2520: Koppa Ϙ/ϙ Nov 6, 2021
The Phoenician abjad, which is the origin of the Greek alphabet, contained certain letters for sounds that in Greek didn't exist. The Phoenician qoph (pronounced [q]) didn't exist in Greek, and since Greek could already use Κ (kappa) the Greek letter koppa (Ϙ, ϙ) was used before back-vowels. This practice was retained in Etruscan and Italic languages for a while, but unlike Q, which also came from this same Phoenician letter, Ϙ in Greek didn't survive, except sometimes for numerical purposes to represent 90. It is a similar story with the Cyrillic koppa (Ҁ ҁ) which is also now archaic.
2514: R Rotunda: ꝛ Oct 30, 2021
There are numerous examples of pairs of letters that get combined into one ligature, which does happen even today. In a sense, that is how the German ß was formed from <S> and <Z>, but as in that case, it's only a specific pair. For a time, a form of writing lower case <r> existed known as the R rotunda which looked like <ꝛ>, and, lacking a line on the left, would be tacked on to letters only if one such like existed, like <d> or even curved lines like after <o>. This was especially used for blackletter, or in other words, the font most associated with the Middle Ages. This helped to develop the modern cursive form of <r> which is notably different to its upper-case or printed counterparts. Indeed, blackletter has some characters which, without prior knowledge, would not be interpretable to a reader today, but this case was notable since there was another form of the letter used for when there was no other letter to apply the r rotunda onto. Because this character was not popular outside blackletter fonts, it more or less fell by the wayside in the 16th century with the overall decline of the script.
2513: I Longum: ꟾ Oct 29, 2021
Latin vowels used to be written with apexes, which looked more like traditional accent mark than the macrons used for writing out long vowels in Latin today. This was the only form of punctuation, if it can even be called that, sine historically Latin had no lower-case, no spaces words or breaks for sentences. The only other variable in this system was 'i longum' or 'long i', written as ꟾ which represented the long vowel but didn't take the accent mark. While it is true that J developed from I, it is more accurate to say that J developed from ꟾ. Moreover, in Latin orthography, if two i's would be written together, the second would be ꟾ to distinguish it from N or even U (V). Likewise, in Dutch, there is a common digraph for the long [iː] sound written as IJ, and often further stylized with a smaller i in front, sometimes written as Y, though the Y was not related historically.
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.
2490: How נ Became Short Oct 6, 2021
Hebrew, effectively has 3 ways of scripts, hand writing, printed, and liturgical script. These are mostly the same, and the reasons for the evolution of each helps to elucidate the differences in each. For instance the letter נ—pronounced /nun/ and an ancestor to N—(except as it appears word-final) is the same length as other letters standardly in print and new liturgical writing, but at the end of the word it goes low (ן). In hand-written script though, it is long both times and is distinguished by being straight at the end of a word, and curved otherwise. However, before a few centuries ago both forms were long in formal holy writing; the reason being that in the beginning/middle of a word, its base juts out and causes the concern of interfering with the following letter.
2487: Cuneiform and Linear A Oct 3, 2021
Cuneiform, arguably the first writing system, was based in wedges pressed into clay from the corners of a stylus, hence the triangular formation, and was used for many languages, both Semitic and otherwise. These two factors help to explain why there is such a volume of known texts—hundreds of thousands of tablets—to survive. In the transition to other writing systems, such as Linear A, named because its lines were cut or pulled, like with a pen, as opposed to pressed that it would allow for more flexibility of writing overall. Cuneiform was not the only pressed form of writing, as this practice is also found from Ugaritic alphabet (technically an abjad), and despite how widespread this was, being used across the whole of the Middle East from Anatolia to Persia, it was not as easy, nor useful for non-clay media, and was eventually replaced having once been the replacement for drawn glyphs too.
