HANDBOOK

OF SCRIPTS AND
ALPHABETS
 HANDBOOK
OF SCRIPTS AND
ALPHABETS

GEORGE L. CAMPBELL

R
LONDON AND NEW YORK
 First published
by Routledge
1997 CONTENTS
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1997 George L. Campbell

Typeset by Florencetype Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Preface vii Greek
Redwood Books, Trowbridge, Wilts Gujarati
All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be Arabic 1 Gurmukhi
reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any Hebrew (with Yiddish)
Armenian 6
electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter
any Batak 9 Japanese
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
Bengali 11 Javanese
information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers. Berber 14 Kannada
Data Buginese 16 Korean
British Library Cataloguing in Publication
available from the British Library Burmese 18
\ catalogue record for this book is

Cambodian 21 Malayalam
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Campbell, George L. Cherokee 25 Mongolian
Handbook of scripts and alphabets/George L. Campbell. Chinese 27 Oriya
- Handbooks, Roman
1. Writing - Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Alphabet Coptic 38
manuals, etc. I. Title. 40 Samaritan
Cree
P211. C25 1997
Cyrillic Sinhalese
411-dc20 96-5765
(with Old Church
ISBN 0-415-13715-2
42 Tamil
Slavonic)
Devanagarl 47 Telugu
Egyptian 49 Thai
Epigraphic South Arabian 52 Tibetan
Ethiopic 55
Georgian 59 References
Gothic 61
 PREFACE

The script tables contained in this handbook originally appeared ir

'
form of an appendix to my book, Compendium of the World's
(Routledge, 1991), where they provided a natural complement to the text
articles describing the languages which now use, or once used, these
scripts. If they now appear articles, it is because the
without the relevant
themselves seems to justify their separate
intrinsic interest of the scripts
publication. Indeed, over and above their main function - that of
providing notational systems for human language - many of the scripts
have considerable aesthetic appeal; and at least two of them - Chinese
and Arabic - become, in the hands of skilled calligraphers, exquisite art

For handbook, some of the tables have been slightly amended in

this
order to accommodate additional detail, and most of the commentaries
have been rewritten and amplified. One item - the script table and
commentary for Epigraphic South Arabian - was not included in the
Compendium.
Ideally, many more examples of orthography, usage, print styles and
calligraphy would be called for, but considerations of cost have ruled this

I would thank Simon Bell for initiating this project, and for
like to
his helpful advice and co-operation at all stages of selection and presen-
tation. I would also like to thank Kate Hopgood for her careful editing
of a difficult text.

G.L. Campbell
 ARABIC

Arabic is written from right to left in an alphabet of twenty-eight letters,

all of which are consonants. The language has six vowels, three
short and

three long. The three short vowels are fatha (a), kasra (i) and damma
(u). Fatha and damma are written above, and kasra below the line. Thus,
with the consonant b:

v ba u bi V bu

The short vowels are not normally written except in pedagogical texts,
and, of course, in the Qur'an, texts of which are always fully vocalized.
The three consonants alif, waw and ya' are used in the notation of the
three long vowels, a, i, 0, with their short counterparts, fatha, kasra and
damma, on the preceding consonant; thus, again with b:

l-ba Wj bi .# bu

Twenty-two of the letters are connected in writing both to the preceding

and to the following letter; the relevant initial, medial and final forms are
set out in the accompanying table. It will be seen, however, that six letters
have no medial form: that is, they cannot be joined to a following letter.
Additional signs used in Arabic script:

(a) Nunation. An Arabic noun is either definite or indefinite. For most

nouns, indefiniteness is expressed

the ending -un, marked as . superscript (

marker changes to
'
/-an/ and / /-in/ in the oblique cases). For
example:

Siijl madinatun SLjl medinatan sijAa madinatin ('town')

Sukun. The superscript marker ^ov °

that consonant is vowelless: e.g. j>"

(c) Hamza. The marker * indicates the glottal stop. The bearer for Lezgi, used the Arabic script until, after a short period of experimental
initial hamza is always alif, with fatha, kasra or damma as required. romanization, Cyrillic was imposed on them. At present, Arabic is
Medially, hamza may be carried by alif, waw or ya'; finally, it is retained for a number of important languages, including Persian, Urdu,
placed on the line of script. Pashto, Baluchi, Kurdish, Lahnda, Kashmiri, Sindhi and Uighur. Since
(d) Shadda. A doubled consonant (geminate) is written as a single the phonological inventories of these languages differ, in some cases
consonant with the sign '
over it. This is called shadda or tashdid. markedly, from that of Arabic, the script has had to be augmented and

Cf.
adapted to meet the new demands made upon it. An extreme case is
provided by Sindhi, in which certain Arabic letters have been adapted to

'J^k 'he broke'

denote the six retroflex sounds, six aspirates, four implosives and two
nasals found in Sindhi. In both Persian and Sindhi certain Arabic letters
'J^k 'he smashed to pieces'
are redundant, in that two or more Arabic phonemes are reduced to
one sound. Thus in Persian the four letters X (Ar. /5/), j (Ar. /z/), J*
(e) Madda. If long alif follows the glottal stop, the hamza sign is dropped,
(Ar. IdJ), li (Ar. IzJ) are all realized as lii. Similarly, the three Arabic
and one alif is written as superscript over a second: J = /'a:/. Madda
phonemes IW, hi and /§/ fuse to give hi.
may occur medially, notably in the word ^|_ji qur'anun 'Qur'an',
'Koran'. Arabic has no capital letters.

The Arabic script is a derivative of the Nabataean consonantal script,

which was used for inscriptions in Petra from the second century BC to
the second century AD. The earliest manuscripts of the Qur'an (eighth
to tenth century) are written in a style known as Kufic, i.e. associated
with the city of Ktifah Mesopotamia, though this provenance has been
in

questioned. It is the source of the maghribt style, which developed in

Spain and which is still used in the Arab states of North Africa.
From the eleventh century onwards, the beautiful flowing cursive style
known as naskhi was developed and perfected to become the Arabic
script par excellence. This is the form which underlies most contemporary
type-fonts. A somewhat simplified form, known been used
as ruq'a, has
for ordinary purposes of handwriting (as distinct from calligraphy) since
the Ottoman period. This utilitarian form does not, however, depart from
naskhi in the way that 'grass script' (cao shu), for example, distorts
Chinese standard characters.
There are several offshoots of naskhi, such as the ornate and exquisite
much used for poetry in Persian and Urdu, and divani,
ta'liq (or nasta'liq),

the script of the Ottoman Turkish imperial chancellery. The supreme

tour de force of the divam style is the tugra - the monogram or cipher
specifically designed for each Sultan. Nowhere is the curious alchemy of
the Arabic script made more manifest than in the tugra: the jinn of pure
formal beauty emerges from the bottle of the script. The frontispiece
shows the wondrous emblem created for Stileyman the Magnificent.
The Arabic is, or has been, used to notate many other languages.
script
Among which have abandoned Arabic script for Roman are
those
Indonesian (Malay), Hausa, Somali, Sundanese, Swahili and Turkish.
Several Caucasian languages, e.g. Chechen, Kabardian, Lak, Avar and
 Final Medial Initial Alone
THE ARABIC SCRIPT Transliteration

THE ALPHABET

Transliteration Final

ie (ed.) The Worlds Major Languages,

NUMERALS

\ Y X I o "\ v A \ \. \\ \Y Y. Yo >..
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 20 25 100

J, ta?

J* 3a?

Tayn
t
yayn
t
<_* fa?

(i qaf

il kaf

J lam
 THE ARMENIAN SCRIPT
ARMENIAN
THE ALPHABET

Transliteration Cursive

U uu
b
The thirty-six letters devised early in the fifth century AD by Bishop f p

Mesrop Mashtots to notate the sounds of Classical Armenian have fitted

the language so well that hardly any subsequent modification has proved
necessary. As Emile Benveniste wrote: 'un analyste moderne n'aurait
presque rien a y changer' (quoted in Minassian, 1976: 31). The letters

$ and were added in the twelfth century, representing a shift

in the pronunciation of -av to hi, while £ was introduced to denote HI,

a sound alien to Armenian, found in loan-words.

Punctuation marks:

full stop

exclamation mark e.g. uiiu/''^ /avagh/ 'ali

n
question mark e.g.
%£ /inc/ 'what?'
f,
 Transliteration Cursive BATAK
r n «-

U tt

1 t

Batak (also known Toba) belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of

as
Austronesian. spoken by about 2'A to 3 million people in northern
It is

Sumatra. Much of the rich traditional literature of the Batak people has
been recorded in a script based ultimately on an Indie model. The script
is now losing ground to Roman.

an, M. (1976) Manuel pratique

 THE BATAK SCRIPT BENGALI
THE ALPHABET
v/-» a <£• dja

"7*7 ha *^C da

OC ma < nga
The derivative of Brahml in which Bengali (Banla) is written is also used
for Assamese, Khasi and a few other local languages. The inherent vowel
in any consonant, corresponding to Devanagarl /a/ is hi: thus is /ko/. ^
hi alternates as inherent vowel, in consonants forming polysyllables, with
M, but always in the sequence 0-0, never the reverse: thus, bow 'big',
gorom 'hot'. This alternation forms part of the vocalic assimilation or
'vowel raising' which is a characteristic feature of Bengali phonology, and
which can be broadly summarized as follows:

h, e, 0/ -> [o, i, u] if the following syllable contains lil or IvJ

/i, u, e/ -» [e, o, ae] if the following syllable contains h, a, e, 0/

[e] if the preceding syllable c<

MEDIAL AND FINAL VOWELS

[o] if the preceding syllable c< .s/u/

For example call 'I go', is pronounced [coli], where inherent hi is raised
to [o] before similarly, from Sana 'to hear', Sunt 'I hear' (lot -» [u]
=50 O mri, -5- = />u
before lil). The hi
lil;

-» [o] and lei -^ [ae] shifts affect pronunciation only;

COX =b, the others are notated in the script.
Both short and long i and u still figure in the Bengali vocalic inven-
pangolat \ make: tory, but the distinction in length is no longer phonologically significant.

In Bengali, as typically in the Magadhan daughter languages, the three

sibilants of Sanskrit (dental, retroflex and palatal) have coalesced to yield

lil,with a tendency towards Is/, especially in Bangladesh.

Conjunct consonants are formed, as in Devanagarl, by means of juxta-
position and superimposition.
Other signs used in Bengali script:

Sanskrit anusvara, Bengali onusar: in Sanskrit, the sign , super-

script above the letter which it marks the unmodified nasal.
follows,
In Bengali it is notated as s. and may be replaced in some words
 by the velar nasal !§ . As in Devanagan, vowels may also be nasal- THE BENGALI SCRIPT
ized by the sign o .

o Sanskrit visarga, Bengali bisorgo. In some Bengali words the sign CONSONANTS
indicates strong aspiration; in others it marks a lengthening of the

preceding consonant. For rules of sandhi affecting visarga, see

<j» k ** *t« ^ gk $«
Devanagan.
E c In eft
*f/ */* (£P n

fcr u v5 4 Tydh =f.

i ^ = Devanagan Op Ik/.
S5 » V^th Tfd t$dh T\n

The accompanying table shows the consonantal inventory of Bengali, the *\p Tpph ^b \*j bh Urn
independent vowels and the secondary vowel signs in combination with
3 y 3' m *v
«r< ?* 7f, ?h *r z TJTi*

VOWELS
(a) independent:

^a <=TU *< *' §»

4 i § ai ^6 $a» *Rar
(b) in combination » ith Ikl:

m ka ftki %ki l k« Jku

Vkri C$ ke )j$kai (§\ko <&ka

NUMERALS
5 ^ 8 6 ib <\
b i
 THE BERBER SCRIPT
BERBER
THE ALPHABET

Berber is a member of the Afro-Asiatic (Semito-Hamitic) family of

languages. It seems to have been originally spoken in a strip of North
African territory, stretching from the Atlantic coast to the borders of
Egypt. Over the last thousand years, Berber-speaking populations have
I I
spread far beyond and today two or three hundred
this original habitat,

