a long, slow decline both as a spoken tongue and as a literary medium in favor of Arabic. Syriac played an important role as the intermediary through which Greek learning passed to the Islamic world. Syriac translations also preserve much Middle Iranian wisdom literature that has been lost in the original.

Tim May has pointed out that Meltho Open Type Syriac fonts are available Beth Mardutho.
Syriac is notable for being one of the scripts on the Xian Stele in China, as well as on the tombstones in Quangzhou. (I have not found and image for this yet.)

(Oddly the Estrangelo Syriac script also appears on the bookplate for the Gleason Moss Collection of H.A. Gleason, Jr., who was my first and well-loved linguistics professor. His father was the botanist H.A. Gleason.)

And finally a nice link here to look at a few related scripts and their transcriptions together in a table. And there is the right half ring and the left half ring. Now I get it.

Actually I intended to end here but really I have to identify the variant of Syriac script which appears in Malkunoc Zcuro. It looks like Jacobite or Serto script from comparison with the Omniglot page. At Amazon dot com I have found a Syriac Bible in the Jacobite script.

Here is a clip from the Syriac Bible: Jacobite Script, Ancient and for comparison a chunk of non-continuous text from Malkuno Zcuro.

Would it be fair to say that Syriac has several diascripts? Hmm.

BabelStone Blog

2005-11-26T20:21:00.000-08:00

Andrew West's recent post about What's New in Unicode 5.0 provided links to some interesting reading. First, he answered my question about Phoenician. You can read his answer here. I didn't bring this up to reopen a debate which I have no part in. Rather, I was away for the month of August and missed the end of that story.

However, I found a document called N2990 particularly useful. This document not only records votes but also records comments. Among the comments, I noticed this line.

Encoding Phoenician is redundant, and needlessly proliferates Canaanite diascripts.

I googled diascripts and came up with this document which supplied a definition. "Diascript is to script as dialect is to language." Good, one more thing to think about.

Next, in the same document on page 9, I found an interesting item.

For character names and named UCS sequence identifiers, two names shall be considered unique and distinct if they are different even when SPACE and medial HYPHEN-MINUS characters are ignored and even when the words "LETTER", "CHARACTER", and "DIGIT" are ignored in comparison of the names.

EXAMPLE 1
The following hypothetical character names would not be unique and distinct:
MANICHAEAN CHARACTER A
MANICHAEAN LETTER A

That answers another question I had for Andrew about character names. Now I know that the part of the name that designates it a 'character' or a 'letter' is not to be considered significant.

However, this is tricky because if the name of the character differs by the word 'letter' or 'symbol' they are indeed separate characters.

U+03F0 : GREEK KAPPA SYMBOL

U+03BA : GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA

While Andrew has tallied up the the number of characters in Unicode in How many Unicode characters are there? I have entertained myself with another of my trivial tasks.

These little trivia games I play sometimes are simply to familiarize myself with a script or a technical detail and entertain myself at the same time. Many have no point at all. Neither does this. It is a tally of the names of characters used in Unicode and gave me a happy half-hour of playing with BabelMap.

Character Names by Block for a few representative blocks.

Arabic Letter
Latin Letter
Bengali Letter
Bopomofo Letter
Braille Pattern Dots
Cherokee Letter
CKJ Unified Ideograph
Cypriot Syllable
Deseret Letter
Devanagari Letter
Ethiopic Syllable
Hangul Choseong
Hangul Syllable
Hiragana Letter
Katakana Letter
Linear B Ideogram
Canadian Syllabics
Linear B Syllable

This is just to condition myself so that in the middle of discovering Katakana at some future date I don't do a double take when I discover that they are letters and not syllables. Ethiopic, Cypriot and Hangul have syllables but Cherokee and Katakana do not. The name for Canadian Syllabics seems to feature the name of the block. Surely the character itself is a 'syllabic', while the system is 'syllabics'. I have to think about this too.

However, there they are and I am taking a step towards becoming familiar with these names. It helps if you want to search for a character by name to know the name. I also explored many of the features of BabelPad described in this post.

I look forward to hearing more about Phags-pa some day.

Phoenician Alphabet

2005-11-25T21:33:00.000-08:00

First, I have been reading, but not commenting on, the Tel Zayit Abecedary controversy. Somehow, conducting a functional literacy assessment for 1000 BC seemed a little daunting. However, I have now checked out all the links provided by Language Log of Nov. 14 and Nov. 21, 2005. (I can't seem to figure out how to link to these posts directly.)

I also note that Phoenician, among other writing systems, has been accepted for encoding in Unicode version 5. Proposed New Characters: Pipeline Table. So it doesn't seem out of the way to practise typing in Phoenician to get myself accustomed to a new keyboard.

Fortunately, Nizar Habash has posted a little demo here. Actually he is using some kind of frames on this site so follow Research> Human Computer Interface> Phoenician Nuun Demo (Phoenician-English Input Method.)

You can see that I have faithfully reproduced the sequence of letters from the Tel Zayit Abecedary. This keyboard is pretty intuitive and uses only two letters in the shift position: teth and sade. (I can't seem to get SMALL LETTER S WITH DOT BELOW to display for me in blogger. Maybe another day.)

Update:

I must have forgotten a snippet of code yesterday because when I went in today and defined the font as Microsoft Sans Serif the desired character was just fine, thank you very much. This is what I wanted: ṣādē.

Semitish

2005-11-25T20:54:00.000-08:00

I received this email a few days ago.

I wanted to ask you about something that I believe I once saw somewhere online but I can't find now. It pertains to a Hebrew and Arabic alphabet reform that someone was proposing, an odd combination of the two alphabets. Does that ring a bell? If so, I'd appreciate it if you could tell me who is behind this so I can look it up. Thanks!

This is something that I had never heard of and it doesn't google very well. So I posted this message in Qalam, the writing systems forum. In about half an hour I received a reply.

While I am delighted to receive such emails - flattered really, readers can themselves go straight to qalam and bypass me althogether. There you will find 268 script enthusiasts. Right now it looks a little quiet. But here is good too - lots of commenters to augment my musings, thank goodness.

The answer might possibly be the Alphabet of Semitish by Nizar Habash. He has an interesting site to explore. He is an "Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Computational Learning systems in Columbia University." Habas has also invented the Delason Constructed Language and writing system. Of particular interest here is his Palisra Gallery with this introduction.

What is Palisra?

Palisra is an artistic exploration of the nature of a world where Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms never existed. They are replaced by a merged nationalism, that of the people of the Holy Land.

This is an ongoing project that includes creating all elements of an alternative merged nationalism: flag, money notes, stamps, religious art, and language (an Arabic-Hebrew esperanto we are calling Semitish).

Is this a vision of things to come or an elaborate escape of a bloody reality?

That's up to you to decide.

In my next post I hope to feature Nizra's Phoenician input utility!

Chinese Input Method Popularity

2005-11-25T18:14:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting post on Chinese input Methods from Lee Sau Dan in Sci.Lang.

Jer writes:

Hi - Has anyone read statistics about input methods used in China? I assume the Pinyin systems would be the most popular, followed by Wubi. (Wubizixing).

Lee Sau Dan writes:

In the sphere of traditional characters, Cangjie is quite popular,because it's ubiquitous and it's what professional typists are trained to use. Zhuyin (based on the bopomofo phonetic transcription system) may come next, but there are many people using various other methods. e.g. People in Hong Kong like to use Jian3yi4, which is a sort of broken Cangjie. Many use Cantonese-based input methods. In Taiwan, some Minnan-based methods are popular, too.

Jer writes:

Anyone care to predict the future? Will it stay as it is now where most people prefer to type the pinyin pronunciation then choose the correct character, but more serious people put in the time to learn Wubi?

Lee Sau Dan writes:

Even those how don't bother to learn Wubi are using something other than plain Pinyin, because the latter is too slow to be used intensively. e.g. there is Jian3pin4, which substitutes some digraphs in Pinyin (e.g. "zh", "sh") with single keystrokes. And phrase-based input methods are gaining ground because of the increased inputting speed.

Jer writes:

I can't really picture a system faster than Wubi taking over.

Lee Sau Dan writes:

Go beyond the "type character by character" mindset and you'll be able to imagine faster methods. Is it too hard to imagine typing "i18n"and have the input method turn it into "internationalization" for you automagically? I don't think so.

Lee Sau Dan 李守敦

These last couple of lines hint at what is ahead in input methods.

Addenda and Errata II

2005-11-24T18:06:00.000-08:00

I hope no one thinks that this is an encyclopedia; or that I shouldn't be posting if I make the occasional error. Especially when I copy something verbatim from somewhere else without checking the tiny details.

This one I found quite interesting so I'll blog about how I have checked this out.

First, Simon commented here,

I believe the transcription of title should be "Malkuno Zeuro", not "Malkuno Zcuro". It's hard to tell whether it's a "c" or an "e" in the script on the second image, and also the "kaph" and "e" are quite similar in the first image, but ܙܥܘܪܐ makes more sense as "little".

I have to say that it still looks like a 'c' to me but ... I then checked out Simon's blog. Right, he posts in Hebrew so maybe there is something to this.

I then got out Holladay's Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon. I am not sophisticated enough to find an online dictionary for Aramaic yet so this will have to do. It is just barely back on the shelf from checking out 'Emeth Hesed'. (Yes, it is an 'aleph' that was removed not an 'e' to turn 'emeth' into 'meth'. Another detail that I copied from someone else's story. Actually I knew it was an aleph but the story was being told in English so I went with it. Sloppy, sloppy!)

Anyway... in the Lexicon I found צעירו masculine singular for 'little' or 'small'. So 'zeuro' it is.

Next, to see how the confusion came about I checked the two possibilities that Simon mentioned in Syriac. They do indeed look somewhat similar.
ܙܟܘܪܐ zcuro (a non-existant word)
ܙܥܘܪܐ zeuro meaning little [Addenda: 'zcuro' would be the correct transliteration of this word since 'ayn is often tranliterated with a 'c']

Okay, 'zcuro' is an error, [Addenda: zcuro is correct] and now I can see how the error came about. Checking in BabelMap I easily found that the first is 'zain, kaph, waw, rish, alaph' and the other is 'zain, e, waw, rish, alaph.'
[Addenda: The 'e' is better labeled 'ayn' and is pronounced as a pharyngeal fricative, transliterated by 'c']

Really, no need to make that mistake, but I think the fact that it looked like a 'c' in English threw me off. [Addenda: Yes, it is a 'c'.]

No excuses though. One of the reasons I am blogging is in order to have this kind of give and take, and learn more. I found this little bit of research quite fun, and confirmation that one does not have to just let something go just because it is in another script and an image. Thanks, Simon. I assume that bloggers don't have to be infallible, do they?

I also have updates to these posts.
The Italic Ampersand
Vietnamese Revisited
'Qness' or the tradition of 'Q'
Greg Vilk

Now, where can one buy this book? Hmm. This is the info from Wolfgang Kuhl.

"Malkuno Zcuro" Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Le Petit Prince" (The Little Prince) in modern Aramaic language (Tur Abdin dialect) spoken in South East Turkey was printed in Germany and will be available in November 2005. The text is printed in Aramaic script (Syriac) with Latin transcription. The book also contains vocabularies in German, French, English, Turkish as well as in Swedish. BTW "Malkuno" means "prince".

You can find Wolfgang's original notice about this book on this webpage with his email address. Maybe the book is now available.

Endnote #1:

This comment from Lameen Souag has clarified that it is, in fact, zcuro. Thank you, Lameen.

This is etymologically correct; Proto-Semitic (and Arabic) s.aghiir > s.ghiir > zghiir by voicing assimilation > z`iir by regular sound shift. (Dunno why it's got -uu-.) However, it's not orthographically correct: that's a c, not an e, because Semitists often use a c to represent the pharyngeal `ayn.

Lameen also has a fascinating post today about Oldest African Dictionaries.

Endnote #2:

This is from Wofgang Kuhl, who sent me the information in the first place. My apologies for doubting the original orthography, Wolfgang.

Saint-Exupery's "Le Petit Prince" was translated by the "Circle of Aramaic Students" at Heidelberg University, Germany.

I contacted the professor who initiated the Aramaic translation. He assured me that "zcuro" is the correct translation for "little" as far as the Tur Abdin dialect is concerned. He assumes that the persons who came up with "zeuro" must have consulted a dictionary of the Old Aramaic language.

BTW a copy of "Malkuno Zcuro" (ISBN 3-937467-15-7) can be obtained from the following book company:

http://www.verlag-tintenfass.de/

info@verlag-tintenfass.de

Endnote #3:

Simon continues,

Though as a Unicode purist, I would myself prefer to write it as ʿyn, using U+02BF MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING

First, why is the 'ayn labeled Syriac letter e in Unicode?

[Paragraph removed to the comment section.]

Definitely Firefox is becoming increasingly necessary because these extra characters are not displaying well in IE especially in the comment section.

Where is Your Son?

2005-11-23T23:01:00.000-08:00

சிற்றில் நற்றூண் பற்றி நின் மகன்
யாணடூளனோ ஏன வினவுதி ஏன் மகன்
யாண்டு உளன் ஆயினும் ஆறியேன் ஒரும்
புஸி சேரநது பொகிய கல் ஆலை போல
இன்ற வயிறோ இதுவே
தோன்றுவன் மாதோ போர்கள்ளத் தானே

'You stand against the pillar
of my hut and ask:
Where is your son?
I don't really know.
My womb was once
a lair
for that tiger
You can see him now
only in battlefields.'

Kavarpentu puranamuru 86 (transl A.K.Ramanujan 1985:184)

This is a poem cited by Sanford Steever in his article on Tamil in World's Writing Systems edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. This book has articles on 80 writing systems. My favourite characteristic of this book is the short selection provided in each writing system with a transliteration, transcription and translation.

(See the full version at the bottom of the page. I have omitted the transcription and left the transliteration unmarked by accents. I haven't learned to keyboard underdots and macrons yet. Sorry.)

I always find these selections reveal something about culture, human nature or both. I chose this poem to keyboard since I was in the mood to type a little Tamil.

I started with the Inscript keyboard and soon found that I needed to use the shift key for every second letter. I had the on-screen keyboard from Start> Programs> Accessories> Accessibility> On-screen keyboard open. However, it only displays either the base state *or* the shift state not both at once. So hunt and peck didn't work. I then found that there were syllables in the text that I could not readily identify. This is not suprising given that World's Writing Systems uses a variant form of Tamil font.

This is the Tamil keyboard in Windows. I have put the two together myself just to have a way to view them both at once.

I finally ended up using the Tamil phonetic (romanized) keyboard here with syllable display and that went well. Pretty easy once you get used to it. Actually there are two vowels where the shift key is needed. I had forgotten that.

Tamil is where it all began for me. I was working on a multilingual computing project a couple of years ago when I tried getting young people, who were somewhat familiar with typing Tamil in a previous encoding, to use the Inscript keyboard for Unicode Tamil. No way.

It took me over a year to get things sorted out for Tamil - I dropped the project and the rest is history. But if it weren't for this keyboard I would not have felt the need to connect with others and find out more about Unicode and related issues. Most other languages that we needed i.e. Chinese, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and other Latin keyboards were no problem. Vietnamese ... well yes and no. Other languages just didn't seem available at the time.

Text of poem with transliteration and literal translation.

சிற்றில் நற்றூண் பற்றி நின் மகன்
cirril narrun parri nin makan
small house pillar leaning your son

யாணடூளனோ ஏன வினவுதி ஏன் மகன்
yantulano ena vinavuti en makan
where.is.he that you.ask my son

யாண்டு உளன் ஆயினும் ஆறியேன் ஒரும்
yantu ulan ayinum ariyen orum
where he.is that I.don't. know once

புஸி சேரநது பொகிய கல் ஆலை போல
puli cerntu pokiya kal alai pola
tiger joining going stone lair like

இன்ற வயிறோ இதுவே
inra vayiro ituve
begot womb this

தோன்றுவன் மாதோ போர்கள்ளத் தானே
tonruvan mato porkallat tane
appear indeed battlefield only

You stand against the pillar
of my hut and ask:
Where is your son?
I don't really know.
My womb was once
a lair
for that tiger
You can see him now
only in battlefields.

Kavarpentu puranamuru 86 (transl AKRamanujan 1985:184)

From Poems of Love and War, selected and translated by A.K. Ramanujan, 1985. Columbia University Press.

Pater Noster

2005-11-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

This is a long overdue post. The Christus Rex website displays the Lord's Prayer in 1322 different dialects and languages. Some of these are images of the Lord's Prayer in tiles from the Convent of Pater Noster. Here is the Lord's Prayer in Armenian.

"The Convent of the Pater Noster was built over the site where Jesus taught His disciples the Lord's Prayer. The walls are decorated with 140 ceramic tiles, each one inscribed with the Lord's Prayer in a different language."

If you can add to this internet collection, contact the Christus Rex website (email is on the website.) The website is well-known and has received many internet awards.

A collection of Hail Mary Prayers on this website have been contributed by the Marion Library Collection in Dayton, Ohio.

Thanks to Wolfgang Kuhl who contributes to the Christus Rex website and told me about it last year. He also sent me information about the Little Prince in Syriac here.