2486: Linear A & B Oct 2, 2021
The Greek alphabet was ultimately derived from Phoenician (a.k.a. Punic; a.k.a. Canaanite), but considering the shapes of the letters, the inclusion of vowels, and changing direction of the writing itself, this was not an immediate process. Two writing systems, known as Linear A and Linear B, emerged in the eastern Mediterranean. Linear A was used from about 1800–1450 BC with no decipherable texts to date, but was used by the Mycenaeans (Minoans): early Greeks based in the Aegean and especially Crete. Already Linear A switched to a left-to-right script, and in addition to containing symbols for old letters, there are new letters, grammatical symbols, whole syllables and a number system including fractions. In Linear B, also used by the Mycenaeans from about 1450 BC until the Bronze Age Collapse, seemingly for primarily official purposes. Like Linear A, some symbols were letters and others whole syllables—not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs in that way—with about 200 overall signs. Ultimately, these, and other scripts used for early Greek language writing can help to show the transition of a once glyph-based system of representing words and sounds into a recognizable form of the alphabets it led to.
2461: Old English Rune Poem Sep 7, 2021
The Old English rune poem is a significant document in runology wherein each line contains a riddle to which the name of the rune is the answer. It uses 29 Anglo-Saxon runes as opposed to Young Futhark's runes. Unfortunately, the original was lost in the Cotton Fire at Ashburn House in 1731, though it had been copied in 1705 onto copper plates. On these copies however, some of the formatting was changed and possibly more than two lines were added.
2453: Secunda Aug 29, 2021
One of the best ways that Biblical Hebrew phonology is understood is from the Secunda, of the Hexapla. This is part of a 6-level interlinear translation into Greek of which the Secunda is a Greek-alphabet transliteration of the Hebrew text, written in about AD 3rd century. Obviously this has its own issues for basing one's understanding of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, but it does lend some insight. Certain sounds represented in the Greek lettering are significantly different to the modern or modern liturgical varieties of Hebrew, each having their own differences anyway. This is especially useful to glean from local place names, but again, is limited insofar as any writing system will be when used by foreigners for a language with no major similarity.
2446: Times New Roman Aug 22, 2021
The most popular font of all time, and one of the most recognizable is Times New Roman, created in 1931 by The Times, a London newspaper. The Times only used this for 40 years of its 236 year history though, from 1932 to 1972, and since then the paper has changed fonts on five occasions, in part due to changes in the actual paper and overall layout styles. Still, these new fonts are mostly variations on the Times New Roman classic, which itself tried to draw on traditional italian styles of the early printing presses, hence the 'Roman'.
2445: X-SAMPA Aug 21, 2021
X-SAMPA was a system for transcribing, theoretically, any vocal sound in a standardized way. In 1995, this was not the first nor last attempt at something like this, notably coming about a century after the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) which was and is more dominant. What X-SAMPA brought to the table was that it allowed people to transcribe these sounds on a normal QWERTY keyboard as a way to get around IPA's special characters, even if they should have Unicode support. This is still used today, but X-SAMPA does not have a one-to-one correspondence with the IPA and in the current updated version there are IPA symbols that can't be transcribed in X-SAMPA.
2367: Anomalous: The Rare Dagesh in Guttural Letters Jun 11, 2021
Hebrew uses a system of diacritics to represent vowels, but also to represent other phonetic changes. Still, there are some anomalous cases in the Torah. The dagesh—appearing as a dot in the middle of a letter—distinguishes basically 2 features; either it will distinguish between plosive or fricative forms in six letters: בג"ד כת"פ (note that not all of these are still productive) but more often the dagesh is used as a דגש חזק ('strong dot') indicating gemination. This latter use is found in all other letters to effectively double that particular sound but those mentioned above and the 'guttural letters': א, ה, ח, ע, and in many ways ways ר. This last case, ר (reish), representing [ʁ] or [ʀ] is found in at least 17 cases, which is still very few, that are throughout the Prophets and Writings. Even fewer exceptional cases—about four—are found with א (aleph) even though this is often taken as a 'silent letter', such as in Genesis 43:26, Leviticus 23:17, and neither of these have other vowels added.
2345: Digamma: Greek's Ghost Letter May 20, 2021
The letter G effectively replaced the letter Z in the Latin alphabet, but in the Greek alphabet the letter Ζ,ζ was also affected in its order in the alphabeta. The Hebrew and Phoenician letters, zayin, are both 7th and as numerals means (7) as is true in Greek numerals despite it being 6th in order. This is because the letter Ϛ,Ϝ known as Digamma which used to be 6th was used and eventually disfavored, merging with Sigma—namely the Lunate Sigma—creating the only Greek letter with 3 distinct forms (capital, lower case, and word-final). This had originally represented the sound /w/ which no longer exists in Greek.