Berber dialects are spoken in about a dozen North African countries. The O
total number of Berber speakers is put at about 12 million. The principal Q O
dialects are Shluh, Tamazight and Riff in Morocco, Kabyle and Shawia
in Algeria, Tamahaq {Tamashek or Tuareg) in several Saharan countries.
All of these dialects are essentially spoken colloquials, with no written
literature. Nevertheless, a script for the notation of Berber consonants
had been devised more than 2,000 years ago, as is shown by two bilingual
(Punic-Berber) inscriptions, found in the Roman city of Dugga in Tunisia.
COMBINED LETTERS
Many hundreds of Berber inscriptions have also been discovered in Libya.
These are in Roman script, but are of great value as they are vowelled.
The two inscriptions found at Dugga are in a script identical, or at least
very close, to the tifinagh script, which is still in use among the Tuareg
people. The word tifinagh is the Tamahaq plural form of tafineq, which
means 'letter*, and is a berberization of the Latin word punica.
Tifinagh is a purely consonantal script, written from right to left. It has
no way of indicating initial or medial short vowels, though the point called
tagherit (see the accompanying table) may be used to indicate final /a, i/
or Aii/. Further, the letters and £ can be used as the counterparts of
:

V. (1890) La Langue Tamm

the Arabic /u:/ and fill. There is no way of indicating gemination, which
is of phonemic importance in Berber.
 THE BUGINESE SCRIPT
BUGINESE
THE SYLLABARY

•* •N *0 « ^
pa

The Buginese-Maccasarese syllabary known in Buginese as hurupu'

Aga
*
ba
^/
da
n>
i"
<fc
ra
^
qa
sulapa' appa' 'four-corner letters', is based on an Indian model, runs from
left to right, and retains the typically Indian system of marking non-inde- >s \f <C~v ^5> +® <»
pendent vowels as super-, subscript or collinear adjuncts to consonants. nga ma na na la ha
From the accompanying chart it will be seen that the Devanagart velar,
labial, dental and palatal series are each represented by three consonants ** x> «* *** **
(the aspirates are missing); and each row ends with a homorganic
conjunct: ngka, mpa, nm, jica. The inventory is completed by the four
semi-vowels y, r, I, w, the sibilant s and the spirant h. The letter ^^»
serves (a) to notate initial 'a/a, and (b) to act as a carrier for other
vowel sounds in initial position. The vocalic diacritics are here shown in
combination with the c<

^ *» \+& ~*>*v *&

la li lu le lo la

Major defects in the script are its inability to notate independent vowels,
and the absence of markers denoting gemination, nasalization and
glottalization. Thus *$• can be read as saw 'sorrow', sara' 'rule' and
sarang 'nest'. According to Sirk (1975) the conjunct graphs are not system-
atically used.
In Maccasarese, which does not have the vowel M, the diacritic *> is
used to indicate that the syllable so marked is followed by a nasal conso-
 BURMESE

First-tone vowels other than the three specified above are mai
BURMES subscript dot, e.g.

Gn3 ke, OJ ke, SCO'S *a, <$ ke.

Third tone vowels are marked with i (< Sanskrit visarga) e.g.

Burmese (Myan-ma) belongs to the Burmic branch of the Tibeto-Burmese

family. From south-west China, where its close congener, Yi, is still

spoken, Burmese was carried southwards, to reach its present habitat by

the ninth century AD. Here, it came into contact with the Mon language,
and the Pah scriptures of Buddhism. The result was an amalgam: Tibeto-
Burman stock with a Mon-Khmer substratum and writing system, plus a
Pali-Buddhist ideological superstructure. The earliest written records in
Burmese date from the eleventh century. By the twelfth century, Burmese
had replaced Mon as the literary language of the Mon court.
The Burmese script is derived from the Mon version of Brahml. As in

all Indie scripts, each base consonant has an inherent short vowel la/. In
addition to their primary forms, all vowels and certain consonants have

secondary forms. The table shows the consonantal inventory of Burmese,

and the initial vowel signs and the secondary vowel signs as applied to a
consonant, denoted by C.
Eleven vowels are coded for tone, i.e. they require no tone marker.
Seven of these are second tone, three are first tone, and one is third.
Using Ik! as bearer consonant, we then have:

Second tone

coo la, Ski, ojM, Qmks, mSki, cco5fc>, c^kd,

 THE BURMESE SCRIPT CAMBODIAN
CONSONANTS

tha da da
C( cc o c»
Cambodian (Khmer) belongs to the Mon-Khmer sub-division of the
There are about 6 or 7 million speakers in
Austro-Asiatic family.
Cambodia and Vietnam. The oldest inscriptions in Khmer date from the
seventh century AD.
VOWELS The Khmer script derives from a South Indian variant of Devanagarl.
(a) independent: The original Devanagarl order is preserved (the retroflex and dental series
have coalesced) as is the siting of the vowels; and, as in Devanagarl, the
6 e §
consonants in their base state have a syllabic value, i.e. a back vowel
inheres in each. Khmer use of this Indian material, however, introduces
an essential innovation: the consonants are divided into two series or
fl <5 <5 o with base inherent vowel -aa; the second with
registers: the first series
base inherent vowel -oo. One and the same vowel sign is then realized
differently depending on the series of the consonant which it vocalizes.
nt, represented by C: Thus, the system doubles the vocalic inventory (Cambodian is very rich
in vowels) by giving one specific value to a vowel sign following a series
C -a Co -a Cos - -
a C -i C -f C (Cl) -« C (C| -«J
1 consonant, and quite another value to the same vowel sign following a

«C -e «C -<? C -S «c5 -6 eCo -<5 C -6 series 2 consonant. Formally, Series 1 consonants correspond to the orig-
inal Devanagarl voiceless stops with their aspirates (including the affricate
series); Series 2 consonants correspond to the Devanagarl voiced stops
with their aspirates. For example, kh in series 1 represents Devanagarl
CONJUNCT CONSONANTS
kh; kh in series 2 represents Devanagarl gh. As illustration: kh in series
As a general rule, conjunct consonants retain their primary form and are written
1 is 9 kh
; in series 2 is US ; both can be followed by the vowel sign for
as subscripts, but four - ya, ra, wa, ha - have specific forms, shown here as
long a: ~\ : but 2D Pf is pronounced [khat] ('to polish*); VX> fT is
applied to ma:
pronounced [khoat] ('to prevent).
« ma, HI mya, § mya, % mwa, <j hma, g| mywa, % hmya. The consonantal phonemes of Cambodian are shown in the table. The
phonemic values given are those of consonants preceding vowels. As first
§/„„ yfl , ik«, §„,y.
components in clusters, and as finals, the aspirated consonants are reduced
to their non-aspirate values: /kh/ > /k/, etc.

The vowel symbols with their first and second series values are also set
NUMERALS out in the table.

°J?93 S
?"E°
 CAMBODIAN

Some examples from : the velar, palatal and dental series: THE CAMBODIAN SCRIPT
Seriessi Series 2

CONSONANTS
ft ft Ikoal neck ft * /kaa/ mute

9 Sift /khat/to l£5 nrtft /khoSt/ to

ft kaa * 3 IS baa b

polish prevent

a to/ be
9 *<$) £j phaa ph
B tf>
inscribe

ittk chaon/ (W /choog/ to

ft kaa * % ft paa P
$$
reach out
interval
ISJ khaa kh or tf phaa Ph
en crp Mam/ to eat en em /noSm/
meat salad
i ao %S maa m
A 3& /don/ ?
?B /dun/alike

elephant
command
ft ft> /taa/ old
J? & /tia/ duck
& caa c ft tU yaa y

Source: Huffman, F.E. (1970) Cambodian SyhMm of Writing and Bepnni ng Reader. Yale & chaa ch 6 f raa r

Ltaiversi ty Press.

A coo c & OS iaa I

Asc an be seen from the consonant chart, cert ain Cambodian phonemes
are not paired, e.p series 2 moo has no series 1 correlative *raaa.
it
;.

is ilecessary t<3 produce such

Where
a correSati ve, a conso nant can be
:
ruj chaa ch & ? waa w

'converted' by diacritic: " converts a Series 2 into a Series 1 consonant, CD ftaa n £ & sua s

If) haa h

Similarly, ~
converts a Series 1 into a Series 2 c<
»» t
Conjunct consonants are frequent in Cambodian. The second compo- ff
nent is written as a subscript, which is usually a reduced version of the
f'f qaa
base form. There are, however, several irregularities.
The value - i.e. whether it is to be read as series 1 or 2 - of a vowel
following an initial or a medial cluster depends on the nature of the
components forming the cluster. Very briefly, all stops and spirants take a. (1970) Cambodian Svste,

precedence over continuants, and therefore determine vocalic sequence.

Thus, in /tray/ 'fish' the series 1 stop /t/(taa) takes precedence over the
continuant M andrequires the vowel /ay/.
Where two stops belonging to different series form a cluster, the
subscript takes precedence. For instance, in /pteah/ 'house* the series 2
subscript /t/(too) prescribes the vowel; /ph/ > /p/ is a
 CAMBODIAN

CHEROKEE

Cherokee is a member of the Iroquoian group of the Macro-Siouan family.

The language is spoken today - exclusively as a second language - by
--> sraq qaa aa a l about 20,000 to 30,000 Cherokees in Oklahoma, with a residue in North
^ sraq qeq e i S -
Carolina. Ousted in tribal warfare from their original habitat in the Great
Lakes area, the Cherokee moved south to Georgia and the Carolinas,
where they proceeded to model their way of life and institutions on those
\ sraq qay sy U f- of the European settlers. By the early 1800s they had achieved a remark-
able degree of administrative, economic and cultural stability.
^ sraq qaq * i f- In 1819-20, Sequoyah, a Cherokee half-breed, invented a syllabary of
eighty-six characters, some of which are borrowed from the Roman
^ sraq qai * u alphabet, though with different phonetic values. The spread of literacy in
this script among the Cherokees was rapid, and in 1828 a Cherokee weekly
newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was launched, a unique event in the
annals of the American Indian. Parts of the Bible, tracts and hymn-books
sraq qou soon appeared in the new script.

~u The vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ and

script notates the M
= /a/, and seventy-

sraq qua
nine combinations of consonant plus vowel. It does not notate vowel
1i length, the intrusive /h/, or the glottal stop. It is partially inconsistent: e.g.
?w sraq qaa
in the velar series /ka/ and IgsJ are distinguished, the other five values

3 sraq qia

-3 sraq qia
 THE CHEROKEE SCRIPT CHINESE
THE SYLLABARY

fr ga © ka Fgr Tsi A. go J gu E gv

%r ha 9 he A hi I ho T hu &rhv ARCHAIC
W la ci» k e a G io Kiu fl tv The earliest fragmentary examples of the Chinese writing system date
from about 2000 BC. The first sizeable corpus of connected texts, however,
$~ma ®me Hmi 5 mo $~ mu is provided by the oracle inscriptions on animal bones and
tortoise shells,

which were used in divination rituals by the rulers of the Shang dynasty
XJ na X, hna vr nah Jl ne h.ni Z no ^ nu Onv (c. 1400-1100 BC). From 1899 onwards, great numbers of
these inscrip-

tions have been excavated at the site of the ancient capital, Anyang, and
S qua Q que fya •V quoijt) quu £ ^mv elsewhere. Their content is largely stereotyped along the lines that one
would expect to And in an economy based on agriculture: Is it going to
V satis 4 se hsi * so IP« R,v rain? Will the harvest be plentiful? The question was apparently incised
on one half of a shell, for example, which was then heated; the cracks
h daWta S- de%tel dtj.d'V do S du $* dv which appeared in the other half were interpreted as the answer, and

(ft dlaCt tla L tie Cm "J rfo ^ tlu T tlv

written
A
in.

typical oracle inscription falls into four sections: first, the day and
place of the ritual are specified, the day being given in terms of the sixty-
G tsa 1 tse ir tsi K tso (J tsu Gtsv
day cycle generated by the Ten (Heavenly Stems) and the Twelve (Earthly
name of the oracle may be added; this section always ends
G wa Swe ©vW V wo $ wu 6 wv
Branches); the
with the word zhen 'asks'. The next section gives the text of the ques-
tion, and the third section contains the answer, which is usually introduced
&ya 3 ye tiyi fi yo Gr yu a yv by the stock phrase wang zhan yue 'the ruler read the answer'. Finally,
the concluding section indicates the outcome of xhe prediction. While
s, R. B. and Smith, B. S. (1976) Beginning Cherokee, Norman, OK.
krge numbers of inscriptions are identical as regards both content and
J form, small variations do occur; character sequence may change, certain
' words may be left out or replaced by others. Krjukov (1973) emphasizes
yl the importance of this factor for close analysis of the Shang language. An
i| example of a Shang oracle text is given on p. 28.