Senari

2005-11-22T19:32:00.000-08:00

Christopher Green has written me the following,

I study an African language called Senari for which a native speaker and myself are devising a standardized orthography in hopes of being able to develop computer programs to promote literacy in the language.

A graduate student in sociolinguistics at Florida State University, his blog is on "a wide range of linguistic topics, many of which are about language maintainance and policy."

This is from his post Language of the Week - "N"

The language is Nafara, a dialect of the Gur-language Senari spoken by a cultural group in the northern part of Cotê d'Ivoire. I've had the privilege of studying Nafara alongside a native speaker of the language...who incidentally also speaks English, Dyula, French, and Yoruba! This may sound like an amazing and unusual talent, but a great deal of people living in multiethnic west Africa often known 4 or more languages fluently.

So why do I love Nafara so much? Well, back when I first decided that I wanted to be a linguist, I was introduced to Sidiky Diarrasouba, the native Nafara speaker I mentioned just above. He is an educator turned linguist, who decided to come to the United States to investigate a way to develop the necessary materials to revitalize his native language and to promote literacy within his culture.

I have been assisting Sidiky in analyzing the discourse structure of Nafara fables in order to determine a functional grammar and the rules of syntax of his language. We have also attempting to find a practical orthography so that his language can begin to be written.

I thought that I would look up the little that is already available about this language for starters. Above is the Hail Mary in a previous orthography dated 1931. Next, according to this link, "Detailed dialect survey work is currently being carried out by the SIL in the area." The Rosetta Stone Project also records some kind of orthography for Senoufo (Senari) here.

However, the Ethnologue reports these rather bleak literacy rates so it doesn't sound as if any orthography has much currency at the moment. "Literacy rate in first language: 1% to 5%. Literacy rate in second language: 5% to 15%." and further references here. This is a bit of a reality check for some of us.

For a few dry details, traditional issues in orthography creation or revision, are whether the orthography is similiar or dissimilar to the official language orthography; whether it will be phonemic or morphophonemic; at what level it will be standardized, i.e. village, region or district; and whether it will underdifferentiate or not. These are some of the linguistic considerations and there are dozens of books on this topic, so enough of that.

I spend most of my time now checking to see if an orthography 1. displays well on the internet, 2. is easy to search and 3. most of all how easy it is to keyboard.

Some people of interest when working on African orthographies are Don Osborn at Bisharat.net who has written about Senufo here. Also Chris Harvey and Moyogo. Good luck, Chris!

The All India Keyboard

2005-11-19T22:48:00.000-08:00

Recently I wrote about the All India Alphabet. This alphabet has been replaced by an all India transliteration scheme called ITRANS.

There is also an all India keyboard called the Inscript keyboard. This keyboard works well for Devanagari, with its 34 consonants and 12 vowels. The vowels are encoded as both initials and diacritics so that makes 58 letters altogether and a few more symbols. No upper and lower case so all is well.

Tamil, on the other hand, has only 18 consonants and 12 vowels. These vowels have two forms, as in Devanagari. Because these forms are context dependent there is an argument that the two forms could both be input with the same keystroke. That would make 30 letters altogether. In that case, the basic Tamil writing system could be represented on the keyboard in the unshifted state.

Using the Inscript keyboard for Tamil means using a keyboard with 4 blank spaces in the unshifted state, while 3 more keys in the unshifted state have Grantha letters on them. These are letters for writing Sanskrit and are not part of the basic Tamil alphabet. Likewise 7 of the basic Tamil consonants are in the shift state.

You really should be able to type Tamil without using the shift key at all. It may be hard to see but here in the Tamil99 keyboard all the basic letters are in the unshifted state.

In actual fact most Tamil probably use a transliteration IME since that means the shift key is never needed. Who can imagine anything better than that? However, direct input keyboards and typewriter keyboards (IME's) are necessary to provide input for those unfamiliar with the English alphabet or a transliteration scheme.

So why bother mentioning this oddity, the Tamil inscript keyboard? First, because when I started learning to type in Tamil, I was told that this Inscript keyboard was the 'ordinary Tamil keyboard'. And second, because the Inscript keyboard for Tamil is the only Tamil keyboard packaged in Windows.

So there I was 2 years ago trying to learn this strange keyboard and getting more frustrated by the moment. People thought that I was a whiner for complaining about it at all. Now I know better and use an IME of some kind. I actually know how to use this keyboard but when I want to work with someone who is Tamil I generally give it the go-by.

More recently plenty of Tamil transliteration programs and other keyboards have become available as free downloads. My favourite is the online syllabic editor, of course, which was adapted by Richard Wordingham from a Hindi online keyboard, for me to use with Tamil children.

However, the Inscript keyboard remains as the only Tamil keyboard in Windows. If anyone knows what it is doing there, drop me a line.

Greg Vilk

2005-11-19T09:40:00.000-08:00

Greg has sent me a copy of his new novel Golem so I have indulged myself for a few days in attempting to decipher the central puzzle of this novel. I have not succeeded in unraveling the mystery but I have spent some enjoyable hours trying.

This novel is set in Thule Bay in northern Greenland. This could only be Qaanaaq, a settlement whose name is a palindrome. Several clues point to the use of the palindrome in deciphering the two 'keywords' of the story, the words written on the scroll placed in the golem's mouth.

In trying to decide if these words were in Hebrew, Latin or English, I first researched the history of the palindrome. Palindromes are an ancient tradition, dating back to 275 BC. I found famous Greek and Latin palindromes but less use of the palindrome in Hebrew. Along with palindromes there are also reversable words. This offers much more scope for decipherment.

The first keyword is the 'word of creation' which brings the golem to life; and the second keyword, a reverse of the first, will destroy him. I found that the effect of the script, with its many reversed letters, (a realistic feature in my books, since I am familiar with many real scripts with reversed letters) distracted me from perceiving the sequence of the letters in reverse. Therefore I reconstructed the keywords by number.

I wrote down the 'word of creation' as 12134521 and its reverse as 21543211. To visualize this better I organized the letters like this 121-345-21 and 21-543-211.

Now, assuming first the simplest interpretation, that the words are understandable in English, I worked on combinations of letters that would fit this pattern. The double final letters could only be ll, ss, or ee. The other possibilities, zz, and ff, seem too improbable. However, maybe I am barking up the wrong tree.

Next, I switched to researching the legend of the golem in history. I found out that one of the original 'words of creation' was 'emeth' (truth) written on the golem's forehead. With the erasure of the 'e' altering 'emeth' to read 'meth' (death), the golem was destroyed. I assume a similar method must work with Vilk's two keywords.

This was just the beginning of the investigations I pursued in working on this puzzle. Overall, the historic elements in this novel refering to the creation of the golem stand up as highly accurate to the original golem legend, which is a pleasant surprise these days. Good work, Greg.

While I have not succeeded in deciphering the ancient script, there are many more tantalizing clues embedded in the text. There are allusions to the first chapter of Genesis, the first chapter of John's gospel, the Lord's Prayer and other famous quotes. I have not ruled out the possibility that the names of the characters also provide clues. You have to read the novel and decide for yourself.

There is one little detail I do have to mention in the interests of 'herstoricity'. The female character should give up her pantyhose, since this item of attire was not invented until 1959, some 17 years after the setting for this novel.

There is an interesting discussion about 'speech' and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet here and here.

Update: In response to a comment on Language Hat I need to add that 'emeth' is אמת and without the aleph מת is 'dead'. This is actually the triliteral root מןת. I think there is an expression ךבר אמת 'word of truth'. However, in this novel certain conversation points in the direction of a 'word of creation.' Hmm. Help welcome.

On other points, I can not guarantee that I am pointing anyone in the right direction on deciphering Greg's script.

'Qness' or the tradition of 'Q'

2005-11-17T19:22:00.000-08:00

I had a very positive reaction to the Telex input method mentioned by Michael Farris and quoted in my Unikey post. (f, s, r, x, j become the tone keys) Afterall, the index fingers on the 'f' and 'g' keys, are made for multitasking.

However, Mark saw it differently. His reaction was "Ackj! Ohx myg eyesf!" and I thought "What does this have to do with his eyes?" His sensitive fingers maybe - but surely not his eyes.

This alerted me to the fact that not everyone perceives the relationship between the key and the letter stenciled on it in the same way. For me there is an arbitrary relationship at best between the letter portrayed on the key and the key itself.

A key may have a certain English letter stenciled on it but no one key has any one letter as its essential quality. The quality of the upper left lettered key is not 'Qness'; it simply happens to have 'Q 'stenciled on it. It has no 'Qness' unless I am typing in the Latin alphabet on a QWERTY keyboard. Then I assign it temporary 'Qness'.

So I was surprised to read another post today on the Better Bibles Blog in which I discovered that indeed there are others who believe in essential 'Qness' or in "Wisdom in the Q Tradition".

From Announcing a perfectly accurate Bible Translation I heard for the first time about a new Bible translation theory in the tradition of 'Q'. Here is an oft-quoted verse in this new translation.

"hOUTWS GAR HGAPHSEN hO QEOS TON KOSMON, hWSTE TON hUION TON MONOGENH EDWKEN, hINA PAS hO PISTEUWN EIS AUTON MH APOLHTAI ALL' ECHi ZWHN AIWNION."

While Mike Sangrey, the author of this post, intends to publish a dictionary of neologisms to support this new translation, I believe that Mark S. would be able to shortcut that process significantly by teaching readers how to understand the essential quality of each key. They need to realize that the letter stenciled on the key is, in fact, the literal *signification* of that key, and any divergence from this literal truth is a perversion of the intent of the original author of the keyboard.

I, however, am not such a literalist, and tend to be more flexible in my assignment of essential qualities. I am a Thomas concerning the 'Qness' of Q and and open to consider the possiblility that 'Q' may actually represent Θ in this context.

Note: Mike Sangrey offers a complementary sushi knife for those who order this translation today.

Update #1:

I guess I should explain this. Q is not actually the input key for Greek theta when using a Greek Unicode keyboard. However, in the symbol font, a Greek look-alike font for Latin, theta replaces q.

Here is the qwerty keyboard set for the Symbol font. I hope it works.

qwertyuiop
qwertyuiop

asdfghjkl
asdfghjkl

zxcvbnm
zxcvbnm

And there is the mysterious little digamma, (#6) I believe, fourth from the end in the 'v' position. Correct me if I am wrong.

Update #2

This is the same text as the quote above but with symbol as the defined font. It is the Latin character set with a Greek look-alike font. It had me fooled the first time I saw it. Somehow I learned to use Greek Unicode first and then I saw this. But for many people it is the other way around.

This is John 3:16. For God so loved the world...

OUTWS GAR HGAPHSEN O QEOS TON KOSMON, WSTE TON UION TON MONOGENH EDWKEN, INA PAS O PISTEUWN EIS AUTON MH APOLHTAI ALL ECH ZWHN AIWNION.

Spelling in Chinese

2005-11-15T22:51:00.000-08:00

After posting on Zhuang I went back and carefully reread the 9 methods of composing characters in Zhuang and non-standard Cantonese in this article.

A Comparison of the Graphical Conventions in the Written Representation of Zhuang and Cantonese by Prof. Robert S. Bauer

I left off with this last sentence,

For various reasons neither the old Zhuang script nor the written form of Cantonese has undergone the formal process of standardization; the lack of standardization has created the phenomenon of allography in both writing systems.

I don't want to go into all 9 conventions here but this is the last one cited.

9) Graphs whose pronunciations are "spelled" by their two component characters; that is, two (typically standard Chinese) characters are combined to form the target character, and the Zhuang or Cantonese reading of one of the characters represents the initial consonant of the target character, while the rime of the second character corresponds to the rime of the target character (this method resembles the 反切 principle that was employed in the ancient Chinese rime books).

I get the impression that rather than using two distinct characters as in fanqie, two components are combined in one character. This is described by the author as "spelling" out the pronunciation in a character.

I returned to Dylan Sung's website on the history of the Chinese language and script for a description of fanqie. (View his sitemap here.)

Splicing sounds

In order to fix the sounds of a character, we needed a method in which to do it. Very early on in the late Han period (25-220), splicing two characters for the intial and rhyme was the method to pin down the sounds. This is known as the FanQie (反切) method. Prior to the Sui (581 - 618) and early Tang (618 - 907) dynasties, the character "fan" 反 was used to symbolise this splicing. After the establishment of the Tang Dynasty, the character "qie" 切 was used.

Here is an example of how Fan and Qie splicing work.

[This character has the] old pronunciation "tung", and both methods use two extra characters, the first of which is the initial, and the second an exact rhyme to our example. The splicing works exactly the same way in both examples.

For a further discussion of fanqie I went here.

The fanqie spelling is a word-based analogical spelling system in which words are spelled in terms of other [familiar] words. Fanqie was never intended to, nor is it capable of, making distinctions beyond those of the words of any given speaker or reader. Neither the rhymes nor the fanqie spellings of the words of any given dialect or literary tradition can be arbitrarily extended (or "refined") so as to include the rhymes or words of another dialect which may have distinguished them differently or which did not distinguish them at all, as the Qieyun compilers indicate.

Or read the book.

I have recently made the delightful but necessarily time-consuming discovery that if a book is listed at Pinyin info it is likely available at the university library near me. I have a stack of these books on my desk, and some of them I have actually read.

Two thoughts from reading all this. First, different kinds of phonography were used to generate new characters or 字 zi. Second, allography is a great term for a phenomenon which fascinates us all - non-standard writing. (Well, most of us.) In the midst of the all-encompassing standardization that is happening as graphs and systems enter Unicode, many of us will be mourning 'allography' or trying to find ways to keep it alive in spite of itself.

Google

2005-11-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

Here are some responses to the Vietnamese search problem that focus on the search engine and not the keyboard. I think this is an issue that anyone who is searching the internet needs to be aware of.

First, Andrew C. commented,

The key issue is that Google, like many web services does not bother to normalize Unicode strings. Google seems to take it byte by byte. The result is that the microsoft layout compared to a precomposed (NFC) string or even a NFD string produces different results.The W3C have released a draft version of part of their character model that tackles normalization. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-charmod-20040225/

Then Simon reponded,

Actually Google makes the effort to normalise the search strings.For example, for Greek, Google knows about cases (does case mappings):http://www.google.com/search?q=ιστολόγιοhttp://www.google.com/search?q=ΙΣΤΟΛΌΓΙΟhttp://www.google.com/search?q=ΙΣΤΟΛΟΓΙΟhttp://www.google.com/search?q=ιστολογιο and also can work irrespective of accents! This might come from the case mapping rules for Greek; when you capitalise words, the accents are often removed. For more, seehttp://www.unicode.org/reports/tr21/tr21-5.html

Then Andrew C. continued,

As Simon has indicated, Google has put a lot of work into some languages to optimise searching in those languages. But if you use a language they haven't optimised for, you tend to have problems. As far as I can tell, Google seems to operate on byte sequences rather than character sequences. One trap people fall into is the assumption that because Google has an interface translated into a langauge, then Google is a suitable search tool for that language.

Recently, I've been researching Khmer search engines. The Google interface has been translated into Khmer, but it doesn't seem to be possible to actually search sucessfully in Khmer unicode, even though there are Khmer unicode sites that have been indexed by Google.

I also know that I don't need accents to google in French. And this week I have been busily working away on my own little project on Andreas Müller (1630-1694). 'Muller', 'Müller' and 'Mueller' all give me the same search results. After a little testing it seems that the precomposed accents - acute, grave, cirmumflex and umlaut are normalized. However, maybe not the combining diacritics or even precomposed letters with two diacritcs. Hmm. I can't really say.

However, here is another little problem - when I get to the page I want and use the edit:find feature, I have to be exact and use every little accent. I have to search the page using Muller, Müller and Mueller as separate searches. No normalization there! I wondered why all those pages gave me no results.

Well, Müller is not going anywhere so I can catch up with him now.

Additional Comments:

On another topic altogether, I don't have time to quote and comment on the many great posts that I read. I assume that if they are in my sidebar people will find them eventually.

However, here are a few things worth mentionning. First, Andrew West has made his first post Tibetan Extensions 1 : Astrological Pebble Symbols on his new BabelStone blog. Then there is Lameen Souag's post on A comparative linguist of the 10th century and finally the ongong discussion of the Tel Zayit Alphabet on Language Log.

Update #1: See Mike's post for a more refined search engine experiment.

Update #2: See further comment here .

Unikey

2005-11-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted much about keyboards lately so this seems like a good time. This is about the Unikey Vietnamese keyboard which has "all 3 popular input methods: TELEX, VNI and VIQR." (Screenshots)

Michael Farris has made this comment about it.

Not exactly your comment, [that's okay. Michael, this is a blog, remember] but for Vietnamese, I use a non-microsoft keyboard called unikey. It has several options, I use unicode precomposed characters and telex input, a vietnamese system that takes a little getting used to.

Here's a list of some words, with the input on the left, output in the middle and English gloss on the right.

vieejt Việt Vietnamese
nguwowfi người person
tooi tôi I
owr ở at
sawsp sắp imm. future marker
ddax đã past marker

the tone keys (f, s, r, x, j) can be typed either after the vowel or after all the segmental letters of the word have been typed. The latter method is probably better as it assigns the tone marker better in ambiguous cases (but I'm used to writing tone as I go along). It's much faster than when I inputted a 100 or so pages of dictionary entries using keyboard shortcuts of my own devising in a floating accent system that I hate with a passion now (can you say awkward and time consuming and frustrating?)

