2495: Greek-Based Nubian Writing Oct 11, 2021

The Greek alphabet led to the creation of numerous other writing systems around Europe, including Coptic, Gothic, Latin (via Old Italian), Cyrillic (via Glagolitic), Armenian, and Georgian. As impressive as this is, it used to be practiced more broadly and thus adapted more widely, particularly with association to Christianity. Even after the Arab invasions, those kingdoms withstood and remained Christian, maintaining a Greek-based writing system until the collapse of their kingdom to the Mamluks and later Ottomans, by which point most people were illiterate and the writing fell into terminal decline.

2344: A History of G and Z May 19, 2021

The letter Z is pretty uncommon in English and at the very end of the alphabet, but this was not always the case. Much like in the Hebrew or Greek writing systems, this letter (or its equivalent) both are numerically 7th though now in Greek it is 6th in order. The elimination of Z was done deliberately by the Roman censor Appius Claudius who saw Z as a foreign letter even though this is only true insofar as Latin doesn't really use it; it was very much present through the creation of the alphabet. This was then replaced with the Roman-invented G now occupying the 7th position, with G being based off of C in form to represent that it is just the vocalized form. The use of the letter G to represent [d͡ʒ] (as in 'giraffe') is from French orthography.

2105: Brahmic Abugidas Sep 19, 2020

Any writing system that takes certain shortcuts so to speak such as not including vowels, or including an inherent vowel (as with an abugida) will run into certain problems. Brahmic abugidas such as those used to write Hindi or Bengali use letters which represent a consonant with an attached vowel (usually /a/). A problem then arises when either there is a different vowel or no vowel (both solved with a diacritic), or when there is a cluster of consonants, as this is not treated uniformly; for instance there is a special mark in these systems to indicate the inclusion of /r/. This is further complicated given that all of these systems can combine at least 2 and up to 4 letters into more complex ligatures (i.e. joined together). These systems are used from over India and across much of Southeast Asia, and have even had a significant presence in Japan.

Watch the newest video, about historical languages.

Get Word Facts Merch.

Support on Patreon.com/wordfacts

1167: Writing Systems: An Overview Feb 18, 2018

There are many different writing systems from all over the world, used with varying frequency, but not all of these are alphabets. The most obvious example of this may be with pictographic and logographic writing systems (symbols that represent words but aren't images thereof), which aren't alphabets because little to no attempt needs to be made to convey the way that the word sounds. This is why Cantonese and Mandarin (are not mutually intelligible when spoken always, but are written in much the same way. However the list goes on, for instance with abjads, such as for Arabic, Hebrew, and also Tifinagh, Syriac, and ancient Phoenician for which consonants are represented, but not necessarily vowels; Greek and by extension Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are essentially Phoenician but written left-to-right and with the addition of vowels. There are also syllabaries—where a syllable is represented but not the individual sounds—such as for Cherokee or Katakana Japanese. Finally, there are abugidas, which represent consonant-vowel segments; this gives the vowel more prevalence than in an abjad, but not equal status to consonants, such as in an alphabet. Of course, some languages are more suited for certain writing-systems than others, which is why Inuit words look so long written in the Latin script, and but why the Cree abugida (used for some Inuit-Yupik languages) could not be used for Georgian, with its long consonant-clusters.

Check out the most recent Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/ETRNxrPVDvI

Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.