The three basic elements - pictographs, ideographs and phonograi

Chinese script are all present in the Shang script, which points to a
period of anterior development.
 - is a conventional diagram: it ts constructed according to a

order of stroke, from a prescribed number of standardized elements - in

Example of Shang o :le inscription (froi
this particular case, from three horizontal strokes rrT, two vertical

* % i ( , one dextro-rotary angle ~ZJ , and four dots v v - • . The graph H

du shou ci shou yu is reducible to these elements, all of which are used consistently as
components in thousands of other Chinese characters. The Shang graph
Glossary: du 'heaven'; shou 'give'; is'; yu 'help' bu 'i
is not so reducible. There was no consistency in character delineation,
adverbial whose meaning is uncertain.
and variants abound.
Translation; Will Heaven give us help? Heaven will not give us help. In Modern Standard Chinese, again, the great majority of 'words'
combine a semantic determinant - the radical - with a phonetic element.
In Shang Chinese this combination is rare; according to Krjukov (1973),
only about a dozen are to be found in the Anyang corpus. In these inscrip-
Examples of pictographs are:
tions we see the beginnings of the diachronic process which was to yield
the typical Modern Standard Chinese 'word'.
~ff (= modern ,f§ ma) 'horse';
Shang characters which share a phonetic element can, on that basis, be
grouped as sharing some common feature of pronunciation. But exactly
rft (= modern pjf yu) 'rain'. what that pronunciation was remains, at best, conjectural.

CLASSICAL (WENLI)
o (= "f" xi'd) 'under, belo\
In a narrow sense, the term 'Classical Chinese' refers to the Chinese lan-

O (= JH shang) 'above, up'.

guage and its literature from the sixth century BC to the third century AD;
a period which includes the lives and works of Confucius, Mencius, Lao
Tzu, Han Fei, Mo Tzu, and Chuang Tzu, to mention only the six philoso-
Phonograms: a phonogram is in origin a pictograph, chosen, for reasons
pher-sages who were to have such a far-reaching effect on subsequent
which are not as yet clear, to notate a homophonic word. For example,
1
the pictograph 'J depicting the ear of wheat, came to be used to denote Chinese thought. In a broader sense, Classical Chinese begins with the Shih
the word lai 'to come' (modern Chinese Ching ('Book of Odes'), which was compiled between the eleventh and
jj^ ).
sixth centuries BC, and which was in fact co-opted, during the central
About 2,000 characters have been identified, a figure which represents
period, to form one of the 'Five Classics' (wu jing). The other four are:
a much larger corpus of 'words'. This is because the Shang characters
(apart from the pronouns) might be described as semantically multivalued
/ Jing ('Book of Changes');
nuclei whose valencies depend on locus and function in the utterance as
Shu Jing ('Book of History');
a whole. Thus, -^ (= modern -p ) can mean any of the following: 'son',
Li Ji ('Book of Propriety');
'filial', 'to be filial', 'to regard oneself as filial", 'befitting a son', etc. Up Chun-Chiu ('Spring and Autumn Annals').
to a point, the modern Chinese graph shares the polyvalence character-
isticof both Shang and Classical Chinese. After the Burning of the Books by the Qin Emperor Shi Huang Di
There is, however, an essential difference between the Shang character (213 BC), of this material was destroyed, the text of the
when most
and its Classical/Modern Standard Chinese derivative. The Shang char- Classics had to be arduously reconstructed. This took place in the early
acter for 'horse', for example (see above), is like a child's drawing of the years of the Han Dynasty, whose espousal of Confucianism determined
animal: it is impressionistic, and the component strokes cannot be used the lineaments of Chinese literature for many centuries to come. In the
to make other characters. In contrast, the character E - standardized Confucian hegemony three factors were crucial: (1) the sacrosanctity of
the classical texts; (2) the examination system based on these texts and
since the Shuo Wen dictionary of 100 AD (see Classical Chinese, below)
theircommentaries; (3) the supremacy of the literati who expounded the
and set the examinations.
classics
composed of radical
Outside the examination halls, a succession of poets - especially in
the Tang and Sung Dynasties - some of them disreputable by Confucian
standards, went on producing a lot of the world's most attractive
That is, the following information is give : the word has to do with
The main source for the character inventory used in the central Classical hearing, and should rhyme with /men/.

period is the Shuo Wen ('explain character') dictionary of the Later Han
Dynasty (published c. AD 100), Here, the characters are arranged under The nature of the script, and one standard method of looking up char-
540 radicals (reduced to 214 in the late Ming Dynasty). The main cate- acters in a Chinese dictionary, are now illustrated by means of (a) eight

gories of the Shuo Wen classification are: full-form characters in bold printed form; (b) the same eight characters
in standard written form (not in the so-called 'grass script' c&ozi, which
1. Simple characters, a few hundred in number, sub-divided into is a highly personalized cursive); (c) stroke order and number; (d) the
radical system; (e) search procedure in a Chinese dictionary.

(a) pictographs: e.g.

(a) Eight full-form printed characters:
* ™i'tree';

jjj

m
shdn 'mountain';

men 'gateway, door';

* Mi
*
zhong fdn
middle sea tea"
(b) d<

jv shting 'above',
m ti M m
qian long shi

-f xid 'below'. money dragon ht

2. Compound characters, sub-divided into (a) ideograms, (b) phon same characters : in standard written form:

(a) ideogn3ms are made from two or mor e simple characters; + % * ik

£ «id 'to sit' is formed from zhong hal chd fan

*n 'man',
A
± ta 'earth.
reduplicated, placed o
« % « *
qian long win shi
% *in 'man', is made from
tkm 'field + -jj 11 'power'. (c) Stroke order is illustrated here by means of four of the above char-
FB

phonograms - the most numerous class - are made from two

elements: the radical fixing the character as belonging to this
or that semantic group, and the phonetic which suggests the
pronunciation. Example:
 t / /• ^ M 4 f { f As example, we
radical f} .
take the character j|j$ having the seven-stroke

After subtraction of radical 149, the character has

V $& H 12strokes twelve strokes.

149 we find
By inspection in the twelve-stroke section of radical

f§S numbered 5825. Turning to 5825 in the body of

. i r r r rrmnnva the dictionary,

examples of usage.
we find the character with translation and many

l3strokes
Pflftflfjfl

' > -i -i -£ -i -i £' -i 1

\" t» ? ^ £

f #-*-#-#- * Sfc * jSt

It will be seen that by writing a Chinese character in the correct

we arrive at the correct number
order, of component strokes. The
number of components underlies both the radical system and the
indexing of characters in a Chinese dictionary.

(d) The radical system is set out on pp. 34-35 in traditional form, as
a table of 214 radicals, beginning with one stroke and rising to
seventeen. This reproduced from Matthews' Chinese-English Dic-
is

tionary. The is followed by a specific example - the list

radical table
of all characters having the seven-stroke radical p|

(e) To sum up: looking up characters ir i Chinese dictionary involves

the following steps.

Identify the radical; with experience this becomes automt

The correct radical is usually obvious, but there are many a
where the radical is obscure, or where there is a choice.

Find the radical in the index of characters. All

having this radical are listed in order of number of strokes;
inspection in the correct section yields the desired character.
 THE CHINESE SCRIPT
THE 214 RADICALS
IK « tt s k«ne s §s *s ^
*MM to; |
a S S S S
f
I s § § §

31 | <$^E#^3HIEM | @*SH*-Si#i

tit w « tE uh m kh m w * * a * t; * «f ^ * ft e
•4— BSSSssBSSsBSSisssisi
«* « flu * H u * e; « « &* * W- * us w( «o b*

1 a s § s
tajKWn^SlKKtf I
$=^C«^*!^*M
rm w\ w 1 4 « n Mf w ^ w ^ ^ ft-W ni n
^ -K- ^ M ft & * g W X ¥ •£ J< ^& *< - dc s*

^K-Kfr-tt-^-K'c a -3 ^' HrJ-efr^u«I£^

| j-.^^j., | m-<^^<c t -\=;z

RADICAL INDEX NOS. 147-150

I § S I B | | | | | j S 5 I I 1 I I 1 1 o 1 S

I I 1 I I i i i § | a g I s 1111 3. i | i i i - I I

»llffl»tt B SffiSff«KfiaiBI 1IIB ,**«««««* **

E

»*«»*«i
fi
i s i I I I i 8 s '
I I 1 8 I § I I I 1 ! 1 1 8
j,
Kftttflft .«ttf»l£lttttfttf«.& tttt»«B«S»« =

§ S | | S | § I g I I I 1 I I
I I I i | § I
I % | i | | | §

1SIIS . ftflEKg&ttfttttlffi
i i § i i i i i i i i i § i
E S B
I I

tta«»««i^»s»
1 = S | | i | | 8

.
i*MftM«**«ii«« S
I 3 I = I | | § | | | I I
8 I 1 I I I I § I 8 I I

i 3 a i i i * i i i i «
8 „ a s s „ a „ 8 g 6 „ a a s i i

1 .1 5 * | I 1 I I 1 I
|

-
- - -
i i
s
 THE COPTIC SCRIPT
COPTIC
THE ALPHABET

Letter Transcription Utter Transcription

PP r

Coptic - the latest form of Egyptian, which belongs to the Semito-Hamitic

C c s

family - was widely spoken in Egypt from the third to the sixth centuries Tt t

AD. It was never the language of administration, a

which the Greek role
introduced by the Ptolemies continued to discharge, even under the
TT yluyl
Roman Empire. From about 100 BC onwards, the old demotic script was G € e[e]
4>$ phlp + hl
discarded in favour of the Greek alphabetic script, and, with the spread
of Christianity, Coptic began to acquire literary status. The translation of
1\ z XX kh [k + hj

the Bible into Sahidic Coptic (mid-third century) was of enormous impor-
H H e
api^ ps
0« tk[t + h]
DJw 6
Thanks to the use of the Greek phonetic script, Coptic is the only form
I i ip.il
of Egyptian whose pronunciation is actually attested; hence the great
HJn, s
R K k
importance of the language for Egyptian philology.

to
Seven additional letters

denote sounds alien to

were borrowed from Demotic (see Egyptian)
Greek: uj / Uf = 1JI, <i = /f/, j, = /h/,
W l
<iq
!>*
f
h[chj

S; = h, x = /d3/j/ d7, <3 = IV.'I, t = lt.il. h

= 3SL
z was probably pronounced as hi, not fed/ as in classical Greek,
/h/ is used for Greek (rough aspirate). The vowel marker - indicates the
'
j>

£ % x[ks}
X* dz
reduced front vowel hi pronounced before the bearer consonant: thus M Oo 0(6] Se c
= teml. Abbreviations are frequent, especially in the case of nomina sacra:
e.g. IHX = ICPAH*. 'Israel'; ccop = C03THP 'saviour'. Hn p *+ ti

Doubled vowels are read as vowel + hamza: BGOGON = /boi?on/ 'bad,

 THE CREE SCRIPT
CREE
THE SYLLABARY

Moose (M) Western (W)

Thisis the major language of the Algonquian family in North America.

spoken by about 60,000 Indians over a vast territory, extending from

It is

Hudson's Bay in the east, across Ontario and Manitoba to Saskatchewan

and Alberta, and from the grain belt northwards to Mackenzie and
Kewatin.
The Cree syllabary was developed by the Rev. James Evans in the
1830s, and by 1840 it was being used to print religious texts in Cree. As
further modified and improved by the Rev. John Horden (author of
A Cree Grammar), the syllabary has been subsequently used for the
considerable body of Biblical translation and original devotional litera-
ture published in Cree from the late nineteenth century onwards.