Thanks, Michael, for explaining this. It sounded a little odd at first but entirely suitable kinesthetically. There is a big difference between just finding all the accents in the first place, and then finding an input method that can be easily typed. I still find French awkward. Especially since I have switched keyboards a few times over the years.

Here is another comment on the Telex input method.

That is also the case in vietnamese "telex style" input. A very popular input method as it allows very fast typing. The vowels with a circumflex, as well as the D stroke, are written by redoubling the letter. Then, unused letters of the latin alphabet (j,x,...) are used to indicate the different accents. But those letters can be typed almost anywhere on the syllabe (vietnamese is written with syllabes separated by spaces). For example "Vietnam" in vietnamese is written with the "e" having acircumflex accent and a dot below the letter. With the telex input method: "Vieejt Nam" but also must be accepted"Vieetj Nam" (yes, the accent is always on the last vowel of a syllable with several vowels).

If you think about how the lettered keys will look as you type, this will throw you off. But think of what will display on the screen instead, as the accents are added either after the letter or after the syllable which they modify, up to you. More intuitive than dead keys and no long finger stretches to the top row.

However, the top row is way better than at the side on the quotation mark key. Some of us have very disobedient pinkies - they never do as they are told - better for drinking tea, really.

Another recommended Vietnamese keyboard is VPSKeys.

For Mark, look at this comment about using telex input for Pinyin. Have you ever seen that?

I'm off for a cup of tea. The power of suggestion!

Further from Michael Farris:

Unikey telex input is also forgiving in that you don't have to delete wrong accents. If I mistype owr as owf I just add the r after f (owfr) and it corrects the tone. And tone placement is a little tricky in words with, for example, the sequence -oa- as the tone mark goes on either the o or a depending on the final. Typing the tone right after the vowel is less accurate than typing the tone as the final element (which always places it correctly).

Also, of the fine "tone" letters, three are used in Vietnamese, r, x and s are all initial consonants (so their use after vowels is unambiguous).

Zhuang

2005-11-11T22:09:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking a lot about the Zhuang writing system lately mainly because it was new on Omniglot last month. Here is the paragraph which interests me.

A method of writing Zhuang based on the Wuming dialect and using a mixture of Latin and Cyrillic letters and a number of IPA symbols was devised in 1955. A reform in 1986 removed the non-Latin letters and replaced them with individual Latin letters or combinations of Latin letters.

Simon shows the difference between the earlier set of letters and the current set. The main difference is that now they are all Latin letters and easier to keyboard.

The earlier Zhuang system which mixes letters from several alphabets represents the same design model as the All India alphabet and comes from the same era. There must have been a sense that either, one could just create typewriters with this mix of symbols, or more likely, create text from a printing process in which letter sets could easily be mixed. Then the computer came along!

This qalam post by Andrew West adds further details.

Actually, the unwieldy Zhuang phonetic alphabet devised in 1955 that uses a mixture of Latin, Cyrillic and IPA letters together with the special tone letters ... is no longer in official use, but since 1981 has been replaced by a new phonetic alphabet using ordinary Latin letters only.

There was indeed a tradition of writing Zhuang using a mixture of existing Chinese ideographs (to represent either the pronunciation or meaning of a Zhuang word) and specially devised ideographs that represent the meaning and/or the pronunciation of a Zhuang word in the same manner as the Vietnamese nom script. These Zhuang-usage ideographs are known as "saw ndip" in Zhuang or "fangkuaiZhuangzi" in Chinese.

However this seems to have been a rather ad hoc system, which varied considerably from manuscript to manuscript, and was never formalised as a systematic script. Educated Zhuang tended to use Chinese for written communication, and the Zhuang-usage ideographs were mainly used for writing down folk songs and such like.

I've not yet met anyone of the Zhuang nationality who is familiar with this form of writing. A dictionary of Zhuang-usage ideographs _Gu Zhuangzi Zidian_ was published by Guangxi Minzu Chubanshe in 1989, ...

"The Zhuang, with a population of about 18 million, are the largest ethnic group group in China. Most of the Zhuang people live in compact communities in the Zhuang Autonomous Region in Guangxi, with the rest scattered throughout Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou and Hunan provinces."

Pinyin News has some interesting comments on Zhuang population statistics and official attitudes towards minorities.

Abstracts from the Workshop on Zhuang Language Department of Linguistics The University of Hong Kong 12 May 2005 give this information.

Some Zhuang speakers would prefer to write Zhuang with the old Zhuang script which is a combination of Chinese characters, Chinese-like characters, and other symbols. Dating from the Tang Dynasty, this written form of Zhuang has recorded folktales, myths, songs, play scripts, medical prescriptions, family genealogies, contracts, communist revolutionary propaganda, etc. One of the most astonishing features of the old Zhuang script is the large number of allographs (or variant graphs) — as many as a dozen or even more — that may be associated with one morphosyllable.

As for written Cantonese, only in Hong Kong is it widely used in newspapers, magazines, comic books, personal correspondence, play scripts, etc.; the Cantonese writing mixes together standard Chinese characters with nonstandard or dialect characters and letters of the English alphabet. For various reasons neither the old Zhuang script nor the written form of Cantonese has undergone the formal process of standardization; the lack of standardization has created the phenomenon of allography in both writing systems.

This is altogether a fascinating discussion of non-standard Chinese characters. Way too much information here for a blog post but this article is too good not to mention.

I hope nobody tries to read this unless they are very interested in either the Zhuang *or* the thousands of non-standard Chinese characters ... because, um, this blog post is a little long-winded. Thanks to Gary for mentionning non-standard Cantonese characters recently and giving this link.

Vietnamese Revisited

2005-11-11T16:18:00.000-08:00

[Warning! This post suffers from inaccurate terminology. When I wrote different 'encoding', I really meant different 'character sequences.' ]

Last June I posted about how not to help someone do a google search in Vietnamese. It was one of my more frustrating experiences and I just walked away and forgot about it. However, Mike has made me think about it again. I went back and visited my post and saw what was wrong with it. So I am giving it another kick at the can.

I was asked to help a Vietnamese speaking social worker to do an internet search in Vietnamese. He said "You don't need the accents - just use the English keyboard." We tried that and got some hits. I didn't have a Vietnamese keyboard at that moment, so we went to VietDic and using that got an encoding for our search term in Vietnamese - many hits.

At home I tried the Microsoft Vietnamese keyboard. Not so many hits.

So once again here is my experiment from last June - updated.

First, I am using google:images results. The term bãi biển means beach. If I get pictures of beaches preferably in Vietnam I consider that a good hit.

Here is the test with terms displayed this time in Arial font.

1. VietDic site - bãi biển 654 hits

2. Microsoft Vietnamese keyboard - bãi biển 5 hits

3. Combining accents only - bai biên 473 hits (Not all beaches)

4. No accents - bai bien 207 hits (Not all beaches)

Okay, so I don' t speak a word of Vietnamese but it does seem that something is not right with the MS Vietnamese keyboard. There must be two different encodings that look identical and no normalisation in the search engine. If anyone can explain this I would be interested in hearing the story.

Update:

Mike says in the comment section that "individual standards that cannot represent other languages are an evolutionary blind alley -- as is deciding the best encoding for a language by measuring google hits! :-)"

I accept your point, Mike, I won't defend using google hits to prove anything. They are basically for fun. With an image I know I have beaches. With a different encoding I still have beaches but not the same beaches. I concede this point.

However, what is meant by "individual standards that cannot represent other languages are an evolutionary bind alley"? Maybe someone thinks that I am not using Unicode. I wouldn't know how not to use Unicode.

Here are my Unicode codepoints (upgraded from my comment section) for the 'ể' in biển.

#1 'ể' is one character U+1EC3 : LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND HOOK ABOVE

#2 'ể' is a two characters U+00EA : LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX *and* U+0309 : COMBINING HOOK ABOVE

They are both Unicode aren't they, but shouldn't one of them be the standard? Who sets the standard?

Update #2: Sorry, I have not been using the right terminology. So I hope nobody thinks that this is a techblog. Instead of saying 'encodings', which indicates Unicode and some other encoding standard, I should say two different 'character sequences'. (There is a paper about all this terminology, &c.)

And it turns out that the two sequences for 'ể' are canonically equivalent. Thanks Andrew C. However, the normalization that should occur for 'canonically equivalent character sequences' doesn't appear to work in either google or yahoo.

Update #3: Two people have recommended alternate Vietnamese keyboards. Unikey and VPSkeys. Great! Thanks Michael for your description of Unikey.

Comments continue on Mike's post.

Exploring Christianity

2005-11-11T14:06:00.000-08:00

I have been fascinated by how one shape can morph into another for some time. This applies to ancient as well as current writing systems. A while ago I posted on the Hanzi 口 and 十 . I had been thinking at the time of how easily 十 ten in Chinese, morphs into X ten in English. I believe this is pure happenstance, no mysterious theory here, just an observation of how some glyphs, that is shapes, are basic - urglyphs, so to speak.

Here is an example of how X has morphed into a cross t.

(Okay, in century gothic it looks like a cross but it may not otherwise.) In any case I decided to see how many steps it takes to morph the 'x' in 'exploring' into the cross, passing through the Greek letter 'chi' χ on the way.

First I wrote 'exploring', then changed it to 'eχploring'. Next, I made the chi italic so 'eχploring', then I enlarged the chi, 'eχploring'. Then I changed the font to verdana 'eχploring'.

Now I had to paste a screenshot into an image editor and erase three of the crosspieces so that the lower one would appear elongated and create a tilted cross. Then I saved it as an image.

No, I did not do all this out of my own imagination - exactly. I saw a poster which used this effect and wondered how it was done. I followed the link to the exploringchristianity website and saw to my disappointment that this effect is not represented on the website. I am sorry I did not take a photograph of the poster. My image seems fuzzy and amateurish but I assure you that the poster was eχcellent.

Update: I have lost some formatting when I uploaded this post so the italic 'chi' cannot be viewed. It stays stable in Word and I pasted my Word image into the image editor.

The Italic Ampersand

2005-11-11T11:14:00.000-08:00

I didn't quite get it right. When I opened the Arts & Life section of the Vancouver Sun this morning I found that in the text they did indeed use the & character. However, in the advertising the ampersand appears in its other form, as a distinct 'et' ligature. I understood that this might be the italic form of the & so I am checking a few fonts for the right shape.

I haven't done an exhaustive search but I did scroll through a few fonts and found that Palatino Linotype does the job! Here it is &. This is the bold italic version of the Palatino Linotype ampersand and shows the et ligature which is found in this movie poster.

Now for a few more images. Six different ampersands appear here. I can see from this that Palationo Linotype is not the font used in the poster. It is close - but not a match.

And the true derivation of the et ligature is demonstrated here. (Actually I am not too sure about this one.)

An even more wideranging discussion of this character appears here.

I would love to find out what this page in Japanese says about the use of the cross as 'and' in this Romeo + Juliet poster.

Update: Thanks to Emeth Hesed for providing a translation from the Japanese.

What is an ampersand?

Well, let’s take a look at the picture on the left. It is the DVD jacket for Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes’ Romeo & Juliet.

And, because it’s in white it’s hard to see, but can you tell it says “hope & despair, tragedy & love”? Inside the red cross beneath there is a black “&”.
This “&” mark means “and” of course, but why?

Actually, this comes from Latin (a dead language not spoken by anyone anymore). It is a stylish way of writing “et” (meaning “and” in English). As you can see in the chart below, there are various designs.

This mark is called “ampersand.”

A long time ago, when learning the alphabet at school, children memorized it by saying from A, “A-per-se-A, B-per-se-B, ...” (A by itself A, B by itself B). And then, when they finished Z, there was an “&” and they said, “and-per-se-and.” That became “ampersand.” Continue here.

Ampersand

2005-11-09T20:06:00.000-08:00

There is a new Pride and Prejudice movie out, titled 'Pride & Prejudice.' I haven't seen it yet. (Oops, I think it opens tomorrow?) Just one more thing to add to the list. I wouldn't mind checking out the costumes though and the real estate. However, I was curious to see how the ampersand is faring on the internet.

On the first page of Google results, only 3 out of ten sites use the ampersand in the movie title. The other sites talked about the movie Pride and Prejudice.

Here are the results.

Pride & Prejudice - Tucson Citizen, New York Daily News, SheKnows

Pride and Prejudice - San Francisco Bay Guardian, New Yorker, Stuff.co.nz, Monsters and Critics, Rolling Stone, Globe and Mail, Cinematical

On the second page only two out of ten used the ampersand and so on.

The ampersand is not hard to find, right up there in the middle above the 7, so what was so difficult about that? I found it myself without asking for help!

I can, however, being so cynical, think of about ten reasons why one might not use the ampersand. You think it is a lazy shortcut, a handwritten shorthand symbol that does not relate to printed text, an everyday equivalent of 'and'. Or maybe the person at the keyboard is processing phonetically, lexically, or kinesthetically, and not visually. Maybe the typist is making a grammar correction along the lines of 'In this context the ampersand really should not be used.'

But didn't someone make a big fuss about this being a distinguishing feature of the movie title? Who said what exactly on the subject of the ampersand?

Later:

I have been completely sidetracked by now because I have just discovered HTML Ampersand Character Codes. This is a site that explains how you can keyboard unusual characters in html that do not appear on your keyboard, using the ampersand and the name of the character (from the chart, of course).

I can now enter æ þ ¿ ¡ which I have never missed - as well as some I find it ridiculous to live without - ¢ ° ¹ ² . My keyboard has dollars but not cents.

The one that has me totally puzzled is the code for ampersand itself. Would someone please tell me what use it is to know how to enter ampersand in code, which requires the ampersand, unless you have the ampersand, in which case you don't need to enter it in code?

Thanks to my sister Liz for alerting me to the use of the ampersand in the movie title Pride & Prejudice. Fortunately this blog is about writing systems and not movies because I haven't checked out any details on the Pride & Prejudice movie yet. But then I can't afford the real estate.

Endnote:

Now I only need to know the sequence which would enable me to write about these codes without invoking them if you like. Off to a tech site for me.

Update:

Thanks to help from commenters I was able to open the HTML Ampersand character code page and using view:source, I was able to see how the code is written in order to display the code to write these characters. So " for " and þ for þ and so on. I also found out the use of the code for ampersand since it is essential to write these codes for display. Not that I can explain this properly but it does work if I just copy from the code displayed when I open source and don't think about it too much.

Of course, none of this works in the blogger comment page itself.

The Aleph-Beth-Gimel

2005-11-08T22:50:00.000-08:00

Archaeologists digging in July at the site, Tel Zayit, found the inscribed stone in the wall of an ancient building. After an analysis of the layers of ruins, the discoverers concluded that this was the earliest known specimen of the Hebrew alphabet and an important benchmark in the history of writing, they said this week.

If they are right, the stone bears the oldest reliably dated example of an abecedary - the letters of the alphabet written out in their traditional sequence. From the New York Times

More on Language Log.

The De Landa Abecedario

2005-11-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

Enough already about how Apocalypto doesn't mean 'new beginning'. Did we think it did? If Gibson wants to create a new beginning out of an apocalypse, so be it.

What is more interesting is that on Language Log I read that Gibson gained inpsiration from "texts by 16th century bishop Friar Diego de Landa y Calderon, who wrote the book 'La relacion de las cosas de Yucatan' (The relation of things of the Yucatan)."

So who was Diego do Landa? He is best known for two separate accomplishments in his life. First, in about 1560 he recorded information about Mayan religion, language and culture, capturing the sounds of the Spanish alphabet in Mayan glyphs. He recorded these signs in relation to letters of the alphabet but the glyphs were eventually more correctly interpreted as representing syllables.

Second, de Landa was personally responsible for destroying as many Mayan books as he could get his hands on, possibly only 27, but maybe many more. Since many others have perished in the moist environment, this leaves 4 perserved manuscripts written in Mayan glyphs. While de Landa may have been witness to Mayan child sacrifice, he is himself known for his exceptional cruelty in a very cruel time.