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.
2335: Adlam May 10, 2021
While most scripts around the world are quite old, from the Dark Ages if not antiquity, a number from Africa developed in the 20th century are gaining some traction. For instance, the Adlam script was used across the Sahel and in particular the country of Nigeria by around 65 million people had previously been written in both the Latin and Arabic script, but both were insufficient for its expression and thus Adlam was developed by 2 teenagers in the 1980's. Both due to its native phonology that doesn't match the other two previously used writing systems, as well as its diacritics for things like consonant gemination, prenasalized consonants, long vowels and modified consonants, it much more accurately and simply represents the functions of the language. It also has its own numerical system which is written right-to-left, unlike in Arabic where the writing is also right-to-left but the numbers are left-to-right.
2304: AZERTY & QWERTZ Apr 7, 2021
In addition to the English QWERTY keyboard, there is the French-language AZERTY layout, and the German and Slavic QWERTZ. Granted, many of those have variants to themselves, such as the Swiss keyboard—which is based off the German QWERTZ—but has special keys that either have German diacritics (ÄÖÜ) or French accented letters (ÀÈÉ), but usually for a languages special characters, they will be in the same place, with 2 keys to the right past (P), and 3 past (L).
In the beginning of the 20th century, many alternative keyboards were used but did not catch on in large part because while keyboards were not as widely used as today thanks to computers, the people who used them—mostly secretaries—were trained in QWERTY or AZERTY.
2300: Rocky Origins of QWERTY Apr 3, 2021
The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, marketed as the Remington No. 1, saw the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard, so named for its arrangement of four rows of keys. in the order we are familiar with now around the globe. It was not until the Remington No. 2 however that this would gain any popularity. For one thing, it only had capital letters, and it was not possible to see what was being written as one wrote, known as a blind writer. It was also expensive and took training to operate, with all of these factors and generally poor marketing leading to a popular lack of enthusiasm. Still, the 1874 design did lay the foundation for its more successful successor, and now ubiquity among the adoption of its keyboard layout, at least with English. Other languages such as French will use different arrangements of keys for the same keyboard; in the case of French it is known as the AZERTY. In both cases, there were competitors who introduced other layouts, but these never caught on.
2253: Intro to Pinyin Feb 14, 2021
Pinyin is the official system for transliterating Mandarin Chinese using Latin letters, designed in the 1950's. The goal was to make the language easier to teach to those unfamiliar with the language at the beginning stages. That said, as with any writing system the sounds represented will not be exactly the same. In European languages this is of course still true such as the English Z [z] compared to the German Z [ts], but Pinyin established relations between letters that are otherwise related traditionally, like
J [tɕ], Q [tɕʰ], and X [ɕ] or alternatively
Z [ts], C [tsʰ] (granted Z and C these are commonly related in Slavic languages). Overall, the way the spelling is approximated does not take from any single European language, but picks certain ones out individually.
aside from those sounds usually more distant to the Western ear, the system does allow for a general approximation of Chinese pronunciation, especially with vowels.
2237: Maltese Jan 29, 2021
The Maltese language is a perhaps more exceptional at first glance than it looks. There are a few things about it that shine through even on the surface, such as how it is the only Semitic language with Latin alphabet (though with extra letters like Ħ ħ), the only Semitic language of the EU, and that it has considerable Italian and English influence, despite being descended from Sicilian Arabic. Indeed, not only does a sizable portion of the vocabulary take from Italian, but also certain aspects of its grammar, partly because of its lack of connection to Arabic through Islam. It is also more closely recognizable to a speaker of Tunisian Arabic than would be the case the other way around, but this sort of asymmetry is not really so rare around the world.
2224: Lunate Sigma Jan 16, 2021
The Greek letter sigma is special in its design in a number of ways. It is the only to have 3 forms: Σ, σ, and ς (the last only found at the end of words), but even these are not the only way it's looked. The Lunate Sigma used in Greek of the Hellenistic period, was written in a C-like shape, now known as the Lunate Sigma (uppercase Ϲ, lowercase ϲ) called as such in reference to the Moon. This should not be confused for the Latin letter C/c. It only has two forms, laking the distinct word-final form that is found today. These days, it is mostly found in religious contexts or other decorative fonts.