1
N / r K

I s ~ ^
^ ^ ^ h>

-\J
r^ ? <;
 of which are of considerable literary value. Worthy of special mention in
CYRILLIC this context is the Ulozenie, or 'Code of Tsar Alexis' (1649), a code of
law written in the Muscovite vernacular of the mid-seventeenth century.
This work enjoyed official status and wide dissemination for almost 200
years, and had an important influence on the emergent Russian literary
language. In this seminal role, the Ulozenie has been compared with
Luther's translation of the Bible. Simplification and secularization of
the Cyrillic script came with Peter the Great's educational reforms in
the early years of the eighteenth century. The Petrine 'civil alphabet', the

The earliest Old Slavonic from the tenth century AD, are
texts, dating grazdanskaja azbuka, entered on its new secular career, in the early
now
written in two alphabets, Glagolitic and Cyrillic. The former seems to stages of which book production in Russia was to rise from seven volumes

have been the earlier of the two. Both alphabets are attributed to the a year in 1725 to about 5,000 a year by 1800. The script itself remained

'Apostles to the Slavs', the brothers St Cyril and St Methodius, Greeks unchanged until the 1917 Revolution, when five letters - Tk fc e I , , ,

who were active as linguists and missionaries in Moravia in the middle v - were discarded as redundant, though t, was subsequently reinstated.
of the ninth century. The contemporary inventory is set out in the accompanying Cyrillic table.
As a basis, the apostles used the Greek uncial alphabet, necessarily The Russian vocalic system is systematically divided into hard and soft
amplified with letters denoting specifically Slavonic phonemes. Two letters series, specifically notated in the Cyrillic script as follows:

were borrowed from Hebrew to denote /tjY and /J/: X (isade) > M,
Iff (shin) > Ui. Letters were also invented for the nasal vowels of Old /£/, /a/, lol y lul

Church Slavonic, and for short lul and IV. The Cyrillic version of the w
soft: l\d, : /ja/ e /jo/, /ju/
Old Church Slavonic alphabet is set out in the accompanying table.
With the conversion of Vladimir I of Kiev to Christianity in 989, and One extremely important feature of the Russian vowel system is not
the consequent adherence of the Kievan principality to the Greek reflected in the script. This is the extensive reductionism which affects all
Orthodox communion, a wide new field for the dissemination of the scrip- unstressed vowels except lul. In particular, unstressed lol tends to become
tures was opened up. The Cyrillic script now spread into the East Slavonic [a]: this phenomenon is known as akanje. Where two or more unstressed
speech area, for which, as a South Slavonic medium, it had not been vowels (not precede the tonic stress, the reductionist process is
lul)
originally designed. In point of fact, however, early writing through the graduated through more than one stage of the secondary vowel inventory.
Kievan and Mongol periods (eleventh to fourteenth centuries) continued This is particularly evident in the case of lot: cf. xoroSo /xsrAjo/ 'well,
to be largely in Old Church Slavonic; and the prevalence of a south good'; golova /gslAva/ 'head*.
Slavonic language written in a South Slavonic script was fortuitously The five East and South Slav nations which are in communion with
reinforced by an influx of South Slavonic clerics after the fall of the Greek Orthodox Church use the Cyrillic script with certain modifi-
Constantinople in 1453.
If the Old Church Slavonic language was exclusively used for ecclesi-
Ukrainian: g, i>; m, 3 are dropped, £ /je/, i IV, i /ji/ are added. Thus
astical texts, Old Russian steadily gained ground as the medium for lay
'Kiev' is written as Kh'i'b 'Europe' as GBporia/jevropa/
material. In this new context, the Old Church Slavonic letters for the
;

nasal vowels became superfluous and fell into disuse, while certain other Belorussian: H is dropped, i and f /w/ are added.
letters acquired new functions: notably those for short /uV and IV (Tk and
Old Church
soft syllable closure: cf.
Serbian: the 1818 dictionary of Vuk Stefan Karadzic introduced an
b), which came to denote hard or
adapted Cyrillic, including the following new letters:
Slavonic n^Tb/pafi/ 'way, path', Russian IlyTb /put'/.
The first years of the seventeenth century saw the onset of the smutnoje Ti h /C7, . U u /d 3 /, To b l&l
vremja the 'time of troubles' in the Muscovite state, leading to the raskol,
A> a, /lj/ H> h, /nj/
the 'great schism' in the Russian church - twin developments which
weakened the ecclesiastical hegemony, and opened the door towards
secularization. Old Russian was used for several polemical works, some
 Bulgarian: e, bi, 3 are dropped. The hard sign t is used to denote THE OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC SCRIPT
the typically Bulgarian phoneme /a/ > hi.

Macedonian: has the following additions: THE ALPHABET

f /dj/, J /]/, Xb /lj/ H> lnjl, £ It]!, IJ Idsl, S /dz/.

Name Symbol Transliteration Name Symbol Transliteration

7?ie Cyrillic script as applied to the non-Slavonic languages of the Russian

Federation of States: before the 1917 Revolution the Arabic script was
As & i a Ch'er X Y kh
used for the written languages of the Islamic peoples in Central Asia and Buki & K b O (V) o
the Caucasus. The 1930s saw an extensive experimental programme
of W'edi ii B V TBi v, u, c

romanization, which was soon abandoned; and Cyrillic alphabets were Glagol' r r g Tscherw j
H <t c
the written languages of the Soviet Union. Most of
then devised for all Dobro A A d Scha 111 in j
these are currently in use. E6t' (i e Schta IP MJ St
The considerable involved in adapting the Cyrillic script to
difficulties Ziw'ete iK ?K i Jer T, Tv u
the needs of markedly different phonological systems - e.g. those of the Z elo
J
df
Caucasian languages - were approached (a) by introducing new charac-
Tkl

and by modifying and/or combining existing characters. Thus,

(b)
Semlja 3 3 f Jery
1 M 1'
ters,
Ize H H 1
t
Roman capital I was introduced to notate the ubiquitous (in Caucasian Jerek 1,

languages) hamza-onset and ejective articulation. JetJ -h fc e

Kako K K ft
The Turkic languages of the Russian Federation of States all use Cyrillic Ju 10 W ju
Ljudi A
plus supplementary letters. Most of the Turkic languages have about half
n

Kazakh has Myslite ffi M

f

m Ja M a 1"
a dozen such letters. nine:
Nasch H II n Je M re ]e

8 F K, H 9 ¥ Y h i

Other languages of the Russian Federation of States: to the Cyrillic base,

Nenets, for example, adds for the nasal glottal stop, and " for the
'

oral glottal stop. Nivkh uses to mark aspiration, and distinguishes the
'

o T
velar pair from the uvular pair /q/, 1GI, which are notated as k, r.
/k/, IqI

The voiced velar fricative /y/ is denoted by h the uvular counterpart Ivl \

|0 V e o
by \.
V v
 THE CYRILLIC SCRIPT DEVANAGARI
THE ALPHABET
The Devanagari script is the most important derivative of the Brahmi script,

itseif seems
a left-to-right adaptation of a right-to-left Semitic script, which
to have been introduced into north-west India from Mesopotamia early in
the first millennium BC. The Devanagari letters used for Sanskrit date from
the eighth century AD. The name may be translated as 'sacred city writing'
or 'city writing of the gods' (Macdonell 1924); deva 'divine, god', nagara
'urban'. The thirty-four consonants and thirteen vowels of the script are set
out in the accompanying chart, plus the vowels in combination with /k/:

ki Urn ki ki to ku k[ ftf k[

Conjunct consonants are formed by juxtaposition and or superimposition

(often involving some deformation). Some representative examples follow:

a? cP e£ t^t ?r '^ w w 1 H
F U |T I f^

Tf = rma, % = rka

r following a consonant is written Wanting to the left from

the lower part of the consonant:

W: = km. %^pra

Devanagari is used to write several modern Indian languages. By far the

most important is Hindi.

 THE DEVANAGARI SCRIPT EGYPTIAN
VOWELS (SVARAH)

One of the oldest attested languages in the world, Egyptian belonged

the Afro-Asiatic family, and showed several features snared
CONSONANTS (VYANJANANI) with Semitic. The following stages in the development of Egyptian are
distinguished:

Stops (sparsah) Semi-vowels Others

(antahsthdh) ffi.sma?ifl^j
1. Old Egyptian of the third millennium BC. Known from the Pyramid

?I1?? F
2.
Texts, the most archaic form of Egyptian, and from funerary inscrip-
tions of the fifth and sixth Dynasties.
Classical or Middle Egyptian, covering the period 2240-1780 BC
k kh g gh A h h
(Dynasties 9 to 12).
ST 3. Late Classical: 1780-1350 BC (Dynasties 13 to 18). The Book of the
c ch j jh n Dead was compiled in this period.
y
4. Late Egyptian: fourteenth to eighth centuries BC (Dynasties 18 to 24).
Z 3 ^ £ W T o5 5. Demotic: eighth century BC to fifth century AD.
f ffc d dh n l
6. Coptic.

cr «r * u ^r W ^ The 'sacred writing' deciphered by Champollion in the 1820s is known as

r th. d dh n i s hieroglyphic. Several thousand hieroglyphs are known, many of them
being very rare or hapax legomena. The
? ^ ^r ^r it W
hieroglyphic script is sub-divided

p ph b bh m
(a) Ideograms: these represent objects in purely graphic fashion with
no phonetic element; e.g.

CI ypr/, 'house',

(b) Phonograms: these are particularized signs indicating pronunciation;

NUMERALS
•=> 'mouth'
\ o III,

comes to function in the course of the centuries as the conventional

sign for hi, and a series of such single-valued signs ultimately
produces an alphabet (see below). At no stage of Egyptian before
Coptic are vowels notated. To facilitate pronunciation, modern
 practice
read as
is

/per/;
to vocalize the Egyptian consonants with Id. Thus, pr
sn 'brother', as /sen/, nfr 'beautiful' as /nefer/.
is
THE EGYPTIAN SCRIPT
(c) Syllabic signs representing two or three consonants, often accom-
panied by phonograms: Thus, THE ALPHABET
'=' /nb/, 'basket';

* ^k A (n} F (2)
/sbV, 'star'/

(d) Determinatives: these are class or function markers posted at words

(j
A M (e)
to suggest their semantic field. Thus, verbs of motion are often
accompanied by the determinative ~-J> A (p) N (j)

and words denoting liquids by the determinative |j(|or\\ I « R and L (% b)

^or<2 U 0) H (n)
(cf.Chinese radicals, which have a similar function, though they are,
of course, shorthand for characters with phonetic values). An
Egyptian determinative when acting as such, has no phonetic role; B (3) H (n)
it may, however, be particularized to define the object represented:
J
it is then accompanied by a vertical stroke. Thus in a P (S) KH (X)
(Arab. £)

g"
\J /wbn/, 'rise, shine',

a determinative with no phonetic value; ii

S (D) S K (3)

<* If I
s m T (n)

SH(S) (fc?) <^> T (ID)

The Egyptian script is read either vertically downwards, or horizontally K (2) ls=s TH(9) (n)
left to right or right to left. Ideograms representing gods, humans, or

animals act as pointers to the direction in which the script is to be read:

if they face to the right of the viewer, the script is read from right to left,

and vice versa. Symmetry of a purely formal nature plays an important

Q (?) ^ TCH(T') tt)

part in the arrangement of signs. There is no punctuation.

Source: Budge, W. (1978) The Egyptian Lang
A cursive form of hieroglyphic, known as hieratic, is attested from about
3000 BC. An abbreviated cursive, known as demotic, appears from about
800 BC onwards. While there is a one-to-one correspondence between a
hieroglyph and its hieratic version, there is no such correspondence in
demotic script, which is full of ligatures.
 EPIGRAPHIC SOUTH ARABIAN

Several thousand South Arabian inscriptions of varying length (some

EPIGRAPHIC SOUTH very long) are known. They comprise oracular and votive texts, spells,

ARABIAN incantations,
graffiti,
military records, administrative
burial inscriptions, etc. Two
edicts, legal
definitive collections are:
documents,

1. Corpus inscriptionum semiticamm ad academia inscriptionum et liter-

arum conduit atque digestum. Pansiis.Pars quarta inscriptiones

himyariticas et sabaeas continens, vols I-III. Paris, 1889-1932.
2. par la Commission du
'Repertoire d'epigraphie semitique' publie

From the middle of the second millennium BC onwards, a group of highly Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticamm, vols V-VII, ed. G. Ryckmans
civilized city-states developed in the south-west corner of the Arabian (Inscriptions sud-arabes, Nos 2624-5106). Paris, 1929-50.

peninsula (corresponding roughly to modem Yemen), the most notable

being Saba', Main, Qataban and Hadramawt. The inhabitants of these The first has photographs giving the epigraphic text plus transliteration;
states spoke Sabaean, Minaean, Qatabanian and Hadrami, all four being the second has transliteration only. See also Conti Rossini (1931), Beeston

dialects of the language known as Epigraphic South Arabian. The (1937).