Diego de Landa (1524-1579) was a Franciscan friar who arrived in Yucatán in 1549, and twelve years later became the Franciscan Provincial. He recorded many details of the Maya culture through the native informants Gaspar Antonio Chi and Nachi Cocom. His report, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán ("Account of matters in Yucatán"), was written in 1566 after he was forced to return to Spain in 1563 by Bishop Toral, who had complained to the Council of the Indies about Landa's treatment of the Indians, including his burning of 27 Maya hieroglyphic codices at Maní in 1562 in protest against child sacrifice. Landa returned to Yucatán as Bishop in 1573, replacing the now-deceased Toral

The Relación provides an essential chronicle of Maya life, reporting on their houses, farming practices, religious ceremonies, and calendrics, plus detailed information on Maya hieroglyphs including a partial syllabary. The manuscript for the Relación was probably seen by late 16th century Spanish historians Lopez de Cogolludo and Herrera y Tordesillas (Thompson 1963), and was rediscovered in 1863 by the French antiquary Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg in the Madrid Biblioteca de la Academia de la Historia. This highly important source, first published in 1864, three centuries after Landa compiled it, has been central in deciphering Maya script. Athena Review

If you have time for a little more history, here is a short take on the decipherment of Mayan by Michael Coe,

Why did it take such an unconscionably long time before we could actually read the writings of the most brilliant civilzation of pre-Columbian America? The fact of the matter is that a true "Rosetta Stone" key for the Maya decipherment challenge had been available since the mid-1860's when Bishop Landa's sixteenth-century account of the script was rediscovered in a Spanish archive. Recounting the testimony of his native informants, Landa had claimed that the system was based upon an abedeceario (sic), an alphabet, and he gave examples of how sentences could be written with it. Unfortunately, when this was applied to the then-known Maya codices, the results were ludicrous and were dismissed-along with Landa's "ABC"-by serious scholars. Michael Coe in Difficult Characters ed. by Mary S. Erbaugh

Until 1952 scholars interpreted Mayan glyphs as nonphonetic ideographs. It was Knorosov who showed that the Maya writing system was not an 'alphabet but a syllabary' ... 'similar in structure to other early scripts such as Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese'.

Endnotes:
Athena Review
Journal of Historical Review
Canadian Museum of Civilizaation

Paranthetical: In Coe's article, 'abecedario' is actually spelled 'abedeceario'. Does this reflect a simple typing error, an inability to sequence the phonological syllables, or an ideographic relation between an idea and a word written in the English alphabet, bypassing the phonological processing route altogether?

What speaks against its being a typing error is the additional 'e' following the 'c' which has been added to make the word conform to English spelling rules. I have no idea who it was that made this error, but I remark on it only as a curiosity.

La Plume Caporal

2005-11-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

I was looking for a particular title in the university library today and my eye fell on a large old book on Chinese cursive writing. It was the Dictionnaire des Formes Cursives des Caractères Chinois par Stanislas Millot, Lieutenant de Vaisseau. 1909. Intrigued I sat and read the preface.

French Original (Scroll down for English):

Les sinologues sont souvent arrêtes dans leurs travaux par le rencontre de caractères cursifs ou antique et la mondre inscription sur un objet de collection peut les discréditer dans l'ésprit des profanes.

Le 20 juin nous étions à Takou à bord du croiseur le Pascal au milieu d'une trentaine de bâtiments de guerre de diverses nationalités.

On manquait de nouvelles de la colonne Seymour et des assiégés de Tien-tsin et Pékin et l'ánxiété était par suite à son comble lorsque l'ón recût un message en caractères cursifs à l'addresse d'un amiral chinois prisonnier. On espéra y trouver des renseignements intéressants mais les Japonais eux-mêmes malgré l'usage constant qu'il font des caractères chinois déclarèrent n'y rien comprendre.

On était sur le point d'envoyer un croiseur à Tchefou pour y faire traduire le document lorsque l'on songea à nous le montrer. Grâce à l'étude spéciale que nous avions faites, par hasard, de l'écriture cursive nous pûmes, non sans peine fournir l'interpretation désirées.

Ad Hoc Translation:

Sinologists are often stopped in their work when they meet cursive or antique characters and the least inscription on a collectible can discredit them in the minds of laypeople.

The 20th of June we were at Taku on board the cruiser Le Pascal in the middle of about 30 warships of different nationalities.

We lacked news of Seymour's column and the besieged at Tien-tsin, and anxiety was at its peak when we received a message in cursive characters from an imprisonned Chinese general. (The officers) hoped to find interesting information in it but even the Japonese in spite of the constant use that they make of Chinese characters declared that they understood none of it.

They were on the point of sending a cruiser to Chefoo to have the document translated when they thought of showing it to me. Thanks to the special study that I had made, by chance, of cursive writing, I could, not without difficulty, provide the desired interpretation.

There is some historic information on what a French vessel was doing on June 16, 1900 off Taku here and more about the Boxer Rebellion here.

More information about this unusual book was found in a comment on a post about Ricci on Pierre Haski's blog.

J'avais trouvé un recueil de toutes les formes cursives de hanzi, répertoriées par un lieutenant de vaisseau, stanislas millot en 1909. Le bouquin est intégralement écrit à la plume caporal, un truc incroyable. dans la bibliographie de ce type, outre ce "dictionnaire des formes cursives des caractères chinois" on trouve des ouvrages aux titres exotiques comme "notice sur deux abaques pour problèmes de tactique navale".

Translation:

I found a collection of all the cursive forms of Hanzi, indexed by a ship's lieutenant, Stanislas Millot in 1909. The book is fully written with a corporal's plume, an incredible accomplishment - in this guy's bibliography, as well as 'dictionnaire des formes cursives des caracteres chinois' one can also find works with exotic titles like "notice sur deux abaques pour problemes de tactique navale."

I found that Millot's birthdate was 1875 which makes him 25 years old in 1900! And this book is written entirely in beautiful calligraphy. I missed the reference to the corporal's plume so I will have to go back and have a further look. I am not sure that I have translated this correctly but what else could it be? Fire away.

An interesting post on Chinese cursive script here.

Endnotes:

Dictionnaire des Formes Cursives des Caractères Chinois par Stanislas Millot, Lieutenant de Vaisseau. 1909. Leroux. Paris.

Image of Cursive Script from Appreciation of the Art of Chinese Calligraphy

Pierre Haski's blog was quite a find for me since I was so taken by his book Ma Yan which I bought in Hong Kong last year on the way home from Beijing with my daughter - but I digress.

PS I returned a day later to the library to check on the reference to 'la plume caporal' and the book was not on the shelf. I have put a trace on it and will go back later.

Update: I have found a reference to 'la plume caporal' here . "c'est que même si sur amazon ils proposent de rédiger un petit mot, je préfère prendre du canson, ma plume caporal et mon encre de chine et écrire moi-même un petit-mot..."

Golem

2005-11-06T13:55:00.000-08:00

This is from Greg Vilk's recent book Golem published this September. He is offering a $100.00 prize for whoever deciphers this script. There is a lot of information from real books and sites about writing systems on Vilk's site so it is a great place to spend time exploring and reading. I am almost tempted to run out and buy the book. I have to think about this.

The Tachistoscope

2005-11-05T21:58:00.000-08:00

I never thought I would hear about these devices again but apparently they are alive and well in another form. Originally tachistoscopes were often used to help improve reading fluency. And now there is a software that simulates that. However, tachistoscopes can also be used to test the readability of a font. Fontblog has a recent post on using a tachistoscope to test the readability of ClearType. From ClearType improves our accuracy at recognizing words ,

Tachistoscopic Lexical Decision is a technique that has been used extensively to measure word recognition. Tachistoscopes were a mechanical device for presenting materials briefly, but have been replaced by computers. Readers are briefly shown either a regular word in their native language (e.g. distant) or a pseudoword (e.g. tadints), which is not a word in their native language. The reader’s task is to say if they saw a word or pseudoword. The advantage to this methodology it only requires the reader to complete a very simple task of pressing one button for words or another for pseudowords. This allows more accurate timing for word recognition.

A team led by Professors Lee Gugerty and Rick Tyrrell at Clemson University studied the effects of ClearType on the tachistoscopic lexical decision task. Read the rest of this post here.

Read more about the tachistoscope here. Try taking these tachistoscope tests.

Dialect Character Sets

2005-11-05T17:44:00.000-08:00

I recently read this post on Mike Kaplan's blog. Martin Kochanski says,

Before Unicode was as widely used as it is now, users of languages with diacritics had to manage with ASCII (or if, they were lucky, with Latin-1) and whole dialects of character usage grew up as a result. This was especially the case with informal communications such as chats and bulletin boards.

To give the example I know best: Polish needs acute accents on c, s, and z, a dot on the z, tails under a and e, and a line through the lowercase "l", to mention just a few.

Sometimes the accents were left out when they could be inferred, and some adjustments were trivial (eg. represent acute accent with a following apostrophe) but what was really inspiring was that people worked out that some letters that weren't used in Polish, such as q, v and x, could be co-opted and given consistent meanings in Polish completely unrelated to what they normally mean in Latin scripts: thus if x equalled z-dot (I can't whether this was one of the specific equivalences) then a Polish speaker would quickly learn to read x as z-dot without hesitation and to press the x key when he wanted to type z-dot.

The spontaneous evolution of such dialect character sets (the convergent evolution resulting from a strong selection towards mutual comprehensibility) has always struck me as a rather inspiring episode, because "bottom-up", driven by need, and not created by committees. The trouble is that once the need disappears, so do the dialects.

I'm hoping that someone somewhere is interested enough in the electronic equivalent of "oral history" to be able to capture and codify these ephemeral character sets before they are forgotten even by the people who used them; and it struck me that some of the people who read this blog might have an interest in this bit of history too.

Mike asks, "Now this is a fascinating topic, but one that I have to admit I know just about nothing about. Does anyone know of a place where knowledge all of these kinds of de facto standards might be kept?"

To Point or Not to Point

2005-11-03T20:10:00.000-08:00

In a recent comment Mark brought up the issue of tone marks in Pinyin,

"I tend to think that the best system for native speakers would be the least complicated, thus omitting most diacritics. ... I'd like to learn more about the use of pointed/unpointed text with the Hebrew and Arabic scripts. I wonder if you or any of your readers know of studies on the efficiency (for reading, but also for writing, if available) of using or omitting diacritics with these scripts. Or perhaps the partial omission of diacritics."

I can't say much about Arabic, since it is a bit too complicated to compare to tone marks. For Hebrew, most of the text that I have seen on the internet is unpointed except for some religious sites.

However, the topic of pointing or not pointing in Cree Syllabics is one that I have thought about for many years. Too many.

The original Cree Syllabary was designed by a missionary to mark vowel length and preaspiration of consonants with marks. If all of these features are marked all the time then the text is called 'fully pointed.' If they are omitted, then 'unpointed'. Sometimes the text is pointed occasionally to disambiguate, for certain words, for stylistic issues, etc. Then it has been called strategic pointing.

While I have a some old copies of the Wawatay News in a filebox somewhere, I have also found a copy of an article from this Oji-Cree newspaper on the internet. Although the online version of the paper is in English only, the newspaper that I saw was always in English and Syllabics. This is an aboriginal publication and as such represents one very common way to write in Oji-Cree.

The image posted above represents the same text in unpointed and pointed syllabics.

As a retrospective on this for Cree, originally it was intended by the missionary to be pointed. The Cree used it as unpointed text, except for one or two families who had a tradition of pointing. This corresponded to their reputation as priests and elders in the Anglican tradition.

Most missionary publications have only been partially pointed. Now on the internet we can see variations by community. The Cree School Board has a policy of using pointed text. The Naskapi unpointed. Most Cree and Oji-Cree text written by the Cree elsewere is unpointed or occasionally partially pointed.

Is it necessary to point text? Evidently some communities thought not. So why are others using pointed text? Hmm.

Thanks to Chris Harvey for great resources.

Mark invites readers to respond to this issue of whether to use fully marked text or not, whatever the language.

The 1837 Syllabary

2005-11-01T23:11:00.000-08:00

This chart is from the The speller and interpreter, in Indian and English: for the use of the mission schools, and such as may desire to obtain a knowledge of the Ojibway tongue. Evans, James, 1801-1846.([New York? : s.n.], 1837) It is now available in an easily accessible format on the internet.

This is the chart of syllables that James Evans presented on page 20 of his Cree speller. Below is the syllabics chart from 1841. In this chart the top row is the row of vowels. See this page on Languagegeek for more details about this chart.

In his introduction we can get some insight into Evans' development of his roman orthography for Ojibwe, "All who have attempted to represent the Indian dialects by written characters, have proved the impracticability of accomplishing this object by the use of the Roman character, while it retains its English sound; and almost every writer has a method of notation peculiar to himself, while none have presented us with a complete system, in which each sound is rendered invariable, by a distinct and appropriate character." page 4

Samuel Ajayi Crowther

2005-10-29T15:55:00.000-07:00

I don't often comment on the many new writing systems featured on Simon's Omniglot site. I read his website regularly and take its immense popularity for granted.

However, this one time I feel the need to expand on a reference. Once in a while I read a name or word that stirs deep memories. This is a story that must be told. On the new page for Igbo I find,

"The first book in Igbo, Isoama-Ibo, a primer, was produced in 1857 by Samuel Ajayi Crowther, an ex-slave and teacher. "

Here is the recently published biography of Ajayi Crowther. A Patriot to the Core: Bishop Ajayi Crowther by J.F. Ade-Ajayi, 2002, Spectrum Books, Nigeria.

Many short versions of his life can be found on the internet. From Great Christians in History;

"Samuel Crowther (about 1806-91) was the outstanding African Christian leader of his time. Adjai (properly Ajayi) was born in the Egba group of the Yoruba people in what is now Nigeria. When he was about 15, he was captured by slave raiders. But the slave ship was intercepted by a British warship, and Adjai was taken to Sierra Leone where he was converted and baptized, taking the name Samuel Crowther. Outstanding at school (and a foundation pupil of Fourah Bay College) Crowther became a teacher for the Church Missionary Society, ...

He "became convinced that the evangelization of inland Africa must be carried out by Africans. Ordained in London in 1843, he was appointed to the new mission in his own Yorubaland. ... Crowther achieved much as evangelist, translator and negotiator. He impressed many, including Queen Victoria, when he visited England. He led the new Niger Mission in 1857 and in 1864 became the first African anglican bishop."

There are several accounts of Samuel Crowther on the internet and most of them end here. This, unfortunately, is a great disservice to history. The truth is that during Crowther's years as bishop, policy and personnel in England changed, and from the time of Crowther's death in 1891 until 1952 there was no other African bishop in the Anglican Church.

This article from Christianity Today represents the story as I remember it. From the last few paragraphs;

"Venn's replacement further undercut Crowther's authority by handing control of the Niger Mission's "temporalities" to a committee in 1879, following it the next year by appointing a Commission of Inquiry into allegations of misconduct by Crowther's subordinates...

All but three of the Niger Mission's 15 Africans were fired. When Crowther protested, he was charged with violating his code of office. He died shortly thereafter, and a white bishop was put in his place. The continent would not see another African Anglican bishop until 1952, sixty years after Crowther's death."

I read Ade Ajayi's book Christian Missions in Nigeria many years ago and it left a powerful and lasting impression.

Ade-Ajayi J.F. Christian Missions in Nigeria: the Making of a New Elite. 1965. Longmans. London.

Ade-Ajayi J.F. A Patriot to the Core: Bishop Ajayi Crowther. 2002. Spectrum Books. Nigeria.

The All India Alphabet

2005-10-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

My sister and I were spending last Sunday evening altering a medieval costume with several yards of fabric in the skirt, with the intention of creating Cinderella's ballgown. We had introduced a hoop and crinoline, and had flounces pinned up half way round the hemline, when we decided to adjust the length. I removed the pins, let the flounces drop and considered starting over again with a new design.

I kid you not - as I later settled in for a few minutes of reading to relax after the sewing, I picked up Colloquial Hindustani, which I had just acquired from a used book store. The book fell open to this page,

"In this simple romanic orthography, Hindustani, though appearing in clothes of new design, is still dressed in a national costume which fits it well, whereas in the usual European transliterations and transcriptions bristling with dots, dashes, and other diacritical marks, which do not really belong to the letters, it looks like a man who has lost his own clothes and has to make shift with an ill-fitting borrowed suit, pinned up here, let down there. To remove the pins and drop the fussy alterations, leaving Hindustani in the bare roman alphabet, is a great temptation to the European. And we know that the dots and dashes do, in fact, tend to wear off. The feeling that diacritics are extraneous to the roman alphabet is very strong indeed among people who do not require them. It is a sound instinct.

Unfortunately the bare unaltered roman alphabet is inadequate for the representation of Indian languages. ...

The alternative is the addition of a minimum number of extra letters of roman type, already well established, enabling us to frame a consistent Indian alphabet. The Indian roman alphabet then takes its proper plce in grammars and dictionaries. A grammatical roman spelling is established, in which all Indians can practise literacy without shame, and which opens the door to easier learning of Indian languages by foreigners of all the continents, It is the method followed in this book." p. xi

I offer this as a bit of history as well as being one possible opinion on diacritics. It is a colourful piece of writing and a perspective on why a certain orthography may or may not gain favour.

Today another roman orthography is often used for transliteration in India, ITRANS. It also lacks diacritics by virtue of being accessible in an ASCII encoding for use on the QWERTY keyboard. Just the unadorned roman alphabet. Even though many sounds require several letters to type, it may still be faster than using the shift key.

I do know that diacritics were used for many languages where the main consideration was to be able to use a typewriter, rather than have to get extra letters for printing. Orthographies are tied to the preferred technology of the day more often than not.

The additional characters of the All India Alphabet in the image above are all available in Unicode in the IPA extensions. As I said, I am posting this quote for historic interest only. I have no particular opinion on roman orthographies in India.

Harley, A. H. Colloquial Hindustani. Introduction by J.R. Firth. 1943. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. London.

