2145: Icelandic Cursive: ð, æ, and þ

There are certain letters including ð, æ, þ, ƿ, and ʒ (all represented in the lower case) which used to exist in English writing but no longer do. That said, three of these ð (like in 'THe'), æ (as in 'At'), and þ (as in 'THin') are still used in Icelandic. This raises the question: how are these written in cursive. Especially considering that Æ/æ was actually from Latin unlike the other Germanic ones, despite its current name 'ash' coming from the ash tree Germanic rune ᚫ which preceded it has a longer history. There are examples in the photo below from an Icelandic document from the 1920's. Indeed, all letter of these letters and more would have cursive form, especially since this was more popular in the past.

2141: "Loansounds" in Hebrew: [tʃ] Oct 25, 2020

Hebrew has no letter to represent [tʃ] (like in CHew) but there are two different traditions to draw from to do this. The way that was used for Yiddish, which did have this sound regularly, was to write טש (T-SH) as is used in קטשופ (ketchup). This word is also notable because it doesn't use the for of פ when it appears at the end of the word, ף, where one would be expected. Because the sound only exists in new loanwords, what Hebrew usually does for other foreign sounds instead is to add a sort of apostrophe (׳) known as a 'geresh' to indicate a variant. In this case, 'crunch' is written as קרונצ׳, as a variant of צ normally for /ts/. This is also used for instance for the [dʒ] sound (as in 'Jump'), written as a variant of ג which usually represents [g].

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.

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1731: C vs. K (& Q vs. G) Sep 10, 2019

In very old Latin writings, C, K, and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/, those two not yet distinguished in writing. This is mostly the same as in English now, and similarly certain variants were prefered in certain contexts, such as Q before a rounded vowel (hence Qu-). C eventually replaced K in most words, one exception being 'Kalend' (calend), and G was invented off of C—that's why they look so similar—and in places where the Latin alphabet was adopted, like Roman England or places where the Romance languages are spoken today. Elsewhere, like in Germanic areas or Eastern Europe, this was not so, and they kept K. This was influenced also by runic letters, but only so far.

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1224: Most Writing-Systems come from 1 Source Apr 16, 2018

Think of an alphabet other than the Latin script, and what comes to mind: Cyrillic? Greek? Hebrew (Assyrian)? Arabic? Ge'ez? Brahmi? Devanāgāri? Pallava? Khmer? the list goes on and on, but one thing that these and many others have in common is that they are all ultimately descended from the ancient, Phoenician writing-system. There are literally dozens of writing systems that have some roots with the Phoenician alphabet (it's called that but technically it's an abjad), with a few notable exceptions being Chinese, Korean, and anything from the Americas, including Cree, which was nevertheless was invented by someone who had the Latin script. This means that as foreign-looking as something written in Hindi or Khmer looks to someone writing in English, the alphabets all go back to the same place. Sometimes this is obvious, such as what became ה in Hebrew (Assyrian) became h in Latin, but other times it may look like more of a stretch. Carrying on from yesterday, there will be more about writing systems in the coming days.
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1223: Why the Abjad Works for Hebrew Apr 15, 2018

While theoretically any alphabet can be used to represent any language, given that there is some arbitrarity to all of them, some are more fitting for certain languages than others. For instance, the Assyrian alphabet used to write Hebrew (and Yiddish) primarily is an abjad meaning that vowels are not written in, at least necessarily. However, this does not mean than English words cannot be written in with this system, such as
איי לייק ביג באטס אנד איי חנות לי
graffitied on a wall in Israel reading a transliterated—not translated—"I like big butts and I cannot lie". However, the reason that an abjad is especially fitting for Hebrew is that while it has 9 vowels (five short; four long) any unstressed short vowel becomes the centralized schwa /ə/. This is in contrast to Yiddish where—like in the very similar German—vocalization is more important, and this is reflected in the writing which uses Assyrian letters, but more fully uses the vowels: א,י,ע, and ו.
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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.

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