economic success and stability of these states was based on intensive irri-
gation, agriculture and an extensive network of trade-routes. The account
given in I Kings, chapter 10, of the visit of the Queen of Sheba (Saba')
to King Solomon provides a fascinating glimpse of life at the top in
tenth-century Arabia. Gradually through the first millennium BC the city-

states declined in power and prestige, to be replaced (second century BC)

by the Himyaritic state, which preserved, along with a Sabaean-type
dialect, much of Sabaean culture. In addition to the four dialects listed
above, the group includes the nucleus of what was to become Ge'ez,
the classical language of Ethiopia. The epigraphic record points to the
colonization of Ethiopia from south-west Arabia early in the first millen-

nium BC.
The consonantal alphabet, which was used to write inscriptions in the
South Arabian languages, is set out in the accompanying chart. This shows
the monumental character typical of the older inscriptions (eighth century
BC onwards), with some examples, in parentheses, of forms assumed in
the later cursive. The reconstruction of South Arabian phonology and
morphology is hampered by the absence of signs for the short vowels and
for gemination. The exact function of the consonants w and y is not clear.
In forms like -hw (3rd person singular masculine suffix) and ywm (singular
noun 'day'), w appears to denote long lul.
Basically the script runs from right to left. Boustrophedon texts are
also found, especially in the older period. In these, non-symmetric char-
acters such as ^ (m) and 1>| (d) are reversed: jj ,
f<j
so as to face
righton the return line (cf. the similar practice as regards anthropo-
morphic characters, gods and men, in Egyptian hieroglyphic).
THE EPIGRAPHIC SOUTH ARABIAN SCRIPT ETHIOPIC

> h (*>) * 3 to)

8 n (r» fl h cb)
q 1 5f?; n
c
d N The Ethiopia syllabary is derived from the South Arabian consonantal

d H J
H" script, which was used Arabia from about 1500 BC to the
in south-west
second century BC (see Epigraphic South Arabian). Through the first
millennium BC, Ethiopia was gradually colonized by Sabaean merchants
h Y f
and settlers, who brought with them the nucleus of what was to become
w CD
s & <&) Ge'ez, the classical language of Ethiopia.
By the fourth century AD, the South Arabian script, as used in the
? X rf B Aksumite state in Ethiopia (by then Christianized), had undergone two
modifications of fundamental importance: the direction of writing was
fi Y c?) reversed, possibly under the influence of Greek, to run from left to right,
in place of the typically Semitic right to left; second, the consonantal
h ^ graphs were individually modulated, so as to notate their vocalization.

t (D
<W Sf?J £ Thus arose the Ethiopic syllabary of seven vocalic orders, which is set
out in the accompanying table. The first of the seven orders consists of

¥ 8 S(?) £ the base form of the consonant with the inherent vowel /a/.
Five Sabaean letters were discarded as superfluous in Ethiopic, while

y
? (?) t X 6f six new letters were introduced: four of these denote the labialized velar
phonemes q°, h°, k°, g°. As will be seen from the table, these do not have
k h tf> t 2 forms for the second and seventh orders, as labialization per se involves
the rounded vowels Ai/ and lot.
L 1 Serious shortcomings in the Ethiopic script are: (1) the absence of
some means of denoting the gemination which is so important, usually
phonemic, both in Ethiopic itself and in the daughter languages. In the
seventeenth century an attempt was made to remedy this defect by
introducing the Arabic tashdid but this did not catch on. (2) Similarly,
Source: Bauer, G.M. (1966) ia?}* juznoaravijskoj p Ethiopic has nothing corresponding to the Arabic sukun, used to indicate
that the bearer consonant is vowelless. Where conjunct non-vocalized
ir, e.g. in words like medr 'earth', sayf 'sword', the con-

to write them in the sixth order, i.e. with short e: thus, medr
ismedere, and correct reading as medr depends on the reader's
that the only possible pattern (Arabic wazn, awzan) here is
C,eC 2 C 3 medr.
The Ethiopic syllabary is used to write the daughter languages Amharic,
Tigrinya and Tigre, and has been used for other languages such as Somali
and Oromo (Galla). In the case of Amharic, the syllabary was, early THE ETHIOPIC SCRIPT
in the seventeenth century, extended by seven letters denoting specifi-
cally Amharic phonemes.
THE SYLLABARY

A ha ttf hit

'"I ma "% me g°

4> qa <fe ql •)> qa

* te * te * to

% he «, he -^ ho

V wi <P wa

H. zi H za

P. je ft, je p- jo

£. de £ de p. do

% ge 1 ge 1 go-

to, te T te m to

ft. pe k pe & po

K ft 3t se % so

% de 6 de P do

&, fe ¥ fe & fo
t pa V pu X pi y pa T pe T pe y po
THE LABIALIZED VELAR SERIES GEORGIAN

Georgia was converted to Christianity in the middle of the fourth century;

and a need to make the Gospels accessible to the Georgians in their own
language must have fostered the creation of a Georgian alphabet, which
followed early in the fifth century. According to tradition, St Mesrop
Mashtotz, the creator of the Armenian script, was also, at least in part,
responsible for the Georgian alphabet. Like the Armenian, the Georgian
alphabet is clearly based on a Greek model, for example in the order of
the letters. But the Georgian phonological inventory is very different from
the Greek; and this first classification and notation of Caucasian phonemes
- a classification which remains valid today - must rank as a linguistic
achievement of the first order.
This early Georgian alphabet is known as xucuri. In the eleventh
century, it was replaced by the mxedruli 'civil' script. Seven of the orig-
inal forty mxedruli letters are now obsolete. The thirty-three letters now
in use are shown in the table. Punctuation follows the West European
 THE GEORGIAN SCRIPT GOTHIC
THE ALPHABET
6 a ft r

b b b *

a g 6 *
Gothic belongs to the Germanic branch of Indo-European. In the fourth
century AD, the Visigoths were settled along the lower course of the
c° d
a "
Danube and in neighbouring areas, and was here that Bishop Wulfila
it

worked as missionary and Danube, and after

translator, first north of the
e
Q pft
348 south of the river in Roman territory. Wulfila seems to have trans-
v kh lated most of the Bible into Gothic, and our knowledge of the language
3 a
rests on the extensive fragments which have survived. The manuscripts

% 2
c y date from about the sixth century, and were found in northern Italy,
brought there presumably by the Ostrogoths. The script used is, basically,
O) th Q a Greek uncial plus graphs from Roman and Runic (w and o).
b
o i g /

3
k ft m
' *
er 6
6 m d dz

6 n
V ts

ci o
a tf

3 P b X

f)
z
X di

3 h
 THE GOTHIC SCRIPT GREEK
THE ALPHABET

j\ b r A 6
a b g d e

from 1400 to the twelfth century BC,

u z h $ l *
Ancient Greek was
in the Mycenaean
first

script
written,
known
c.

as Linear B. This is the script which was

z h 6 i deciphered by Ventris and Chadwick in 1952. An earlier script, associ-
q
ated with the Minoan culture of Crete, has not been deciphered; the

H A X\ H G language it

The Mycenaean
notates is

script
probably non-Indo-European.
was a syllabary, similar in structure to those used

Jfc / m « / in Japanese. Independent vowels could be notated, especially if initial,

but not independent consonants. Thus Ancient Greek words appear in

n n n s t Linear B exactly as Anglo-American loan-words do in Japanese katakana:

e.g. elektryon appears as a.re.ku.tu.ru.wo. In the same way, katakana
r S writes sukottorando for 'Scotland', and happibaasudee for 'happy
u P t

Y f X 02 birthday'.
The Mycenaean script did not survive the Dorian invasions of Greece.
When written Greek re-appears, in the eighth century, it is in an alpha-

/ Ch hW o betic script based on a North Semitic model. To begin with, the Semitic
direction of writing - right to left - was copied, with frequent use of bous-
trophedon. After about 500, the left-to-right mode became standardized.
Symbols for non-Semitic phonemes were invented. But the truly momen-
tous step was taken when letters for the five vowels a, e, i, o, u were
introduced. This far-reaching innovation ensured that the Greek alpha-
betic scriptwould become - particularly after it came into Roman hands
- the most successful and the most practically useful of the world's scripts.
Not phonologically the most precise: here, the Graeco-Roman script must
take second place to Devanagarl. But no other script has been called
upon to serve so many widely differing sound systems (though the closely
related Cyrillic is a close second). The Greek script which was adopted
in Athens in 403, and thereafter generalized, was, in terms of Greek
dialectology, an Ionic (Eastern) model. The pitch accents - acute, grave
and circumflex - were introduced in the third century. The table shows
the Greek letters, upper and lower case, with their ancient and modern
pronunciation.
 THE GREEK SCRIPT
pronuru t n t n It r t on

THE ALPHABET

[g] g
M
t (elsewhere)
[d] d [a]

[zd] W [o:]

[yd y. ui
h
[t ] th [o] n(g,kh, M
[i] i [i]
[Ok] nk Ko)g]
[k] k M (medially)

[g] (initially)
!>] ' [1]

[m] m H [mp/mb] mp/mb [(m)b]

(medially)
[b] (initially)

[nt/nd] nt/nd [<n)d]

(medially)
[d] (initially)

[dz]

w
[y]
h
[p ] [ll
h
[k ] txl

[ps]
[o]
 THE GUJARATI SCRIPT
GUJARATI
CONSONANTS
h H 31 u £
ka kha g" gha nga

1 y <r/ *
jha

Gujarati (Gujarati) is a New Indo-Aryan language, which took shape from a 6 £

a western form of Middle Indian around the eleventh/twelfth century AD. dha 2
Literature in Gujarati begins to appear in the fifteenth century, and about
the same time in the closely cognate Rajasthani. But whereas Rajasthani
d «l £. H <
ta tha da dha na
stuck to Devanagari, Gujarati, for its part, developed a graceful cursive
script which dispenses with the superscript bar, characteristic of \ k <H <H H
Devanagari. The only other New Indo-Aryan script which is closely pa pha ba bha ma
similar to the Gujarati is the Kaithi cursive script, sometimes used for
writing Hindi in northern India, H \ «l =1

The shows the Gujarati consonantal inventory, and the vowels:

table y m la wa.va
the latter (a) in their independent forms, and (b) in combination with the
consonant b. Like other Brahmi derivatives, the Gujarati script is syllabic,
Zl >* & ti «l
sa sa sa ha la
with short a inherent in each consonant.
Conjunct consonants are formed by juxtaposition, partial amalgamation
or subscript.
VOWELS
As in Devanagari, the inherent vowel is cancelled by virama "^ . The
(a) indep ndent:
final h in Sanskrit words is denoted by visarga, and _£_ amisvara marks
a *
:

nasalization which is homogeneous with the following ci ^ Ul V & G

ail & 5^1 &l

°k <t

NUMERALS
 THE GURMUKHI SCRIPT
GURMUKHI
CONSONANTS

The emergence of the Gurmukhi (Panjabi) script is closely as

the rise of the Sikh religion in the sixteenth century. Earlier, the defec-
tive North Indian script known as Landa had been used for Old Panjabi
texts. The earliest Sikh teachers set about improving and rationalizing
Landa on the Devanagarl model. Thus enhanced, the guru-mukhT (liter-
ally, 'from the mouth of the teacher') script was used to write the text of

the Adi Granth, the 'Original Book' of the Sikh religion, containing hymns
by Guru Nanak (1469-1539), Arjan (1563-1606) and several other
teachers. Gurmukhi is the script now used for the Panjabi language in
India. In Pakistan, Panjabi is written in the Arabo-Persian character. The
accompanying table shows the consonantal inventory of Indian Panjabi.
As in all scripts ultimately deriving from Brahmi, each consonantal
graph has an inherent vowel; in the case of Panjabi, this is short a or hi.
The lay-out of the letters is, in general, close to that of Devanagarl, but
there are two important special features:

(a) Three letters are used to provide bases for free-standing vowels.

§ ura 5M aira S M
As illustration, the vowel signs are now shown in combination with
the consonant /ka/:

ka ka ki kl ku ku ke kai ko kau

(b) Panjabi has three tones. unmarked. A vowel

Neutral tone is

following an initial low tone, [ha] is then

voiced aspirate is in the
mute, and the aspirate becomes its unvoiced counterpart: e.g. the
script form [ghora:] is realized as /kora:/ 'horse'. Cf. [ghar] >
/kar/'house'. In final position, the same voiced aspirates and [ha]
mark the preceding vowel as high e.g. [ca:h] is realized as /ca:/ 'tea';
the [ha] is again mute. Cf. kujh] x /kuj/ 'something'.