Delphi Tablet II

2005-10-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

This is another part of the same tablet in the Delphi Museum, #1637. It was one of the pieces originally found in 1893-4. The title on the table or matrix is ΤΑΥΤΑ ΔΙΠΛΑ (These are the doubles).

This matrix represents the consonant blends such as br, bl, gr, gl, ... rather than 'double' consonants. Across the top are the initial consonants BGD TKP TH CH PH M ... Down the side are the second consonants in the consonant blend, in order of frequency, R L N D M B ...

The first group of blends is BR, GR, BL, GL; other groups are DR, TR, KR, PR; DL, TL, KL, PL; BN, GN, DN, TN; THR, THL, THN, THM; CHR, CHL, CHN, CHM; KN, KM, KT, KP and so on.

Most of these sets of four sound values are created from using one shape in four orientations. X which is symmetrical is modified with a dot in four positions.

This form of writing may have had one or more of the following functions, commercial, academic, political, military, espionage, religious, educational (to record lecture notes), etc. to mention a few possibilities.

Whether it was to facilitate writing at the speed of speech, or to convey information in a secret code, is a good question. However, with a secret code, usually there is a one to one mapping of letters, rather than an abbreviated method as is portrayed here. The phonetic organization of letters also suggests that there is more to this than just a secret code. It is likely, however, that the two functions, as shorthand and as a secret code, are related to each other, and one system may have had many uses.

For me this table of Greek consonants is significant since it shows that the use of a shape in four orientations was used for symbols in the 3rd century BC. Many of the shapes are somewhat similar to the shapes which Evans used when designing the Cree Syllabary.

In Evans' syllabary the first two lines use Δ and Λ, which are letters in the Greek alphabet, and are not shown as symbols within the Greek consonant table. However, five of the remaining shapes are very similar to shapes found in the Greek consnant table, and the principle of using four orientations is identical.

I do not have any knowledge of whether Evans studied Greek shorthand. Since there is very little written in English on Greek shorthand, and the tablet above was discovered in 1893, I would suppose not.

However, we do know that Evans learned a shorthand system in England before Pitman had published his system. I am trying to piece together a history of shorthand from classical to Victorian times.

I do have more examples of shorthand from England to scan in - images that I have not yet found on the internet.

Dzongkha Calligraphic Font

2005-10-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

Here is a Dzongkha calligraphic font. Mark of Pinyin News has posted a Dzongkha keyboard with my name on it so I had to look into this.

His article begins,

"Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, has been relegated to the status of a dialect of Tibetan in Microsoft products. Rather than being labelled “Dzongkha” or “Bhutan-Dzongkha,” it is identified as “Tibetan – Bhutan” in the recently released beta version of Windows Vista. This is apparently an official Microsoft policy, likely aimed at appeasing China. " Read full post here. Stephen's comment is interesting also.

The Tibetan Computer Company creates and distributes Tibetan and Dzongkha fonts. There are lots of other details on Tibetan and Dzongkha input here. Tibetan is unique in having vertical stacking consonants. I understand that Tibetan input is a one of a kind experience!

There have been a series of sociolinguistic type articles on Pinyin News lately, all of them mind-bending, as they break down popular notions about Asian languages and scripts. I particularly liked the post on the Mystery of old simplified Chinese characters.

Delphi Tablet I

2005-10-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

This inscription is #5678 in the Museum of Delphi, Greece. It is part of a collection of pieces found in the Temple of Apollo dated in the third century BC. The first two pieces in this set were found by a French archeological dig in 1893 and the last were found in 1929.

The symbols in the table are not identified in the book I am reading and I have found no reference on the internet. Within the small table are two shapes in three orientations organized in descending columns while the another shape occurs in four orientations. Two other single shapes occur.

The first line below the table starts "TA ANO GRA.." possible GRAMMATA, or letters. After that follows a phonetic organisation of Greek consonants which I am going to set off in groups with spaces between.

ΓΔΒ ΚΤΠ ΛΝ...
ΓΔΒ ΧΦΘ Λ... (the first set of three letters and Λ are modified with a dot)

English
GDB KTP LN...
GDB CH TH PH L...

The following rows continue the pattern with alterations to the letters.

This tablet indicates the antiquity of the phonetic organization of the Greek consonants. I am not able to comment on the purpose of this tablet.

PS

1. Comment from Simon.

"I gave the small session on learning Greek. See here for some pictures and comments :)"

2. Previous posts on Greek Consonants

The Matrix
Classification of Consonants

3. Biblio

Boge, Hebert. Griechische Tachygraphie und Tironische Noten. 1973. Akademie Verlag. Berlin.

Errata: In the table there are actually three different shapes that occur in three orientations and three single shapes.

Byzantine Paleography

2005-10-22T00:51:00.000-07:00

Byzantine Paleography is a site with many resources on Greek manuscript traditions. I have yet to explore all the pages but wish to record this before I forget. Here is the introduction.

"This page and the linked pages are not directed at those who are already able to read Byzantine MSS with ease, i.e. Paleographers, a skilled and erudite group of scholars. Rather the goal here is to present basic discussions, images, and a few useful tools to those who are interested in how we come to gain knowledge about the past, and to those just starting out with work on manuscripts. "

I was immediately attracted to a few pages with charts, my favourite venue for organizing information, on Greek Letter Forms, Greek Letter Combinations (Ligatures, etc.) and Common Abbreviations.

While it may seem repetitive, I am posting the page of Bergekios' manuscript again but in a larger format. I hope that with this page open and enlarged and the many pages of Greek ligatures available, this will start to look more familiar to me.

Later, I will scan in few pages of ligatures and abbreviations from the books I have here. I also need to remind myself that I am working here with a manuscript from the 16th century, a manuscript that coexisted with the age of print.

Addendum: I am not sure how to get the size of image that I want posted in blogger. I will be working on this again over the next few days. PS. I think that is readable now.

Bibliography (wil be added to):

Greek Letters: From Tablets to Pixels edited by Michael Macrakis, 1996, Oak Knoll Press, New Castle, Delaware. ISBN 1-884718-27-2

Angelos Bergekios

2005-10-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

This is about two different 'kai's'. In the Lord's Prayer here 'kai', meaning 'and', is written in two completely different ways. The first one I have decided to call 'shorthand kappa with varia', for want of finding a name that someone else has given it, (see yesterday's post ). The second one is better-known and comes with its own codepoint in Unicode. It is called 'U+03D7 : GREEK KAI SYMBOL'. This is because it is used today in Greece, so I understand.

If the first one can be analysed as 'shorthand kappa with varia,' then the second one can be dissected as 'kappa with shorthand alpha-iota.' (Sometimes these are called ligatures but they do not derive from the two original letters, they were established as shorthand. See my bibliography at the bottom of this post for further details on Greek shorthand.)

In any case, the question is, how did these two forms of 'kai' turn up in print in 1713? Fortunately the library has fac-similes of Greek manuscripts. I have found a copy of a manuscript by Angelos Bergekios (Angelus Vergecius).

Apparently Bergekios "used his own writing as a model in designing the 'grecs du roi' types cut by Garamond for Robert Estienne in 1542, the ancestor of nearly all Greek types for more than two centuries." Barbour. xxiv

This excerpt from Bergekios' manuscript illustrates the use of both 'kai's'. Other similar details are the way that 'rho' and 'mu' are tied by a ligature to the following vowel. In the first line, fourth word, ανθρωποις, has a rho-omega ligature and the sixth word, γεγηρακατοις, the rho-alpha ligature. In the Lord's Prayer, linked to above, at the end of the first line, ουρανοις has a rho-alpha ligature.

So, was the type for the Lord's Prayer in Oratio Dominica designed by Bergekios? I don't know for sure, but it was in the same tradition or style. It was an era in which people were using type to imitate manuscripts. I should also note that the types were designed in 1542 and this manuscript was written in 1564. This should not be too surprising since manuscript copying continued to coexist with printing for over a century.

Here is Peter Daniels' take on this, "There was no photolithography in those days, so the only way to publish a faithful reproduction of a manuscript was to cut hundreds of sorts imitating the ligatures. (Cf. the Gutenberg Bible.)" That sounds very labour-intensive! Here is a copy of the full page text of Bergekios' manuscript from Omont. 1974. Click to enlarge. Here the scribe is called Ange Vergèce since the book is in French.

Barbour, Ruth. Greek Literary Hands. A.D. 400-1600. 1981. Clarendon Press. Oxford.

Lehmann, Oskar. Die Tachygraphischen Abkurzungen Der Griechischen Handschriften. 1965. Georg Holms. Hildesheim

Omont, H. A. Fac-Similés de Manuscrits Grecs des XVe et XVIe Siècles. 1974. Georg Holms. Hildesheim.

Addendum:

Thanks to Eli I have found Ricoblog. In this post he has an image of a page of Erasmus' edition of the New Testament. Sure enough, in line 8 and 10 both the 'shorthand kappa with varia' glyph and the word 'kai' are represented. These are both written with an ampersand in Latin.

Life of Και

2005-10-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

Here is a peculiar little symbol found in line 3 and line 5 of this version of the Lord's Prayer. From context, it is obviously και meaning 'and'.

This table, on the right, found in Lehmann's book* on Greek Shorthand shows the derivation of this symbol from an earlier 'S' shape shorthand kappa with an accent, called a varia, above it.

Thompson** shows the origin of the 'S' shape from an original zigzag symbol, κε.

Back to Lehmann. He shows these modifications for the shorthand zigzag kappa with the different vowels. This is Greek syllabic shorthand and it is one of the things that I have most wanted to explore in writing system history but have put off since there is so little information available.

So, this little symbol for και could be called "kai - shorthand kappa with varia."

These images can be enlarged by clicking on them.

*Lehmann, Oskar. Die Tachygraphischen Abkurzungen Der Griechischen Handschriften. 1965. Georg Holms. Hildesheim.

**Thomson E.M. A handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography.

Boge, Herbert. Griechische Tachygraphie und Tironische Noten. 1973. Akademie-Verlag. Berlin.

Addendum:

If you have noticed that the shorthand kappa looks like 'koppa' - it does. If you know why it looks like koppa, or have any suggestions about this, please comment. I don't know why the two look identical. The zigzag shape is identified by Lehmann and Thomson as shorthand kappa, but elsewhere I see it called koppa. Hmm.

If you are not familiar with koppa, then don't worry about it - or read this paper On Greek Letter Koppa by Michael Everson, which shows the various forms and functions of koppa. Very interesting.

Memory of the World Register

2005-10-15T21:51:00.000-07:00

In my quest for historic scripts I have found another resource. "The Memory of the World Register lists documentary heritage which has been identified by the International Advisory Committee in its meetings in Tashkent (September 1997), in Vienna (June 1999) and in Cheongju City (June 2001) and endorsed by the Director-General of UNESCO as corresponding the selection criteria for world significance."

For the Russian Federation I have found the Khitrovo Gospel (of the end of the 14th - the beginning of the 15th century) which is in the Russian State Library. The Memory of the World Register's Reading Room provides 4 images from this manuscript.

"The manuscript has a great significance in the human written history of universal philosophy and culture. This Gospel give a salient idea of the stage of the development of ancient Russian Literature, of its book-writing schools and workshops and of the dissemination of the church Slavonic language. Khitrovo Gospel is widely known by eight miniatures and ornaments of Andrei Rublyov and artists from his environment."

Other Russian manuscripts in the Memory of the World Register are the Archangel Gospel of 1092 and Slavonic publications in the Cyrillic script of the 15th century .

Click on these images to enlarge.

From Old Books

2005-10-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

This text of the Lord's Prayer is from Oratio Dominica: The Lord's Prayer in above 100 Languages, Versions and Characters by Dan Brown, published in 1713.

While this text was printed in 1715, the notes in the margin indicate that this version of the Lord's Prayer is from a text dated 1581. Click on this image to enlarge or see it here (warning: Give it a minute or two to download - as it is 3880x5568) or on page 8, From Old Books, Oratio Dominica.

This website From Old Books provides a complete page-by-page scan of Oratio Dominica and offers many hours of browsing through pages of old books. Many thanks to Liam for making these images available.

Addendum: There are marks that appear to be aspiration marks in this text. I find a reference to these marks on page 2 of this document.

"The Slavonic writing system was influenced also by the fact that many texts were copied from the original Greek sources—so, the aspiration symbols (hard and soft) are placed arbitrarily and mean nothing in Slavonic texts;"

This is supported by the note,
"Some sources insist that aspirations are conserved in Old Slavonic texts for calligraphic reasons only and are copied directly from the Greek texts; some sources [16] state that placing of aspiration symbols is not arbitrary—although we don’t know exactly what they mean, they are somehow connected with the pronunciation, as in every writing system apart from Hebrew. Nobody knows the truth . . ."

16 Nikolai Serikoff: private communication.

Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TEX and Unicode, Alexander Berdnikov, Olga Lapko (pdf)

Malkuno Zcuro

2005-10-13T18:36:00.000-07:00

From my inbox:

"I have read your Sep. 24th entry in your blog on the Aramaic (Syriac) language.The following book might be of special interest to linguists:

"Malkuno Zcuro" Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Le Petit Prince" (The Little Prince) in modern Aramaic language (Tur Abdin dialect) spoken in South East Turkey was printed in Germany and will be available in November 2005. The text is printed in Aramaic script (Syriac) with Latin transcription.

The book also contains vocabularies in German, French, English, Turkish as well as in Swedish. BTW "Malkuno" means "prince". It is said to be the first book printed in modern Aramaic ("Suret") worldwide."

Checking back to my Sept. 24 post and comparing the name of the script,

Aramaya ܐܪܡܝܐ
Suryaya ܣܘܪܝܝܐ

I find that the Syriac script cover of this book is labeled 'Syriac', while the Latin transcription is labeled 'Aramaic'. That makes sense.

Addendum:

Here is another interesting website on "The Little Prince", a collection of translations in 142 languages and dialects.

Erasmian Pronunciation

2005-10-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

I may mention classical Greek, every once in a while, but I wouldn't dare to be heard pronouncing it out loud. I listened to my teacher using the usual pedagogical pronunciation, which provides a distinct pronunciation for every letter; and my Greek classmate naturally pronounced classical Greek as if it were his mother tongue, which it was. I was remarkably silent in that class, restricting myself to writing Greek, which I thought was a much nicer alphabet than the Latin one.

(I notice that the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" - based on the actress's own life, BTW- was filmed around the corner from where I went to high school in Toronto.)

Anyway... it was Erasmus who established the 'proper' pronunciation for classical Greek and non-Greeks have been slaughtering the pronunciation of that language ever since. Erasmus is also responsible for the "Textus Receptus", an edition of the New Testament that was the "Received" edition, used, I believe, for the King James Version of the Bible and held sacred to many. Such an influential man, that Erasmus.

However, an enlightened American president, Thomas Jefferson, who lived in Paris for some time, balked at the Erasmian pronunciation of classical Greek as he explains in this letter.

All of this is a leadup to Gary's post in Shadow, where he follows the trail of a pronunciation for classical Greek to the Greek Alphabet site of Harry Foundalis. It is a good read with sound files as well. From Harry's Greek Alphabet site,

"If any (non-Greek) scholar attempts to pronounce classic texts in the reconstructed(1) pronunciation, that, to Greeks is tantamount to sacrilege. As a contemporary Greek myself, I can give you my personal feeling for how the reconstructed pronunciation sounds: it is as if a barbarian is trying to speak Greek."

A Back Translation

2005-10-12T18:16:00.000-07:00

Enough about fonts and all that. I have been thinking of this book on and off for a few weeks. Mission to Asia ed. by Christopher Dawson. 1966. Harper & Row. NY. Click on these images to enlarge.

This book contains the History of the Mongols by John of Plano Carpini, the letter he carried from Pope Innocent IV to Guyuk Khan and the reply he brought back. Maybe not the reply he wanted, but a reply. It contains The Journey of William of Rubrick to the court of the Khan in China and letters of John of Monte Corvino, Brother Peregrine, Bishop of Zayton and Andrew of Perugia. Andrew of Perugia's letter (in a different translation) and tombstone can be seen here.

My copy of this book is a little dog-eared but apparently there are reprints available at Amazon.com. I sincerely hope the reprint has the same luscious cover design by Jacqueline Shuman in a heavy and relatively durable paperback edition. I suppose that the 'Nun of Stanbrook Abbey' who translated these narratives remains unnamed.

These narratives include the first description known to the west of the Mongol Uighur script and many fascinating accounts of the struggles these ambassadors had getting their own letters from Rome translated into Mongol.

"Entering we said what we had to say on our knees; that done we delivered the letter and asked to be given interpreters capable of translating it. We were given them on Good Friday, and carefully translated the letter with them into Ruthenian, Saracenic and Tartar characters. This translation was given to Bati, who read it and noted it carefully. " p. 56

Now for the story of getting the Khan's letter translated into Latin. It happened right there in his court. He wasn't trusting the translation of his reply to a later date and interpretation. Here is the vivid account.

"On this occasion we were asked if there were any people with the Lord Pope who understood the writing of the Russians or Saracens or even of the Tartars. We gave answer that we used neither the Ruthenian nor Saracen writing; there were however Saracens in the country but they were a long way from the Lord Pope; but we said that it seemed to us that the most expedient course would be for them to write in Tartar and translate it for us, and we would write it down carefully in our script and we would take both the letter and the translation to the Lord Pope.