There are very few conjunct _„„ i.iuuo 111 Panjabi. In general, for C|C 2 ,

Cj is in base form, C2 is attached schematic outline. Specific subscript

forms are used for ra, wa, ha.
 known as daghesh,
HEBREW
(a) it distinguishes a stop from its correlative spirant, which has no point
(daghesh lene):

tt) tl\ p(*l)B PB *0l)3 ft CDS

di di g y g* bn 63
The north-western branch of Semitic, as it appears at the turn of the marks gemination (daghesh forte), e.g.:
(b) it
second and first millennia BC, falls into two main groups, Aramaic and
Canaanite. By far the most important member of the latter group is ...qqf ...mm® . . . ww H . . . bb 2
Hebrew, known from a vast literature, central to which is the Old pointed at the upper to notate at the upper
The letter shin is left Isl,
Testament (earliest material c. 1200 BC, latest c. 200 BC). For most of
right to notate ///:
the first millennium BC, Hebrew epigraphic material is written in an Old
Hebrew character, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet
around 1000 BC. Circa 200 BC, however, a cognate form of Phoenician-
The sign has a dual function: (a) it denotes the shwa vowel Isl;
,

based script was borrowed from Aramaic, and all subsequent Hebrew marks a medial consonant with null vocalization. In certain
and (b) it
writing is in this 'square' character. The Samaritans alone retained the
cases, there may be some doubt as to the correct reading. A useful rule
Old Hebrew form (see Samaritan). is that in a syllable following a long vowel always denotes /a/.
.

The first table shows the Hebrew consonants with the Phoenician equiv- Throughout the post-Biblical period and the Middle Ages, the 'vowel
alents. It will be seen that five characters - kaf, mem, nun, pe and tsade
letters', waw for olu, yod for i, were increasingly used in prose, though
- have two forms: the second form (in parentheses) is word-final only.
verse was more conservative. In the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century,
Originally vowels were not marked. In the pre-Exilic period, three con-
a conservative orthography known as xaser, which used classical spelling
sonants, yod, waw and he, came to be used as matres lectionis for the
without pointing, received scholarly sanction. At the same time, however,
notation of long final vowels: yod representing /'v., ei/, waw lou ui/ and
the press and the public in general stuck to male, a simplified orthog-
he /a:/. Later, this usage was extended to medial long vowels.
raphy making extensive use of the vowel letters.
In the seventh century AD, the Masoretes - Jewish scholars working
In 1970 the Hebrew Language Academy published rules for a stan-
to preserve the Hebrew text of the Old Testament with maximum fidelity
dardized orthography without pointing.
- introduced the system of vocalization known as the Masoretic. Since
the consonantal structure of the text was held to be sacred, and could
not be modified in any way, vowel points were written above or below
the consonants (but see Daghesh, below). The classical vocalization thus
YIDDISH
preserved represents, therefore, the pronunciation of Hebrew in the
The many innovations in the Hebrew script as applied to Yiddish are
seventh century AD, and there are grounds for believing that the orig-
primarily due to the difficulties inherent in the use of a Semitic notation
inal pronunciation of the language was somewhat different. In addition
for an Indo-European phonology. In particular, the scripta plena used for
to the matres lectionis for long vowels, the Masoretic system marks short largely an imitation of German orthography, dating from the
Yiddish is
/i, e, a, o, u/, plus simple shwa and three shwa augments 16, a, 5/. See the movement in the eighteenth century, which took
time of the Haskalah
table of Hebrew vowels.
of the German Aufklarung. The Yiddish script is
up many of the ideas
shown in the accompanying table. Letters marked with ** are used as

word-finals only. In some forms of written Yiddish, letters marked with

* occur only in quotations from Classical Hebrew literature.
It will be seen from the Yiddish table that alef is generalized as /a/,

alef plus qames is generalized as hi, and 'ayin as lei. Cf.

 JSa 1JH man man'
'"PS H
der
<2i /to; 'the
'the

woman'
THE HEBREW SCRIPT
irp DKt <fo.s kind 'the child'
CONSONANTS
Various combinations are used to denote German diphthongs, e.g. double
Name
Phoenician Jewish Square Cursive
yod plus patah = /aj/. Beth is generalized as /b/, i.e. the voiced stop only,
(= Old (modern (modern)
the correlative fricative M being represented by double waw. Initial alef
Hebrew)
print)

before yod, waw or a diphthong is silent.

3(1)

»(D)
3(1) J(l) nun

8
9(H) pe p,p~~f
s(r) 3(9)
p P qof
VOWELS THE YIDDISH SCRIPT
(a) The Masoretic vowels (without ma s lections). C stands for
THE ALPHABET

tf a
qames: subscript lateral plus vertical:
J*
sere: two subscript dots:
3(3) b
hireq:

holem:
one subscript

one superscript
dot:

dot:
J g
d
W *]«,
1
patah: one subscript lateral:
n h
saghol: two plus one subscript dots:
i, i u
qibbus: three subscript dots in right-slanting line:
n 0}

i) V 'V*
See examples below.
n*
(b) The vowels (combining with var
n*

Long Short Ultrashort Source: Jazyki nan

fa'O .<"? •dV

le^iy ley "\ ?*8

monn "5*1
»»| Aiq

|P»1J 5,0 za,z\

nS" -13
nul
 example, the Japanese genitive/relative particle (?) /no/ is often

JAPANESE represented in kanbun by -^ (zhi), its Chinese semantic equiv-

represented by a Tang Chinese
alent. In man yoogana writing, /no/ is

character, selected on grounds of phonetic similarity. In the same

way, a Japanese polysyllabic word could be represented by a

concatenation of Chinese phonetic approximations. It was an
unwieldy method of writing, and there was no consistency in the
selection of Chinese characters: at least a dozen Chinese graphs are
used to denote the Japanese particle ka.

The Joomon and Yayoi Neolithic cultures flourished in Japan from about
(c) The ninth century saw the introduction of the okototen system,
6000 BC to the fourth century AD. Nothing is known about their
languages, and they seem to have whereby Chinese characters used as kun (see above) were supplied
no written record in the form of
left
with peripheral dots indicating which Japanese inflections or parti-
inscriptions. Old Japanese, as it appears in documents of the
first
cles were to be added to complete the sense. Thus, if we use a
seventh/eighth centuries, is characterized by a sparse phonological inven-
square to represent a Chinese character, a dot at the upper right-
tory, a polysyllabic lexical structure and an agglutinative morphology,
features which qualify the language equally well for inclusion in either
hand corner ' indicates that the Japanese object marker (w)o is
to be added. Similarly, a dot at the lower right-hand corner signals
the Altaic or the Malayo-Polynesian areal types. Japanese philologists
addition of the nominalizer wa, while a dot at the bottom left-hand
have been much concerned with identifying 'Yamato' words - i.e. pris-
corner marks the Japanese participial form in -te, and so on. At least
tine Japanese words - as the core of the language. As attested, however,
eight key markers in Japanese morphology and syntax could be spec-
even the oldest stratum of the language does not seem to be entirely free
ified in this way.
of Chinese loan-words.
The Chinese morphemic script reached Japan via Korea in the
(d) At the same time, the two Japanese syllabaries, katakana and
third/fourth century AD. For Japanese, a polysyllabic and highly inflected
hiragana, were beginning to take shape. Katakana originated in
language, a logographic script such as the Chinese character, perfectly
abbreviated forms of Chinese characters, used as a kind of short-
adapted to a monosyllabic isolating language devoid of inflections, could
hand for mnemonic purposes. The elegant and aesthetically pleasing
be utilized in either or both of two ways:
hiragana syllabary derives from the cursive writing of Chinese char-
acters. Through the late Heian and the Kamakura periods - i.e. well
(a) Chinese characters could be used to designate their Japanese
into the Japanese Middle Ages - literature continued to be produced
semantic equivalents. This is known as the kun method. For example,
in a variety of scripts: in kanbun (mainly by Buddhist priests), in
the Chinese character li| /shan/ in Chinese, meaning 'mountain',
could be read as yama, the Japanese semantic equivalent. Early kun
pure Chinese and in katakana (by male scholars and courtiers), and
in hiragana (by ladies of the imperial court, among whom the Lady
texts often stick awkwardly close to the syntactically alien Chinese
Murasaki Shikibu and the Lady Sei Shoonagon cannot fail to be
text: e.g. negation markers are found preceding verbs, a word
mentioned). By the close of the Heian period, however, the so-called
order which is characteristic of Chinese, not of Japanese. The
wabun style, based on hiragana plus a limited use of Chinese char-
artificial language thus produced is known as kanbun. A modified
acters, had established itself as the most satisfactory medium for the
form of kanbun known as hentai kanbun, while retaining the
notation of Japanese. Printing was imported from Korea in 1593.
principle of semantic transfer, tended to replace Chinese syntax with
Early books are set in wabun style, the kanji being accompanied by
furigana (phonetic glosses in hiragana), where required.

(b) man'yoogana: the kun method worked up to a point with bare stems.
For the representation of Japanese inflections and particles, the
Modern Japanese (hyoojungo 'standard language') is written in a
man'yoogana method was developed: this involved selecting Chinese combination of Chinese characters and the two syllabaries. Hiragana is
used for verbal inflection, nominal particles and many native Japanese
characters, regardless of meaning, as phonetic approximations: for

76
words. Katakana is used for foreign words, particularly the Anglo- THE JAPANESE SCRIPT
American words which proliferate in modern Japanese. It is also the script
for telegraphese. Chinese characters function as root words, both verbal
and nominal. For example, in the complex verb form asobanakereba nari-
THE SYLLABARIES
masen 'has/have to play', the root aso- 'play' is notated as the Chinese
character ^ (Chinese you 'to play') while the remaining ten syllables
conveying the negative conditional and the negative
(final -n is syllabic), HIRAGANA
present indicative, are in hiragana. Most Chinese characters used in
Japanese have more than one pronunciation; as at the outset, over a thou-
sand years ago, the basic distinction is still between the Sino-Japanese ka ga sa
reading (the on-yomi) and the native Japanese reading (the kun-yomi).
For example, the on-yomi reading of the character meaning 'to play', nijfLC^i:trtftf*»)
i M
ki m gi ski ji ji hi bi pi mi n
given above, is yu. Reference to this character in the dictionary (Nr. 4726
in Nelson's Japanese-English Dictionary) will show that out of about
. g* «< zu tsu zu nu fu bu pu mu ru
eighty compounds listed, only 25 per cent or so give t^J its kun-yomi fa.

pronunciation (aso-); everywhere else, the on-yomi reading yu- is used.

In 1946, an official list of 1,850 Chinese characters was adopted as the
desirable inventory for everyday purposes. In 1981, this list was extended
to almost 2,000. Chinese characters not included in this list are accom-
fccr-t-ffcHo is. ff & i> 6
panied,when used in print, by their hiragana readings.
The hiragana and katakana syllabaries are set out in the tables. For the * if if if e*
sha ja
*>*
cka
s* t*
ja nya
t>*
hya
t»
bya
tf*
pya
a*
mya
rj*
rya
structure of Chinese characters, see Chinese ya kya gya
Extensive adoption of American-English loan-words has led in recent
ty £ig> t«i le> L> $® ~%® Cp U © t» t»
1

hty 0®
years to the introduction of several innovative katakana forms, denoting, cku ju nyu hyu byu pyu myu ryu
yu kyu gyu shu ju
for example, /Je/, /tj~e/, /wi/.
<fc it tf* It Li *>t 5* £* *>* tfi Vl ** &*
yo kyo gyo sko jo cho jo nyo hyo byo pyo myo ryo
 JAVANESE
KATAKANA

7 is if -9- -? '
$ y -f /\ ;s- y^ v ^ y 77 V

-f + ^ v y f f - t tr fcf * y 7-f
The Old Javanese literary language is attested from the tenth century

v 9 ? z x -y y % -y
~f -f a )v AD. It is known as Kawi (< Sanskrit kavi 'sage, seer, poet'), and it was
u ku gu su zu tm zu nu fu bu pu mu ru written in a script which is based on BrahmT. The same script
clearly

iJr/^-lfff^^^^^ 1/ 7x
was used for Old Balinese and Sundanese. Typically Indie features in the
script are: (a) its syllabic character: as in Devanagan the vowel /a/ inheres
in all base-form consonants; (b) the consonantal inventory is ordered in

:t 3 =f v y h f y * *' *° * n 7* 9 positional (velar, palatal, dental, labial) rows, each of five terms (see
Devanagan); in Kawi, however, the retroflex series is represented by (a
and da only.
V *t 4+ ">t y> ft ft -+ fc+ tft t> 5t 'it
Also characteristically Indie is the presence of signs for Ixl and /// and
yo fcya gya s/ia ys cha ja nya hya bya pya mya rya
for the three sibilants hi, /JV and Isl; also for anusvara, visarga and virama
J-
y«
*a
Ayu
*jl
gyn
Xj
Mm
yj,
ju
^ fa ~ a ta
chu ju nyu hyu
Ifj.
byu
t°a
pyu myu
5a <Ja
ryu
(see Devanagan).
An <in Kawi is the presence of signs for short and long Isl,
innovation
absent Brahmi model.
in the
3 *a #3 y 3 J? 3 fa fa -3 t 3 If 3 fc°35 3 'J 3
yo Ayo gyo sho jo cho jo nyo hyo byo pyo mya ryo
With thirty-one consonantal and twenty vocalic symbols, the Kawi script
was well equipped to notate a literary language, about 90 per cent of
Long vowels are notated in Hiragana by adding &, t \ '5, &, or &, e.g. whose vocabulary consisted of Sanskrit loan-words.
In Kawi, C 2 the second component of a consonantal conjunct C,C 2
fo #> & $ hi okd-san; ,

could be written, in somewhat modified form, under C,. Thus developed

,

and in Katakana by adding , e.g. through the medieval period the secondary forms, known as pasangan in
modern Javanese. Other modifications took place: many letters changed
in shape, and several, e.g. those denoting the aspirates, were discarded
as irrelevant to the needs of modern Javanese. Punctuation signs were
also introduced.
Column Table 1 shows the primary aksara, column 2 their pasangan
1 in
1

forms. Asnoted above, a > hi is inherent in the aks&ra Table 2 shows .

id by >y in Katakana, e the sandangan ('clothed') signs used to notate the vowels e, i, o, u in post-
consonantal position, and certain other phonemes.
\1-otz itta, and In addition, the Classical Javanese script had a series of 'large' or capital
letters, for use in the names and titles of distinguished p
 2

THE JAVANESE SCRIPT VOWELS AND OTHER SYMBOLS

CONSONANTS
S(g« Atone Value

; 2 Name Ww ° pepet e

urn - Jll -») ha h (mute)

M na n
Ml
d tf ^
; Ltg e/e

<> c* ca tj 1
ra — o (circumfix)
v— « taling-tarung
T.T «n >i •» ra r

«n - Ml, *t, ka k (as final > ?) J pangkonKr.,

paten Ng.
cancels inherent vowel;
corresponds to Devanagari
virama
ICl «0
^ * da d
pingkai marks palatalized consonant

Ut ^ i'
cakra post-consonantal r

^ p kera re following a consonant

/ ^ iayar syllabic final r
HO, m la

r f wigiian syllabic final h

cecak syllabic final n

« „ _J1 ~( pa-cerek re

g 9 9
nga-letet le

Vowels in isolation: these occur mainly in foreign words:

(Ls. <t* a <i <=- e

w

2- * ° 2 *

Source: Bohatta, H. (n.d.) Praklische Crammatik tier Java,

hatta, H. (n.d.) Praklische Gram,
 a ,

JAVANESE

THE JAVANESE SCRIPT VOWELS AND OTHER SYMBOLS

CONSONaiyis
Sign Name Value

1 2 Name Value O ° pgpet e

<um mi Jin -» ha h (mute)

o i

<K1 « d * na J
l e/e
i

c* tf
<> 1

«n— 1~' taling-tarung (circumfix)

-n m -ii -j ra r

Ml, n, ka k (as final >?) a J! pangkon

paten Ng.
Kr. cancels inherent vowel;
corresponds to Devanagari
da d virama
(XI -w
£ *
dt pingkal marks palatalized consonant
aa, «* cdl

OJI « jk -» sa s UL ^ ( cakra post-consonantal t

;;;, O <W
° wa w •5
«* keret re following a consonant *..

/ ' syllabic final r ;x;

"

na, * la !

wiguan syllabic final h "'

<U M ji -» pa p
cecak syllabic final n :jj;i

101 «a
CO « da <
a::

pa-cerek re
UK «*
cs <* jft d3 v 5 <

nga-lelet 16
OJUI «M.
ya J 9 * S 3
OH *a»
dM na P Vowels in isolation: these occu r mainly in foreign words:

ai ».
a v ma m &». &» a C, c e Q oi
(inn ™ g4 g

ana «»
m c ba b 2 8 -
2 s a

¥ V CO <" t* 1

CI *9 o *> nga In the vowel

Ng. refers to
able above, Kr. refers to
Ngoko 'colloquia speech'.
Krama / cromo/ 'polite, formal speech';

Source: Bohatt a, H. (n.d.) /VaAt sche Grammatik d ^an^nSpracHe.^nn,

Source: Bohatt ,H.(n.d.)PraA ftefet Gram» afifc derJavanischen Sprache, Vienna.

82 83
r
KANNADA THE KANNADA SCRIPT
CONSONANTS
1^:-
4 so rt 23
kha gha

ti tf w dqo
pqr,

jo
The Kannada (also known as Kanarese) script is a derivative of Brahrni.
Between the Brahml source and the Kannada script, as it appears from 13

][;
: the fourteenth century onwards, a transitional script was in use which also (ha da
underlies Telugu (q.v.). The shows the modern Kannada inventory
table
of consonants and vowels: the latter (a) independent (initial only), and ti
|.;V

|p: (b) as applied to the consonant /k/. As in most Indian scripts, the short tha da dha
vowel /a/ is inherent in each base consonant: thus ^ is /ka/.
si
Conjunct consonants are in general formed by subscription of the
r> second component, which is often abbreviated. pa ba bha

0*> tf O SJ
ya ra /a va

t 3SJ rJ

!
VOWELS
«5 e <^ * ero 010 DJO

£ £ SO 2« L B
¥ ]
Vowe signs: he c 11 t a d as applied to ka:

S3 ka. * * , *e fe; & /cm, &© &h, % Jfcr«, 6 ke,

^ **, $d few, &J3 (to, Afif ko, 3 feiu

a"

NUMERALS

r\ _D £ e 6
^ 3
1 i.
5 6 7 8 9

1 '
84
ill 85
 n of the Hangul syllabary and the late nineteenth century, less

KOREAN than 1 per cent is in Korean: the rest is in Chinese.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called 'mixed script'
began to gain ground. In this system, much as in modern Japanese,
Chinese characters function as root morphemes, while the syllabary is
used for inflections and particles. Since the late 1940s, use of Chinese
characters has been discontinued in North Korea, while in South Korea
mixed script continues to be used.
The syllabary is set out in the accompanying tables. The most inter-
Buddhist missionaries from China, and Buddhist texts in Chinese reached esting feature of Hangul is the way in which consonants and vowels
Korea around the turn of the millennium, and by the fifth century Korea combine in their base forms to form syllables. That is to say, vowels
was a Buddhist state using Chinese as the language of administration and following consonants do not assume secondary forms as in Devanagarl,
culture. The subsequent spread of Confucianism in the Korean Middle nor are the consonants themselves modified as in Ethiopic. The conso-
Ages reinforced the status and the use of Chinese. It is not surprising nantal inventory takes into account the three-fold division of Korean stops
that after nearly two thousand years of unremitting exposure to Chinese into lax, aspirated and tense. The tense consonants are geminates of the
influence, well over 50 per cent of Korean vocabulary consists of Chinese lax: cf. 7
Ik/, V
/kk/; Ipl. M W
/pp/. To distinguish aspiration the conso-
borrowings. nant is marked: 7 /k/, 7 /k h
/, while palatalization is notated in the vocalic
By the seventh century, however, scholars were looking for ways of series: 7p /ka/, Vowels cannot stand alone, but must be
7f Ikyal.
using Chinese characters to notate native Korean words. Among the supported by the bearer o (not to be confused with the consonantal sign
earliestexamples extant are the hyangga folksongs. The problem of for In/): thus <>\ /a/, j£. Id.
adapting the morphemic Chinese script to the requirements of a highly
inflected, agglutinative language, was being faced at very much the same
time in Japan; and, as in the analogous case of Japanese, three possible
paths were explored: (a) semantic transfer: a Chinese character was used
to denote its Korean semantic equivalent; in a language as heavily
sinicized as Korean this must have seemed an attractive solution;
(b) phonetic representation: Chinese characters were used to 'spell'
Korean words; (c) Chinese characters, functioning as semantic nuclei, were
supplied with phonetic diacritics to indicate the additional material (inflec-
tions, particles) required by Korean grammar and syntax (cf. the okototen
system in Japanese).
A practical solution such as was developed in Japan in the shape of
the elegant and tractable wabun
eluded the Korean scholars. In
script,
the middle of the fifteenth century, however, a group of scholars under
the aegis and direction of the fourthmonarch of the Yi Dynasty, King
Sejong (reigned 1418/19-1450) produced the phonetic syllabary of twenty-
eight letters known as Hangul Within a year or two of its promulgation,
the new script had been used in the poetical work Yong.pi och'dn ka
(Dragon(s) Flying to the Heavens).
The Korean syllabary has been described as 'one of the most scientific
alphabets in use in any country' (Encyclopaedia Britannica). In fact,
however, for the next 400 years, little use was made of it. Chinese
remained as before the status language of the educated and influential
classes. Of all the written material produced in Korea between the
 THE KOREAN SCRIPT
Two sample row follow:
THE SYLLABARY
(a) C+V
7)- 7\ A A JL 3L t if ZL
Pure vowels: ka kya k3 kya ko kyo ku kyu kit

1
7} 4 A A 4 A T\ ^ 3+
ki km kyx ke kye ko ki kwi kwa

*1 A *
kws kwse kwe
(b) C + V + C (phonetic realizations)
A 4 2 % #
kak kan kat kal kam
 1

THE LAO SCRIPT

LAO
CONSONANTS

n 2 n 9 ? a 3
ko kho kho ngo cho so so

d n n n u\ u u
Lao belongs to the south-western group of Tai languages, which also nyo do to tho tho no bo
includes Thai, Shan, Yuan, along with many minor languages.
The Lao from about the sixteenth century.
script, the tua lao, dates \S cj d ID u! JU if
Previously, the tham (< Pali dhamma, Sanskrit dharma) script had been po pho fo pho fo mo yo
used for Buddhist texts in Lao. The tua lao script bears a very close
resemblance to Thai, both apparently deriving from a proto-Thai original s a m 9 s
now lost. The tua lao shares the etymologically motivated but now redun-
ro lo wo ho 'o ho
dant duplications found in the Thai script.
Lao has six tones. As in Thai, syllabic tone is a function of the following VOWELS
factors:
Notation of the rich vocalic system is virtually identical with that of Thai (q.v,),
using superscript, subscript, prefixed and suffixed markers, and circumflx. For ;;:

1. (a) grade of consonant (high, medium or low);

= Ca,C = Cu,C = Ci,(Cl=
example, ifC represents a consonant, CT) Cau, 'i
(b) presence of transposing agent U) ho (cf. Thai Vt );
(.Clt = Co, [C = C6. «

2. vowel length (short or long);

NUMERALS £
3. nature of syllable final:

(a) p, t or fc closed syllable; 9 <k 5 d £ § n a cu o

(b) long vowel or ily: open; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
(c) m, n or ng: half-closed;

4. presence or absence of a tone marker {mat ek, mai to, etc.; see Thai).

90 91
 THE MALAYALAM SCRIPT
MALAYALAM
CONSONANTS
<d> 6VJ en nej 5T3
ka kha «« gha nga

.aJ nS> S3 «JUU 6T31

ca cha /'« jha nya

The separation of this Dravidian language (Malayajam) from the closely

S O CVS
OJU STT)
related Tamil (q.v.) took place gradually, and relatively recently, in the
period from the tenth to the thirteenth century AD. The script now used
(a " dha na

for Malayalam was introduced in the seventeenth century, and is associ-

& CD
«S\ LO (JU
ated with the illustrious name of Tuficatt' Ezuttachan, a key figure in
Malayalam literature. and especially in the vocalization
Structurally,
patterns, the script is modelled on Tamil. In contrast with Tamil,
largely aJ ft£) 6TXJ e ffl

however, which reduces the typical BrahmT-Devanagari positional five- pa pha ba bha ma
term row to two of its members, Malayalam has appropriated the entire
grid, even though many of the letters thus generated never figure in CQJ (0 £J OJ
Malayalam words. ya ra la va
The basic inventory of consonants and independent vowels is set out
in the accompanying table. The table shows the retroflex row as modu- ua n£d (TO nf) § <s>
\
"
lated by twelve vowels (short a is inherent in the base form of each f> §a sa ha la ra

Vocalization patterns for the semi-vowels, sibilants and aspirate are

VOWELS
Conjunct consonants: geminates by duplication, linear or vertical, often (a) independent
with substantial deformation. Conjuncts other than geminates often
employ ligatures.
rata (30) m g)«D g g<D
a
&
The Arabic numerals now
are in general use.
^ o® 6>a$ © 00 6i«)

(b) as applied tc letter tc

ta Si a Sl/f §/« § ft § tru

fflS te <2S te s 6>S&H 6) SO to CSO?o 6>S<Dfa«

92 93
 MONGOLIAN

systematized in 1632 by another outstanding linguist, Dahai, who also

MONGOLIAN introduced a method of using diacritical points to distinguish between

homographs. Thus, in the earlier script /( could be read as n, a, or e.