...the secretaries came to us and translated the letter for us word by word. When we had written it in Latin, they had it translated so that they might hear a phrase at a time, for they wanted to know if we had made a mistake in any word. When both letters were written, they made us read it once and a second time in case we had left out anything, and they said to us: "See that you clearly understand everthing, for it would be inconvenient if you did not understand everything, seeing you have to travel to such far-distant lands." When we replied "We understand everything clearly" they wrote the letter once again in Saraceic, in case anyone should be found in those parts who could read it, if the Lord Pope so wished." p.67

I would highly recommend this collection of original writings from the 13th and 14th centuries, as a counter-balance to Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. Actually one book is not a replacement for the other, they complement each other.

Addendum: I have made a little error and the pictures will not enlarge. I shall be working on correcting that. Update: Fixed.

Now I have a question. I am not sure if the Tartar script which John of Plano Carpini saw was this . He visited the court of Guyuk Khan in 1246.

Addendum: Language Hat has supplied a link to Richard Hakluyt's translation here. The characters are identified there as "Russian, Tartarian and Saracen." Thanks, LH. The text is available in Latin and English, here.

Combining Diacritics Continue

2005-10-11T23:33:00.000-07:00

Tonight I am posting an image of Polytonic Greek with combining diacritics in Notepad. I chose Palatino Linotype, but all characters with diacritics are displayed in Microsoft Sans Serif.

Just to record a few thoughts. First, I had assumed a few days ago that I should use the extended Greek range for the combining accents for Polytonic Greek. Now I realize that these accents are in the combining diacritic range.

Second, I am not sure if Palatino Linotype does not combine or if it does not contain the accents to combine with. I dont know if the action and results would be different in every application. In Word, the whole sentence changed to Tahoma, so Word sensed a font that would work.

Ἄδμηθ', ὁρᾷς γὰρ τἀμὰ πράγμαθ' ὡς ἔχει, λέξαι θέλω σοι πρὶν θανεῖν ἃ βούλομαι

Here it is in blogger. In my preview window it looks great. This is the same thing that could not display properly in Word or Notepad.

I just went back to Word again and repasted it in. This time it displayed in Palatino Linotype but the accents were all out of place. Word must have a series of options for dealing with this situation. Don't laugh. These things have a mind of their own. Why did I ever decide that I should learn about combining diacritics. Someone tell me. And I am not complaining - I am just playing around seeing what's up and what people mean when they say 'combining diacritics'!

I keep pasting the same few characters into BabelMap and then into Word and every time I get a different result. Sometimes a mixed font, obviously mixed, sometimes a reasonably even font, but who knows what it is. And no I am not changing the font myself. I chose "Palatino Linotype" and the Word page is just doing its own thing.

Classification of Consonants

2005-10-11T16:48:00.000-07:00

This is from page 156 of Elementary Greek by Burgess and Bonner. 1907. Scott, Foresman and Company. Chicago. Today's post is simply to show how one might cognitively process a writing system according to a visual chart or construction. Yesterday's post was all about how the writing system displays in a browser.

I have this book and others left to me by my great-aunt, who taught Greek at McGill University, Montreal, in the 1920's and 30's. This is not the textbook that I used in high school but one very like it. It was not until several years later that I started to study linguistics at university and learned phonetic classes of sounds.

This organization of the consonants into classes was considered necessary to understand the assimilation of consonant sounds in the different verb tenses and noun cases.

In Aristotle's Poetics 1456b "A letter is an indivisible sound, not every such sound but one of which an intelligible sound can be formed. Animals utter indivisible sounds but none that I should call a letter(στοιχειον). Such sounds may be subdivided into vowel, semi-vowel and mute."

Combining Diacritics

2005-10-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

Here is a line from Alcestis' famous speech to her husband before she dies. From Euripides' Alcestis.

"Admetus, you see the things I suffer; and now before I die I mean to tell you what I wish."

Click on the above images to see the display of this line as I saw it in Firefox, with an undefined font. The first is precomposed and the second is decomposed. Both show vowels of uneven size and decomposed shows a lagging perispomeni.

Ἄδμηθ', ὁρᾷς γὰρ τἀμὰ πράγμαθ' ὡς ἔχει, λέξαι θέλω σοι πρὶν θανεῖν ἃ βούλομαι.

Ἄδμηθ', ὁρᾷς γὰρ τἀμὰ πράγμαθ' ὡς ἔχει, λέξαι θέλω σοι πρὶν θανεῖν ἃ βούλομαι

In the Greek text which I have posted here with a defined Tahoma font, the first is decomposed with combining diacritics, and the second is precomposed. In the preview window they look identical and correct.

Hangul

2005-10-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

Everyone has posted about Hangul today. Here are the 24 basic jamos of the Hangul writing system. Read more about it here. At Language Log you can read all about what type of writing system Hangul really is. You probably already have. Here on the west coast I am the end of the line and it is already tomorrow.

I am naturally interested in the arrangement of the vowels in the four orientations. According to Omniglot "The shapes of the the vowels are based on three elements: man (a vertical line), earth (a horizontal line) and heaven (a dot). In modern Hangeul the heavenly dot has mutated into a short line."

Gari Ledyard's Theory has some interest for me but I am content to read what others have written today. If you have a special interest in both Phags-pa and Hangul you may be able to tell me what you think of Ledyard's ideas.

Mandombé in Action

2005-10-08T16:23:00.000-07:00

Just in case you were wondering, as I was, what such a geometric script looks like when handprinted, this should help. Mandombe.info

There is lots of interesting info on how the idea came from brickwork and the mirrored relationship between the numbers 2 and 5
here.

The Mandombé Syllabary

2005-10-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

This is the Mandombé script taught as a syllabary. These are the syllables of the second group. While the table in Wikipedia enables one to read Mandombé, it is not the traditional presentation.

This picture was found here. The explanation above the group of syllables reads "The Mazta of the 2nd group are the Mazta composed of the roots of the 2nd time or angles of 45 degrees." The chart itself makes sense to me but I do not know how to interpret this commentary. Back to Wikipedia where the same terms are mentioned.

The Matrix

2005-10-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

Many writing systems are taught in a two dimensional layout or matrix. This matrix may be an arrangement of letters by their phonetic class, it may be a full scale syllabary or a book of rhyme tables.

This is how I learned the Greek alphabet. I also had to learn the alphabetical order but that was secondary.

p t k
b d g
f th ch
ps dz ks
l m n r s
a e ee i u o oo

Oddly enough I am not familiar with any standard chart or two dimensional layout for the Latin alphabet apart from an IPA chart. However, when learning another script this is one of the first things I look for.

I couldn't find this arrangement for Greek on the internet as a chart but in bits and pieces it can be asembled from this site. I would be very interested in hearing if such a table is ever used now for teaching the Greek alphabet.

Addendum: I have altered the image in this post, not out of vanity, but I don't want to post again on the same topic for a new image and I am trying to improve the aesthetic quality of my images as well as correct any obvious errors.

Reversed Letters

2005-10-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

Most scripts have a traditional presentation format. This is the visual image of the script that the users are most familiar with. For an alphabet it may be a linear display over the chalkboard in school. For other scripts the traditional organization may be a syllabary chart, as in Syllabics, Amharic, Hiragana and Katakana, etc. For some scripts there is more than one format.

This layout for Phags-pa is derived from the layout for Tibetan as seen here, and here.

Consonants

KA KHA GA NGA
CA CHA JA NYA
TA THA DA NA
TTA TTHA DDA NNA
PA PHA BA MA
TSA TSHA DZA WA
ZHA ZA 'A
YA RA LA
SHA SA HA
A QA XA FA GGA

Vowels (and HA)

ΗΑ I U E YA

(There are minor irregularities to this organization for the sake of demonstrating the full set of reversed letters. However, I could not find a complete matrix to copy exactly so this will have to do.)

There are six reversed consonant letters, TTA, TTHA, DDA, NNA, ZA and GGA. In each case the reversal creates a separate letter with its own value. However, for the vowels, I, U, E, subjoined Y and HA, the reversed letters are contextual variants and do not in any way alter the phonetic values of the letters. (I have put in HA twice, first in its traditional position, and second with the vowels because its reversed letter is a contextual variant like the vowels.)

In this script CV syllables are written as a unit and a reversed consonant letter requires a reversed vowel letter, without changing the value of the vowel. One aspect of this type of script, an alphasyllabary, is that letters are arranged in syllabic units. Therefore the form of the consonant can affect the form of the vowel.

While reversed letters were an auxilliary way of creating new letters in Tibetan and Phags-pa, reversals and inversions are the basic manner in which letters were created in Mandombé.

Phags-pa fonts and research is from BabelStone

No Rotation Operator

2005-10-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

Richard Sproat carries out a lot of research on writing systems and aproaches it in a very organized way. I asked him last spring about Syllabics and orientation as a factor in reading.

"I don't have a good story for Cree. Given the current calculus I would have to say that it's basically a CV syllabary like kana. This is because I do not have a rotation operator, which is what I would need to express important aspects of the compositionality of the system. The superscript dot for the long "o" and "i" is easy enough,but I have no way to handle the fact that orientation is a significant component of the system. This is actually a pretty unusual device and indeed the only systems that make any systematic use of it that I know of are Evans' Cree/Ojibwe and Bell's Visible speech. The latter is of course was a purely scientific notation (though Bell did intend it as a script to replace normal English orthography). So that just leaves Cree and Ojibwe as systems that make systematic use of rotation. I could add such a device to the formal calculus of the system, but I am reluctant to do it just for two writing systems."

So there you have it. I cannot find any further research on orientation as a factor in the readability of a script. In the meantime I have spent long enough working on Mandombé, over the last few days, that I can indeed say that for me, at least, it is significantly easier to learn how to read than Arabic or Chinese, very much so. (I don't really want to admit how long I have been working on Arabic.)

I realize that the layperson may remain unconvinced and simply, based on pure supposition, insist that Mandombé is hard to read, but I haven't got the research to back that up and I have, in fact, looked for it.

Of course, after Tamil, Phags-pa, Cree, Vai, etc. it is possible that my expectations of how a script works are a little different from others'. It is not an alphabet.

Many thanks to Denis Jacquerye for posting enough detail about Mandombé that I can actually figure out how to read it, even if the article is still in progress.

I have used this page and this text to work on learning this script.

PS Personal emails are quoted with permission. Otherwise they are treated as confidential.

Cree Literacy

2005-10-06T18:07:00.000-07:00

Book of Common Prayer, 1860
Here's a little anecdote for the day - something that wouldn't make it into a research paper. However, it is worth recounting since it suggests one reason why there is a lack of research on the relationship between orientations in a writing system and difficulty of reading.

When I was first researching the Cree writing system, I visited John W. Berry a cognitive psychology professor at Queen's in Kingston, Ontario. He has written the book on Cree Syllabic Literacy.

Here is an abbreviated outline of the conversation as remembered many years later.

Me: (painfully embarassed) So, I have to confess that I am finding it quite difficult to remember the directions of the syllabics and I can't really read it.

John: Well, that is probably because you are a woman ..

Me: (inwardly bristling) Oh.

John: (jolly, as usual) Women perform less well on tests of spatial awareness than men.

Me: Uh...

John: But Cree women don't have this problem, of course.

Me: They don't?

John: No, this effect only applies to women in industrialized societies. Most brain research which indicates a gender difference does not apply across cultures. It is not universal.

Me: The differences between men and women are not universal?

John: Only biological and hormonal differences. The differences in spatial and verbal abilities has not been confirmed across cultures. Hunter gatherer societies do not reflect the same patterns....

Me: So the Cree, neither men nor women found the script difficult to read.

John: Not at all. They could all read it within a few years of its being introduced. They were for the most part not aware that it came from missionaries and literacy was transmitted within a very short time over thousands of miles. They could all read.

Me: And today?

John: We have tested the literacy skills of adults in several villages and have not found anyone in the older generation who had difficulty reading Cree. However, for the younger generation, the telephone, radio, TV and English are replacing reading in Cree.

Me: But it is not difficult to read?

John: I have never heard of that.

And he wrote the book.

Berry, J.W. and Bennett, J.A. (1991) Cree Syllabic Literacy: Cultural Context and Psychological Consequences. Tilburg University Monographs in Cross-Cultural Psychology. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.

PS. I have since discovered that I can't read any script at all if I don't speak the language. Now, when I want to learn a new script I find 10 to 20 words in that language and learn to say those words, then I learn to read them. No problem. Then I know all the letters in those words.

Chinese Dyslexia

2005-10-05T20:35:00.000-07:00

Dyslexia is often associated with an inability to either percieve or create the correct orientation in a letter or character. The classic visual image of dyslexic writing showed frequent reversals between the letters 'b' and 'd'. In this view it would be difficult to impossible to be dyslexic in the Chinese writing system. However, this view is outdated, perhaps by 20-30 years according to this article.

I met C K Leong at a conference in Vancouver several years ago and was able to view his pages of overheads showing the writing of dyslexic Chinese children. Many portrayed misformed and reversed characters. Unfortunately I didn't ask him for copies. (Next time!)

In fact, it is not neccesary for the actual symbols to represent reflected sets like 'b' and 'd' for children to have this confusion. The component parts of a Chinese character offer as much opportunity for difficulty to Chinese children as the various letter shapes, and irregular spellings offer English children. There is also a difference in phonological processing at a certain level. However, that is one component of the problem, not all.

I recommend to you this article by C K Leong, P W Cheng and C C Lam.

Exploring reading-spelling connection as locus of dyslexia in Chinese.

"This persistent difficulty with spelling, particularly writing to dictation, seems to apply even more so to Chinese children with dyslexia, as compared with children using alphabetic language systems (Leong 1999b). It is only during the last seven years or so that real progress has been made in greater public awareness and understanding of developmental dyslexia in Hong Kong. ... it was estimated that there could be as many Chinese children with specific learning disabilities as estimated in western countries."

So I submit that an absence of transformations in the writing system does not significantly reduce the incidence of reading difficulties. This is, of course, apropos the assumed difficulty of reading Mandombé. I am of the personal opinion that writing systems may vary in terms of the demands put on the readers, but that these effects are more diverse and scattered than one might think and are not easily analysed.

PS If your child has letter reversals you should know that this is a common developmental stage in writing and is usually outgrown. It is only incidentally associated with dyslexia.

Addendum: Shadow has a full bibliography and an image of Chinese dyslexia from one of C K Leong's articles.

Mandombé

2005-10-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

I will soon read further on the mirrored letters of Tibetan and Phags-pa. They are still the earliest examples of reflections being used to create new letters that I am aware of and that is a history I am eager to pursue.

In the meantime, I would like to post about Mandombé. For this post I will be depending on information in part only available in Wikipedia. There are times when we just have to eat our words, for some of us this comes sooner rather than later.

First, thanks to the person who sent me this link with much related information - all of it very interesting. I tried to reply but my email client is suffering from an overactive spam blocker and I can't respond at this moment.

This Wikipedia page on Mandombé gives detailed information of how to read this script. The article was written by Denis Jacquerye and comes recommended by Don Osborn of Bisharat.net.

Since I am constantly reminding myself to return to the visual aspects of a script as the focus rather than its linguistics aspects, which I can't resist but enough of that, here is a page of art inspired by the Mandombé script. It is important to see how this script is understood visually by its users.

Matters of note related to this script. It was invented by David Wabeladio in 1978 in the Congo and makes use of rotations to create both vowels and consonants. Scan down this page to see Wabeladio writing in Mandombé on a blackboard.

This script will lead into the very interesting question of whether transformations and rotations make a script difficult to read - that is more difficult to read than say Chinese or Arabic.

More information here and here.

Rotations or Reflections

2005-10-02T20:21:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about whether rotations or reflections is a more productive principle in letter formation. Some day I would like to think about how these transformations came about.

It all started with Meditations on Utopia. The transformations that the letters undergo in the Utopian alphabet are certainly rotations. However looking at Phags-pa, I realized that I was also looking at transformations, but of another kind, reflections or reversals.

I haven't been able yet to figure out what the rational is to these reversals or if there is one. No doubt I just need to read further. In the meantime I have decided to post this to record and share these inconclusive observations.

I am also wondering if there was a two dimensional layout for the Phags-pa script that I have not yet come across, as there is for Devanagari.

Unfortunately, I have not used a phonetic transcription for these letters so I wouldn't put to much stock in these Ascii transcriptions. Maybe tomorrow I will work on the phonology.

Addendum:

Explanation for reversed letters is found near the bottom of this page. The reversed letters correspond to Tibetan letters and represent retroflex consonants used for transcribing Sanskrit loan words.

Browsers

2005-10-01T23:33:00.000-07:00

I have heard back from several people that they are getting better display in Firefox and Opera than I am in IE. About a year ago someone strongly suggested that I switch to Firefox. So why am I still using IE?

The most important reason is that I need to figure out how one thing works before I move on to another. A couple of years ago I bought a new computer and downloaded as many fonts and keyboards as I felt like. The upshot was that I got a little confused, nothing seemed to work as I expected and I couldn't explain my problem because I didn't know what application I was working in half the time. Well, that computer had a little accident.

So this time I am going nice and slow, one thing at a time. One application a week, maybe installing one new keyboard or learning one new thing and testing that out for a while.

Now the real reason for deciding that IE is the browser I am sticking with in the short term is because the Devanagari/Tamil Syllabic Editor was developed for IE and so far only works in IE. This is an application I am working with frequently so ... Here is Richard's take on this.

"Internet Explorer also offers some useful non-standard capabilities that Firefox doesn't. For example, the page the Tamil 'syllabic input' picker was adapted from uses an IE feature that allows the javascript to track cursor movement over arbitrary dynamic HTML text and thereby allows the insertion of formatting mark-up. "

I don't exactly understand this but I use it.

In the meantime if characters in Extended Latin don't display on a webpage I change the font in my browser to Microsoft Sans Serif since it displays 179 characters. I found browser font display under the Tools menu> Internet Options.

I am a bit of a technophobe actually but I am trying to deal with it in order to indulge in my love of writing systems. Thanks for your help.

An Irregular Syllabary

2005-10-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

From Ed Vajda's Linguistics 201 Syllabus. View the original image here.

These comments are taken from Ed Vajda's class notes posted in 2001. Dr. Vajda is a linguistics professor at Western Washington University, Bellingham, Wa.

"Common misconceptions about Chinese characters
-not concept writing, denote sound
-not logographic; only 40% denote monosyllabic words
-not really morphosyllabic, 11% of Chinese morphemes are polysyllabic: hudian (butterfly), putao (grape)" From Alternatives to the Western Alphabet

He further explains the use of the term 'irregular syllabary' here.

"Syllabaries ... may be highly irregular, with the meaning of words and morphemes being taken into account in the writing of the sound of each syllable: this is the case with Japanese Kanji and modern Chinese characters, as it was with all the earliest syllabaries in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mexico." From Study of Writing

So Dr. Vajda is saying that Chinese writing is not ideographic, not logographic, not even morphosyllabic, but syllabic. Otherwise put, Chinese writing is a heterographic syllabary and its characters are heterographic syllabographs.

Which is why I have been so taken by the simple word 字 zi. If Unicode were being constructed today, I hope that I would be able to enter U+5B57 : CJK UNIFIED 字-5B57 : zì instead of U+5B57 : CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5B57 : zì . However, we live with the legacies of yesteryear and ideograph is a legacy term.

PS. Thanks for all the feedback on font issues.

Square Scripts

2005-09-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

Phags-pa font from Babelstone.

Several Eastern scripts are called square scripts: Hanzi, Hangul, Phags-pa and Hebrew. It is clear that Hangul and Japanese were made to match Chinese Han characters. Phags-pa also developed in the context of the Han characters. However, the Hebrew script is also called square script.

Monotype Imagining gives these descriptions of Hanzi and Hangul.

"Regardless of the number of constituent strokes, each character is drawn within the confines of an invisible square frame. "

"Graphically, the syllables all fit within the invisible square frame used by Chinese characters. Each syllable is made by stacking all of its component parts, in a predictable sequence, into a square configuration. This characteristic has made it quite simple to visually mix Hangul and Hanja into the same text."

This reference from BabelStone indicates that Phags-pa was called "dörbelǰin üsüg" square script in Mongolian and sometimes 'quadratic script' in English.

Hebrew square script, ketab merubba`, can be seen here.

I noticed in passing that Phags-pa letters are called bāsībā zì 八思巴字 "'Phags-pa letters" in modern Chinese. First, the Chinese characters are used phonetically here to write Phags-pa, and second the word zi 字 is used to refer to alphabet letters, much as we would use alphabet to talk about any writing system. BabelStone.

Addendum:

This post has been modified to add "dörbelǰin üsüg", Mongolian for 'square script'. On BabelStone's page the j with caron did not display correctly for me and I saw an empty box. However, I have defined my font as Lucida Sans Unicode and the j with caron displays correctly in my preview window.

The next lesson I need to learn is how to close the font designation as it is skewing other font display throughout my blog. Quite the challenge. I am working on it.If you ever see empty boxes in my blog, other than those I acknowledge, please let me know and tell me what OS and browser you are using.

Addendum 2:

I have continued playing with the font on this page so that I can display the Mongolian term for square script properly without changing the font for the whole page.

Hôt Cuisine

2005-09-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

I drove by a restaurant with this name yesterday and read the sign Hôt Cuisine as Haute Cuisine, and thought about how different Hot Cuisine sounds from Hôt Cuisine. When I googled the restaurant, it was listed as Hot Cuisine on the internet, and serves spicy Eastern dishes. Now I am puzzled, I thought surely this was a play on Haute Cuisine, (probably is) but it works better with the menu if you say Hot cuisine. Hmm. On the other hand maybe it isn't related to French at all and comes from some other language.

Now I really don't know how to pronounce it. I shall have to set up an experiment and say to a friend, "Have you ever eaten at that restaurant at such and such a corner that serves Malaysian food and so on, what is its name, do you remember?"

PS I am really losing it. Yesterdays post was supposed to be titled 'Peter Boodberg'. There is nothing else for it. I will have to read the article again, find a new quote, short and sweet this time, and post it with a link to yesterday's post. What a mess.

Pinyin Accents

2005-09-29T19:51:00.000-07:00

口 U+53E3 : CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-53E3 : kǒu
ǒ U+01D2 : LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH CARON

I shall have far more respect for accents now that I find that I can display them properly at least some of the time.

Mark from Pinyin News has sent me an article by Peter Boodberg. I have been absorbed in trying to understand at least some of it. His language is wonderful. He uses terms like 'the relation of graph to vocable,' and 'the living tissue of the Word' and 'graphic enteguement.'

If you read nothing else please read the last paragraph cited below. This is part of a classic debate that can be pursued further on the many pages of Pinyin.info. If I am not here I am probably over there. Reading.

"The investigation of the corner-stone problem of Chinese epigraphy, the relation of graph to vocable, has indeed been rather retarded than advanced by the new finds. Most students in the field have chosen to concentrate their efforts on the exotically fascinating questions of ‘graphic semantics’ and the study of the living tissue of the Word has almost completely been neglected in favour of that of the graphic integuement encasing it.

It is in the hope of dispelling this fog of misunderstanding that the writer presents in the following pages for the consideration of Sinologists a few hypotheses on the evolution of ‘sound and symbol’ in archaic Chinese, hypotheses that have in view the preparation of the ground for the discussion of this all-important problem.

Pictograms [graphic representations of natural objects] and symbolic signs do not constitute in themselves Graphs, i.e. elements of a written language. In order to become such, they must be conventionally and habitually associated with certain semantic-phonetic values.

Apart from a few exceptional cases, then, ‘ideographic’ characters as a class, we make bold to assert, simply do not exist. Those characters which appear to be such in the later forms of the script are predominantly ‘learned’ creations of Chinese schoolmen, graphical modifications of either original pictograms and symbols or perverse rationalizations of ‘organically’ developed phonetic compounds."

Some Proleptical Remarks on the Evolution of Archaic Chinese. Peter A. Boodberg. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies vol.2, No. 3/4 (Dec. 1937) 329-372

Henrik Theiling's Script Teacher

2005-09-29T19:01:00.000-07:00

Here is an application to help you learn the Latin alphabet equivalent for certain scripts. I don't mind showing the world how much Bopomofo I know - absolutely none. But that may change now that I have this website added to my favourites.

Here is Henrik's announcement in qalam,

"Currently, you can learn Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, Bopomofo, Kangxi-Radicals, Hebrew and Armenian.

More scripts will follow. Besides natscripts, there is a section with conscripts currently featuring Kamakawi's script Kavaka i Oala.

Any comments or requests are very welcome!

Enjoy!"

Natscripts!!! I love that. Thank you, Henrik.

September 26

2005-09-28T21:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, I missed it but here is one more beautiful poster of scripts.

Urglyphs

2005-09-28T18:24:00.000-07:00

There are two particular glyphs that I have been thinking about for a long time.

口 U+53E3 : CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-53E3 : kou
(circumflex removed because it does not display)

十 U+5341 : CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5341 : shí

In spite of appearances this has absolutely nothing to do with Unicode and display issues. The first is a character not an empty box; it is a Han character. These characters have the pronunciation of kou3 (meaning mouth) and shi2 (meaning ten). They are not soundless symbols representing ideas.

(In the preview window it becomes immediately apparent that 口kou3, above, is not an empty box since I have enlarged it by one size, but in my compose window it is still indistinguishable from an empty box. So that is a minor display issue with a happy ending.)

I hope that representing them to myself by sound, as well as meaning, will help me to think about these characters more efficiently. That is, I will be able to think of kou3, rather than about 'the character that means mouth' . Basically, I don't want to think about their meaning but about their shapes as glyphs. I would rather not refer to their meaning every time I mention them. But they have to have an associated sound or they can't be read and discussed. Period.

If I want to think about the letter 'a' I can do so, without thinking about an 'alligator'- if I am over five years old, of course. Well, the same for Chinese. This is about kou3 and shi2. That's it.

While I am building for myself a way of thinking about scripts, it seems worth reminding myself that Chinese characters can be called 漢字 Hanzi. 漢 Han for Han Chinese, I won't go further with that one, and 字 zi4 meaning letter/symbol/character/word.

I have just finished picking up a few ideas after reading some articles on reading in Chinese and I am testing out the notion that in reading, the first and strongest association is between graph and a unit of sound, (even if the sound is not immutable). Maybe this will help me remember these letter/symbol/character/word, these zi4. I am retraining my neural pathways.

I am not going to digress into reading theory; I will return to the shapes of these glyphs and how the notion of a square frame and a quadrant have influenced writing over the centuries, here and there. This is not some great theory of universals, just a collection of details, as I find them.

Addendum: I am getting some discrepancy between the posted display and the preview window. I will try not to be distracted by this.

Father and Son

2005-09-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

I started a free translation of the passage in the preceding post using what might be called dynamic equivalence or a cognitive translation. However, I found that as the references became metaphorical it was hard to maintain the contemporary style.

This is Haimon talking to his father, Creon, in Antigone by Sophocles. Some things never change.

"You think you are right all the time,
That you are more articulate and more intelligent than everyone else,
But in fact you are pretty shallow,
If you were really smart you would be willing to learn more,
And not care so much about holding a tight rein all the time.”

Here is a 1954 translation by Elizabeth Wyckoff.

"Whoever thinks that he alone is wise
Ηis eloquence, his mind, above the rest,
Come the unfolding, shows his emptiness.
A man, though wise, should never be ashamed
Of learning more, and must unbend his mind.
Have you not seen the trees beside the torrent,
Τhe ones that bend them saving every leaf,
While the resistant perish root and branch.
And so the ship that will not slacken sail,
The sheet drawn tight, unyielding, overturns,
She ends the voyage with the keel on top."

Antigone translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, in Sophocles I, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, U. of Chicago Press. 1954.

Free translation, appearing first, produced with the help of Liddell and Scott, 1875, a tattered old copy of an edition intended for use in American schools "in preparation for college."

Polytonic Greek Fonts

2005-09-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

Here are the next three lines of the passage from Antigone by Sophocles with no defined font.

ὁρᾷς παρὰ ῥείθροισι χειμάρροις ὅσα
δένδρων ὑπείκει, κλῶνας ὡς ἐκσῴζεται,
τὰ δ᾽ ἀντιτείνοντ᾽ αὐτόπρεμν᾽ ἀπόλλυται.

Tahoma is the defined font:

ὁρᾷς παρὰ ῥείθροισι χειμάρροις ὅσα
δένδρων ὑπείκει, κλῶνας ὡς ἐκσῴζεται,
τὰ δ᾽ ἀντιτείνοντ᾽ αὐτόπρεμν᾽ ἀπόλλυται.

Microsoft Sans Serif is the defined font:

ὁρᾷς παρὰ ῥείθροισι χειμάρροις ὅσα
δένδρων ὑπείκει, κλῶνας ὡς ἐκσῴζεται,
τὰ δ᾽ ἀντιτείνοντ᾽ αὐτόπρεμν᾽ ἀπόλλυται.

Palatino Linotype is the defined font:

ὁρᾷς παρὰ ῥείθροισι χειμάρροις ὅσα
δένδρων ὑπείκει, κλῶνας ὡς ἐκσῴζεται,
τὰ δ᾽ ἀντιτείνοντ᾽ αὐτόπρεμν᾽ ἀπόλλυται.

The first section with no defined font does not display properly in my browser, IE, but the rest do. At work my post from yesterday did not display properly although it was in IE on WinXP. I believe the full WinXP was not installed since it is also missing the character map. I cannot go to our tech support at work and complain that my browser does not display classical Greek. Too bad.

A translation of this passage from Antigone by Sophocles will be in my next post.

Addendum: The translation is in the next post titled Father and Son

Polytonic Greek

2005-09-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

ὅστις γὰρ αὐτὸς ἢ φρονεῖν μόνος δοκεῖ,
ἢ γλῶσσαν, ἣν οὐκ ἄλλος, ἢ ψυχὴν ἔχειν,
οὗτοι διαπτυχθέντες ὤφθησαν κενοί
ἀλλ᾽ ἄνδρα, κεἴ τις ᾖ σοφός, τὸ μανθάνειν
πόλλ᾽, αἰσχρὸν οὐδὲν καὶ τὸ μὴ τείνειν ἄγαν.

I installed my Polytonic Greek keyboard tonight. This is the first keyboard and language support that I have installed on this computer. I don't have too much trouble using it. There are dead keys for the accents and spirits (breathing marks) - more about this keyboard later. My first objective was to make sure that it would display properly.

I went to the Better Bibles Blog and read very carefully. The first rule is that one must use precomposed Greek glyphs for accented and marked vowels. In order to do this you have to use the fonts that have them - Palatino Linotype is a common one but Tahoma is a bit more modern looking, I guess. These fonts are already in WinXP and I hope most people have them.

So Polytonic Greek text must be inputted in Palatino Linotype, Tahoma or Microsoft Sans Serif. I settled on Microsoft Sans Serif. Now blogger doesn't offer any of these fonts as an option but if the Better Bibles Blog can display Polytonic Greek then I guess I can. So I dragged out an old HTML guide and looked up fonts. I found that fonts can be described thus. Well, I can't do it, can I? but anyway I did type the HTML for the Microsoft Sans Serif font write into the compose window with the correct code for defining a font, and then tried out the other fonts as well. It worked.

I have posted a few lines from one of my favourite plays. Somehow the dialogue in this play always sounds as if it was written yesterday, especially when the son says to his father "You wish to speak but you never wish to hear!" Some things never change. I don't have a very philosophical taste in Greek literature - give me a good family quarrel. I don't really like David Grene's translation of the section I have posted - maybe someone will give me a better one.

I really have learned something today that I thought I never would. Thanks, Simon, for your comment. Now I will check out your website.

Addendum: The topic of this post continues in Polytonic Greek Fonts and Father and Son

Clickable

2005-09-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

It's neat to see that Roman Numerals have their own codepoints.

I have to post this before I forget it. I have no story prepared to go with this post. It is about wanting to find out what script you are looking at even if you are in an internet café or visiting friends and relatives, and not on your own computer, or don't even own your own computer - maybe you are at work and just have to know that character.

Go to this page Decimal, Hexadecimal Character Codes and paste in the character, then convert it to a hexadecimal codepoint. Then type the hexadecimal codepoint into this page The Unicode Character Code Charts By Script. This page will guide you to the appropriate code chart and you can then discover what you were looking at. In my case I was staring at a blank space. I found that U+0020 was a SPACE character and that there were several other space characters. Imagine different shapes and sizes of blank space. (Actually I do know what some of them do.)

3rdpageSearch makes these nifty multilingual input and search tools. Great! These pages by code.cside.com offer clickable input for the entire Unicode range.

On the other hand don't open these pages at work - they are way too much fun, and these guys/girls are really into soccer/football!

Addenda: I have added an image since it was part of how I wrote the original post but blogger would not accept images at the time that I was posting.

Character Matrix

2005-09-25T01:12:00.000-07:00

When you find something of striking beauty you know it is meant to be shared. Here is a guide to the Character Matrix and the homepage of Brill Academic Publishers.

Finding Syriac

2005-09-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

More from the Wikipedia language page. Or further adventures of Suzanne in Wikipedialand.

This is, in fact, the reconstituted pieces of what was intended to be my initial post about BabelMap. I confidently perused the list of languages in Wikipedia and identified one which I was interested in - I thought it might be in Syriac, another script found on Quangzhou tombstones.

However, I wanted to confirm that this was indeed Syriac. The language code is 'arc' and the language is labeled in English as Aramaic.

I copied the language name, which I supposed to be Aramaic in the Syriac script, into BabelMap's main page edit buffer. I then clicked the mode button to convert the characters to NCR hex (numeric character reference, hexadecimal) and the edit buffer displayed the codes.
#x0715 #x0725 #x0712 #x072A #x0738 #x071D #x071B #x0020 (I had to remove the semi-colons to make sure that the codes would display here rather than the characters themselves.)

I then typed the first code number '0715' into the Go to Code Point window and there it was U+0715 Syriac letter daleth. It was definitely Syriac script.

So far no bells went off. However, I persisted and managed to transliterate this name as 'daleth e beth rish zlama yudh teth'. 'debrit' hmm. Maybe 'devrit'. This did not look good. I could not post this as Aramaic without further investigation.

However, Wikipedia is bountiful, pretty amazing actually, and I was able to identify Aramaya and Syriac below. By cross-checking with the codepoints I feel confident that these are accurate.

Aramaya ܐܪܡܝܐ
Suryaya ܣܘܪܝܝܐ

I confirmed that Aramaic is indeed called Aramaya here and here,

"Greeks had called Aramaic by a word they coined, 'Syriac', and this artificial term was used in the West, but never in the East, where it has always been known by its own name 'Lishana Aramaya' (the Aramaic language.) Paul Younan

So what does the Wikipedia page say? By reading the discussion page I find that Gareth Hughes has made a valiant attempt to figure out what the language name says. He suggests that it must be 'in Hebrew' misspelled. Gareth is one of the authors of the Syriac alphabet page.

D'ivrit? ܕܥܒܪܸܝܛ
‘Ivrit עברית That is Hebrew alright.

The language name in Syriac script does ideed look like a transliteration of the word Hebrew. So is Aramaic really Hebrew written in Syriac script? With respectful reference to the webpages cited above, I do believe that Aramaic is called Aramaya ܐܪܡܝܐ and that is what the Wikipedia language list ought to record.

However, some other unidentifed correspondent on the discussion page still labours under the misconception that it already does say Aramaic.

I originally thought that this would be an easy post leading back to ancient Chinese monuments but they will have to wait. For now, I am relieved that I did not simply copy and paste an unidentified word from Wikipedia into my blog without cross-checking in BabelMap. Thank you BabelMap.

If anyone has another explanation for what apears in Syriac script in the Wikipedia language list, I would be happy to hear it.

It also occurs to me that I now know how to find the author of a Wiki page and I could check that first and occasionally use a Wiki page with discretion.

Addendum: Authors names are few and far between in Wikipedia - I just hit it lucky with Gareth.

James Evans

2005-09-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

Our garden near the Hudson’s Bay
Produced much more toil than pay
Potatoes thrive if they don’t freeze
And sometimes grow as large as peas

In their Own Voices

Here are a few little known details about James Evans. He was born in England where he apprenticed to a grocer, learning British shorthand at that time, circa 1820, well before Pitman's shorthand system was published in 1837.

He came to Canada at the age of 21 because his family had recently moved here. He became a school teacher, then married, and was later converted to Methodism. In 1833 he was ordained in New York City as a Wesleyan Methodist minister and, after that, became a minister to an Ojibwe congregation in Ontario, where he worked with Peter Jones.

It was after his ordination that the Wesleyan Church established a Canadian conference and in 1840 the Hudson Bay company agreed to allow Wesleyan ministers in their territory.

"In 1838, the Canada Conference sent him on a tour of the north shore of Lake Superior. In 1839 he met Governor George Simpson of the Hudson's Bay Company, who in January 1840 agreed to support Methodist missionaries, named by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in Britain, in its territory." Victoria University, Toronto

James Evans then moved north to Norway House, Manitoba, where he implemented his syllabic writing system.

More here:

Dictionary of Canadian Biography online
Manitoba Historical Society

Is Syllabics an Abugida?

2005-09-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

In early August I noticed this new webpage at Chris Harvey’s Native Language, Font, and Keyboard Page – languagegeek.com

Chris begins,

"I have seen, with increasing frequency online, statements proclaiming that Canadian Syllabics (often under the name “Cree Script”) is an Abugida. I would like to list some reasons for why this may not be an accurate description of the writing system."

Here is the offending statement from Wikipedia,

"Canadian syllabic writing schemes are for the most part abugidas, where consonants are always marked in a manner which implies a specific vowel."

After a lengthy discussion on the topic, where he argues passionately that Syllabics is not an abugida, Chris concludes,

"I would appreciate comments from others interested in this subject."

Feeling his pain, I promptly emailed him the following information, which he has posted. I add my further reflections in brackets.

"Peter T. Daniels, who invented the term abugida, calls Cree a ‘sophisticated grammatogeny’, certainly not an abugida. (I asked him this question myself!)

W. Bright and Robert Bringhurst have labeled syllabics an ‘alphasyllabary’.

(I made an error here - it should read 'RB has labeled syllabics an "alphasyllabary", a term coined by WB.')

John Nichols has called it both ‘syllabics’ and a ‘mixed alphabet and syllabary’. (cautious man)

James Fevrier and Marcel Cohen, writing in French, developed the idea of the ‘neosyllabary’, or ‘secondary syllabary’. They also use the term 'alphabet–syllabaire'. (Very interesting books by these authors)

Henry Rogers, in a new book this spring on writing systems, is calling syllabics ‘moraic’. (not good )

I have personally tried out the term ‘compositional syllabic notation’, a term I picked up from an Indic writing systems group." (how about 'systematically composed syllabary'?)

Chris replied to my email,

"This is of course the great danger of Wikis and such. .... It ends up being like an urban legend, that spreads quietly until it becomes common knowledge. When I have free time, I think I'll rewrite the Wiki page. "

Chris is a very busy person and may not have time to rewrite the wiki page. Aside from the use of the term 'abugida' , there are many other peculiar details on this page. The Pitman shorthand reference here is another urban legend. Sigh.

Addendum: I just remembered that Unicode version 4 labels Syllabics a 'featural syllabary.' I have no idea what the logic or justification is for this term, nor have I ever heard it used before.

Addendum 2: I then asked the question about 'featural' in qalam and got this reply from Michael Everson.

"I said:"If you think about it you might suppose that it must have been because someone thought that regular rotations and superscription of base characters was a regular way of indicating relationships."

This is just me trying to interpret what "featural" might mean if applied to Syllabics. I did not apply the term to it. I don't think it is a particularly useful term with regard to the taxonomy of writing systems."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/6126

Well, there it is - maybe definitions are best left alone.

Tamil from Tranquebar

2005-09-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

I was talking about early use of the printing press in India recently and how Tamil, recently recognized as a classical language, was the first script of India to be used in print. Here is Genesis published in Tranquebar in 1723. "The translation was probably commissioned by the Danish State Church." Wikipedia

"This New Testament in Tamil was the first to be printed in any of the languages of India. It was translated by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682-1719) and the text was revised with the help of Johann Ernst Gründler (1677-1720). .... By the summer of 1714, the Gospels had been completed but the large typeface that had been used meant that the supply of suitable printing paper was running low. A new, smaller typeface was cast and the complete New Testament, which was dedicated to Frederick IV, was issued in 1715." From "The Missionary Bible"

While Tamil was printed by the Danish as early as 1715, I have read elsewhere that the Portuguese Jesuits had a printing press for Tamil as early as 1578.

"TAMIL types had been used to print Doctrina Christam in Coolegio do Saluador at Cochin in 1578. Some years earlier in Lisbon, a Cartilha, or Christian Catichism, had been translitereated and printed in 1554. Those are known facts." Early Madras-Printed Tamil Books

Further discussion is found here.

"Though the Jesuits began to set up printing presses in several parts of Portuguese held India, trying their hands, with varying degrees of success, on the Kannada and Devanagari scripts, they did not succeed in establishing the idea of printing firmly on the subcontinent and toward the middle of 17th century all their efforts came to an end. Fifty years later in 1711, Bartholomaus Zieganbalg persuaded the society for promoting Christian knowledge in London to send a further Portuguese printing press to India and soon afterwards he was able to obtain a set of ' Malabari ' letters from Germany. From then on printing seems to have progressed steadily in India."

"European Missionaries and the Study of Dravidian Languages " (Notes on some books and manuscripts held in British Museum) Albertine Gaur, Assistant Keeper, Department of Oriental Printed Books andManuscripts, British Museum, London, UK. N.B. This webpage is published by the Tamil Heritage Foundation.

I find it interesting to note that in 1723 there were no word divisions in the printed Tamil text. It would be interesting to find out who introduced that convention to Indic scripts. Thai is still written without word divisions.

Caveat: I have recently used Wikipedia as a source of images in the public domain and as examples of multilingual electronic text. However, any discussion of writing systems in Wikipedia is so sprinkled with imprecision (to put it politely) that I would never recommend it as an academic reference.

"Insert in Plain English"

2005-09-20T23:10:00.000-07:00

Romanized keyboards are not always unwelcome. View this Tamil search engine which instructs the user to "Please insert/type your phrase in plain English. "

I tried 'Microsoft' since it is a word I can easily recognize. மைக்ரோசாப்ட் Now how shall I write this in 'plain English'?

mikrosoft
mikroosopt
maikroosopt
maikroosaft
maikroosaapt

Jackpot!

So why is roman or Latin alphabet input so popular? I was thinking about it and said to myself "I bet I can think of a dozen reasons offhand." Well, I am now going to respond to my own challenge.

You would rather use English QWERTY input on the keyboard for your own non-roman script if:

1. You learned to keyboard first in English.
2. You learned to keyboard before your script was encoded on the computer, so you used a transliteration instead of your own script.
3. There is no standard keyboard layout for your script.
4. It is cheaper and easier to buy a QWERTY keyboard.
5. The keyboard layout for your own script has changed with the new encoding.
6. You don't like using the shift key.
7. You can keyboard many different scripts with one keyboard layout, if you keyboard all the scripts by their romanization.
8. You find that there is more content to google in English.
9. You need English anyway for your job.
10. All other keyboard layouts for your own script are really awkward.
11. You travel a lot and use internet cafés.
12. You need to actually see the letters on the keys to type and you don't have a customized keyboard.

Um, not all completely different, but - how am I doing?

I have no problem with QWERTY input for any script. However, I don't think it is safe to assume that QWERTY should be considered universal input and acceptable as the only form of input for a non-alphabetic writing system.

The Cherokee keyboard

2005-09-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

Paul sent me this screen shot of the Cherokee keyboard for Macs. (As always you must click on the image to enlarge it.) Here is his description.

"Here's how the built-in OS X Cherokee keyboard works: all four rows of the keyboard (including the number keys) type Cherokee characters, and holding shift gives you a different set of Cherokee characters. I counted 86 glyphs all together. If you need to type a numeral, Command-number key gives you the corresponding numeral (instead of a Cherokee character)."

I am very glad to have this image since I couldn't view the Mac keyboard otherwise. Here is a previous email which I wasn't able to follow up.

"Apple ships my Syllabic and Cherokee syllabic keyboard layouts. QWERTY and otherwise."
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com

So the 86 symbols of Cherokee fit on the keyboard and are input as syllables, one keystroke for each syllabic character. That is a glyph-based syllabic keyboard. Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics also has syllabic keyboards, but with fewer characters that is not so difficult.

The full Cherokee keyboard layout can be viewed here.

Bangla in BabelMap

2005-09-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

Last week I was using the windows character map to find all the Indic scripts bundled with Windows XP by selecting any font that sounded Indic and trying it out. However, I missed one. The Vrinda font for Bengali.

I found Vrinda with BabelMap, a unicode character map for windows. While BabelMap's homepage displays the main window of this application, I have chosen a screenshot of the font analysis utility because, ahem, it took me a a few tries to find this. (It is in the tools menu, for anyone like me who doesn't know to open the tools menu first off.)

Click on this image to enlarge it and look in the checked dialog box for "List all fonts that cover this unicode block" ( a unicode block is usually a writing system). I tried Bengali right away because the blocks are listed in alphabetical order, and found that Vrinda was the font for that block; the Bengali characters displayed immediately in the sample text box.

By cross-checking with Alan Wood's Unicode Resources page for Bengali here I could see that I had complete Bengali support. Out of curiosity I went back to the main page where I selected the Vrinda font in the bottom right hand corner and selected Bengali under Unicode Block on the left above the edit buffer. The entire Bengali block appeared in the grid and I was able to see that the empty boxes represented 'reserved' spaces and not missing characters.

Indic scripts are quite intricate so I found the magnified character which appears on the right click a very attractive feature. Here is Bangla in BabelMap, main window, with U+09B2 : BENGALI LETTER LA magnified.

I was able to identify a few more writing systems and their fonts in BabelMap also but this is enough for tonight.

It wouldn't have been so difficult but I am working on a new computer which still lacks my favourite image editing software so these screenshots were produced using paint. It worked - just took a little longer than I thought.

Addendum: Not the fault of paint. It took me a while to find the resize button. Don't forget I am the same person who didn't know to open the tools menu without prompting.

Deadkeys

2005-09-18T17:12:00.000-07:00

On the Unicode Mail Archive today there was a post on dead keys.

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sun Sep 18 2005 - 01:58:43 CDT

"Dead keys are an important practical problem. People have difficulties in learning to use them. People may have used computers for many, many years without ever realizing how they can use dead keys to type letters with diacritic marks. They have just wondered why typing "~" or "^" behaves somewhat oddly, in a delayed manner. "

There was a very interesting and informative thread on dead keys on the A12n-collaboration list last July which I passed on at the time but definitely worth reading the pros and cons presented there. Actually this is a post that has been sitting on the back burner since July and I am just getting around to it.

Subject: [A12n-Collab] Key order in combining diacritics (Re: Font companies serving academia/linguists)
From: Don Osborn
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2005 18:54:18 -0500

"Interesting how things have changed - in handwriting the accent always is added last and even on typewriters you have to backspace to overstrike something. Actually when dealing with new computer users in languages that use accents and tone marks, it would be more intuitive to have either a single keystroke or the diacritic added after. And in fact perhaps simpler for the user, at least at first, to have the latter approach."

Subject: [A12n-Collab] Re: Key order in combining diacritics (Re: Font companies serving academia/linguists)
From: Chris Harvey
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 09:57:09 -0400
Organization: languagegeek.com

"I'm not sure I'm happy about Microsoft's (or anyone else's) Technology dictating how languages ought to be typed. The technology should be developed to implement what people want, not the other way around. Other key layout developers (Keyman on PC, XML keylayouts on Macs) give much much more flexibility. Furthermore, MSKLC is often not very useful for non-alphabetic scripts.

Dead key arrangements "are" an option, just not with MSKLC. As to which key-order is the most intuitive, that depends on the user. I've heard arguments/preferences both ways. If you think of accented capitals in Greek, the accents go to the left of the capital, so perhaps typing the accent key first makes sense. Personally, I agree with all of you, I prefer to type the accent after the base letter, especially for languages like Vietnamese, Kaska, Han, Tutchone which stack accents. "

I have some sympathy with Chris Harvey, a very experienced keyboard designer, but, on the other hand, dead keys! I can't say little enough about them myself. There is an interesting array of perspectives in these threads in any case.

For further discussion on dead keys see Mike's post Dead keys are not intuitive , Friday, December 17, 2004.

Addendum: If Chris Harvey says he needs deadkeys to create keyboards for his clients, then I believe him. Take a look at this page of keyboards.

Quangzhou Tombstones

2005-09-17T23:05:00.000-07:00

Tombstone with cross on lotus flower and inscription in Phags-pa, photo by Ken Parry.

"Christian Angels on the South China Coast is an historically significant photographic exhibition featuring photos, never before seen outside China, of Christian tombstones of the Mongol Period from Quanzhou in South China.....The tombstones are unique and their significance lies in the fact that they provide evidence of a multicultural society in Quanzhou in the 13th and 14th centuries."

I was entranced by Andrew West's comment about Phags-pa,

"I was in Quanzhou (Marco Polo's Zayton) earlier this year, and the Quanzhou Maritime Museum has the most amazing collection of gravestones and architectural artefacts dating from the 13th and 14th centuries, when Zayton must have been the one of the most cosmopolitan cites in the world. In addition to a complete Hindu temple, a Tamil inscription dated 1281, and hundreds of gravestones inscribed in Arabic, Syriac and Uighur, there are a number of Christian tomb stones. The most important of them, in Latin script, was that of the 3rd bishop of Zayton, the Italian Andrew Perugia (Andreas Perusinus), dated 1332. However the gravestones for ordinary Christian Chinese had inscriptions written in Chinese using the Phags-pa script. These stones are a rare example of Phags-pa being used for private use rather than offical purposes, and I don't know of any non-Christian tomb stones or memorial stones that are written using the Phags-pa script."

I was trying to recount this story to a friend and, not knowing exactly where Quangzhou was, I had to read further. That is how I came on this radio program City of Light.

"Nearly all the Christian tombstones from South China are of the late medieval period, and they’re almost exactly contemporary with Marco Polo’s visit to China. And they are all early to mid 14th century..... They were all found in or near the medieval city port of Quanzhou near the modern city of Xiamen which is the capital city of the province. It’s just on the Taiwan Straits, as the nearest bit of China to Taiwan..... The Christian community in medieval Quanzhou came mainly from Central Asia, and by that time the Silk Road used a mixture of languages.

Well the first thing that’s apparent is the use of the cross, and of course this is unique to the Christian world. But the very interesting thing is that we find in the iconography is the cross is supported on a lotus flower, and we first find this actually in China dating back to the 8th century. So we find that on these tombstones, the iconography relates actually to earlier Christian iconography in China, and shows quite clearly I think, a continuity between the earlier and the later period."

Addenda: Visit Andrew's new webpage 14th Century Christian Tombstones from Quanzhou.