Dahai restricted /\ to a, adding a point at the left for n: 4 and a point

at the right for e: /\.

The old Mongolian literary language is something of an enigma in that

no known form of spoken Mongolian can be conclusively shown to be its
basis. When it first appears in the thirteenth century AD, the language
is already equipped with a sophisticated writing system and a literary
identity, pointing to antecedent development in circumstances that can
only be guessed at. The pre-Genghiz Khan Kereits and the Khitans have
been seen as possible sources; both of these peoples were in contact with
Nestorian Christianity and with Buddhism, and both were on a signifi-
cantly higher cultural plane than the other Mongolian tribes.
The immediate source of the script itself is certainly the Old Uighur
script, which in its turn was based on the Nestorian version of Syriac
Estrangelo (see Syriac). Uighur retained the horizontal right-to-left format
of Syriac, and this format was still being used in the fourteenth century
by the Mongol Khans in Persia. In China, however (the Mongol Yuan
Dynasty ruled China from 1279 to 1368), when work began on translating
the Buddhist scriptures into Mongolian, a vertical format, left to right
across the page, was adopted, probably under Chinese As might
influence.
be expected in view of their Semitic origins, the have initial, medial
letters
and final forms. From the fifteenth century onwards, eight additional
letters- were brought into use to notate non-Mongol phonemes occurring

in loan-words.
The basic inventory of the ClassicalMongolian script is set out in the
table. Post-revolutionary writing in Mongolian (1917-40) was exclusively
in the classical script. In 1941 Cyrillic was officially adopted for the nota-
tion of Khalkha Mongolian. However, the classical script continued to be
used for private correspondence etc, by older people in Mongolia, and
generally in Inner Mongolia and in Xinjiang, where it seems to be still

Even before the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty came to power in China

(1644),Manchu scholars had come to know and use the Mongolian script.
In 1599, Nurhaci, the founder of the Qing Dynasty, commissioned Ms
chief interpreter, Erdeni, to provide a script for the hitherto unwritten
Manchu language. Erdeni was able to adapt the Mongol script to Manchu
requirements, a fairly straightforward process, as the two languages
are phonologically close to each other. This initial Manchu script was
 MONGOLIAN

THE MONGOLIAN SCRIPT

Final Transcription
THE ALPHABET

"A 4,

A 4

A 4

M
4> Initial Medial Final Transcription

ai
1
i 4>

i4
4
^J ;U
Final Medial

^ ba, be
X bi p M
**} ke, ge M, gi ko.kii
2 -^>
go.gii

4 ng

^^—*^mm w*
 ORIYA THE ORIYA SCRIPT
:
\H The horizontal line drawn over letters in devanagarl is replaced in Oriya by a
curved line

CONSONANTS
This derivative of Brahmi, which used for writing the Oriya (also known
is © <a €1 &
as Odri) language (belonging to the Eastern group of New Indo- Aryan ka kha go gha nga
languages) makes its first appearance in the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries.
The order of letters follows the Devanagari model, but in place of the « 9 $ §
horizontal stroke above each letter, typical of most other Brahmi deriv- ca cha ja jha nya
atives, Oriya uses a curved line. This practice seems to have arisen in the
days when Oriya was written on palm-leaves, whose surface was less likely % 9 4
to be damaged by curved strokes. ta tha da 4ha na
The chart shows the consonantal inventory of Oriya, along with the
independent vowels, the secondary vowel signs in combination with /ga/, <s> 21 Q a Q
and the numerals. As in all New Indo-Aryan languages and Sanskrit, the ta da dha na
short vowel /a/ is inherent in the base form of the consonant. In Oriya
/a/ is realized as hi. a CP 9 R 91

Conjunct consonants in Oriya are numerous and unpredictable, indi- pa pha ba bha ma
1
vidual components being often substantially transformed in combination.
<?

(jo) ta la

« % S 9 ja

to sa sa ha khya

VOWELS
(a) independent:

a ® $ q q q
a ? ^
s < 31 (3 & gjo 2jj

98 99
(b) the secondary vowel signs, used in combination with
i
ROMAN
similar to the Devanagari A 11 t at an, they

oi
S«
S
g'
«1
gi
q_
gu
^
gu
«
gru

QQ QQ COI CO?
ge gai go gau
Southern Italy and were colonized by the Greeks in the course of
Sicily
There are several irregularities in the use of these signs, particularly as regards the eighth to the sixth centuries BC; and it was for long assumed that
the Latin alphabet was a product of direct contact between Romans
and Greeks. However, it is now generally accepted that the link between
the two scripts is provided by Etruscan. The Etruscans appear in history
about 900 BC. Their period of greatest political, economic and ideolog-
ical power covered the eighth to the sixth centuries. The following
centuries saw a gradual decline in their influence, though the Etruscan
city-states were not finally absorbed into the Roman Empire until the
first century BC. The language ceased to be used for sacral purposes at
about the same time. There is no way of knowing how long it survived
as a spoken language.
In spite of repeated efforts to link Etruscan with Indo-European, with
agglutinative languages of the Uralic type and with Caucasian languages,
no definite relationship with any other language family has ever been
established. What is clear is thatby about 700 BC the Etruscans were
using a Western Greek script to write inscriptions in their language. This
early script, as found, for example, in the Marsiliana Tablet (eighth
century BC), is a close copy of the original Semito-Greek alphabet (see

Greek) running from right to left. This script is shown in the left-hand
column of Table 1.
The second column of Table 1 shows the classical Etruscan script,
now reduced from twenty-six to twenty letters, including the vowels
/a, e, i, u/. The earlier script had separate letters for >I and Q. These were

gradually phased out, and replaced by Id = Ikl.

The celebrated Praeneste Fibula, preserved in the Luigi Pigorini
museum in Rome, shows by the seventh century BC the Etruscan
that
alphabet was being used to write Latin. In Table 2 early and classical
forms of the Etruscan script, as used for Latin, are set out.
It will be seen that the three Greek aspirates, theta, phi and khi, have

been discarded as irrelevant to Latin. X and G were added in the third

century BC, Y and Z in the first. A thousand years passed before the
letters J, U and W
were added. Table 3 shows the upright and italic forms
 (c) distinguishes homonyms: cf. Spanish, where the acute accent
distinguishes the interrogative adverb cudndo from the
conjunction cuando;
square capitals: these have remained virtually unchanged over two
»s abnormal or specific stress marker: Spanish, sdbado
miilermia;
rustic capitals: first to sixth century;
uncials: a rounded script used from the fourth to the eighth century; ) marks soft palatalization in Polish: 6, n, s, i.

half-uncial: partly cursive.

From the uncials various cursives developed. One of the best-known,

certainly one of the most aesthetically pleasing, is the ninth-century
Carolingian minuscule (see the illustration on page 109, which also shows
two lines - 5 and 6 - in rustic capitals, and one - 7 - in uncial), This n Italian to mark specific accentuation: cittd 'city, town';
Carolingian script, as reinstated by Italian humanists of the fifteenth
n Bambara, £ and o are used to denote Id and hi.
century, became the model for early printed books in Western Europe,
apart from Germany, where a so-called Gothic character became the

Ligatures had proliferated in the book-hands of the Middle Ages before .) marks the long vowel hit si 'to say', in Afrikaans;
the advent of printing: the sole survivor in modern usage is the amper-
French etyma with historical

As the natural medium for the Latin language, the Roman script spread
by natural diffusion to the educated classes throughout the vast expanses ;, unrounded hi: sint 't

of the Roman Empire: even the hundreds of Berber inscriptions which

have been found in Libya are in Roman script (only two, found in the
Roman city of Dugga in Tunisia, are in tifinagh: see Berber). e.g. marks long vowels in Latvian: est 'to
Problems arose when this lucid but limited script was called upon to
cope with emergent national languages like Czech and Hungarian, and,
later, when it was extended by missionary activity to hundreds of hitherto The inverted circumflex (hacek) e.g. marks fricatives and affricates
unwritten languages. Alien phonemes and phonemic contrasts, both in Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.: s = ///, c = /tj7: also Czech /ji/.
qualitative and quantitative, had to be identified and suitably notated.
The Roman script could be usefully expanded in several ways: The dot: e.g. in Yoruba, Id and hi are marked as e and q.

1. By using diacritics such as the acute, the grave, the circumflex, the The tilde: In Portuguese, the tilde denotes nasalization: nacoes
macron, the inverted circumflex, the dot, the umlaut, the tilde and /nEsqjJV 'nations'; mae /mej/ 'mother'. In Estonian, 8 denotes the
the cedilla. tense unrounded hi: ohtu Ahtu/ 'evening'. Spanish and Maasai use
n to denote /ji/.

The acute accent: some examples of its use:

The cedilla: used in French and Portuguese to denote a soft sibilant
(a) used to mark long vowels in Hungarian: haz 'house' (here, /a:/
before a back vowel: Fr. legon, Ptg. naqoes. Polish uses the cedilla
to mark nasalization of [a] and [e]: zq.b Izobl, pi. zeba Izebd 'tooth,

teeth'. A hook is used for nasalization in Navajo: £{[, 'horse'. In

(b) marks Id in opposition to Id in French: i Latvian, k, I, n, t are palatalized by cedilla: k, [, n, (. The cedilla is
used in Romanian to denote /J7 s and Itslt.
 .

The umlaut: In German, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian etc. short Icel
and lyl are denoted by o and u. In Hungarian, the long correlatives
are marked as 6, u. a' Id is used in German, Finnish and Estonian,
For the notation of non-pulmonic sounds (clicks): to denote the
ingressive series - the clicks - found in the Khoisan languages, for
example, specific sets of symbols have had to be devised. Thus, in
IKung, the dental click is denoted by I,the palatal by !, the alveolar
by 4 and the nasal by In Nama, the abrupt gingival stop is marked
II.

by *, the correlative affricate by /, the post-alveolar stop by and

!

the affricate by //.

Other diacritics: for foil in Scandinavian languages a is used, g in
Latvian denotes palatalized /gj/ tending to /dj/. In Turkish, g serves
mainly to lengthen a preceding back vowel: dag /da;/ 'mountain'.

By introducing new letters: e.g. in Danish, Norwegian and Faeroese,

ce, 0, representing Id and In Icelandic, p, 8 representing /©, 51.
/ce/.

Akan, Mende, Kpelle, etc. have introduced c, o. In Maltese, K =

Arabic C gK = Arabic t
;
Turkish uses the undotted i as the
.

back vowel harmonic corresponding to front HI. Three new letters

appear in Vietnamese: o\ u\ and d = IAI; (unbarred d = Izl).

By giving new values to available Roman letters: unbarred d = Izl

in Vietnamese has already been mentioned. In Albanian, x = /dz/,
xh - M3/. In Somali, C is used to denote the voiced pharyngeal frica-
tive Pit, Arabic £_

By using diacritics as tone markers: for example, the Vietnamese

system as applied to the syllable ma:

ma high rising

ma low falling

ma high broken

mq low broken

it is used to mark the high k

Chinese: the official pin-yin romanization marks the four tones of

Modern Standard Chinese by means of diacritics: macron for first
(high level) tone; acute for second (sharp rising); inverted circum-
flex for third (long falling-rising); grave for fourth (sharp falling);
cf. ma 'mother', ma 'hemp', ma 'horse', ma 'to scold, curse'. Atonic
syllables are unmarked: rumen 'you' (pi.).

-U ,
 ROMAN

THE EARLY WESTERN GREEK AND THE ETRUSCAN SCRIPT

ETRUSCAN SCRIPTS AS USED FOR LATIN
Western Greek Etruscan

A A a
A *> A
b
6 B
> c(k)
< C
1 Q o d
Wy a d i ^ E
3 1 e 1 ^ p
^ 1 v G
i t
q H H
h

<8> o th |i|
i i

^ K
[
I
<(-< ^ j I
^ rM ;

n w n\ m \A rJ H \

i H H n
ooO
WM' a s
r r P !::

o
i 1 P

M M() ) s

9 q(k)
X
T
<l q r v v V
s
5 * $
T r > t
x X
i^ Y V u

I
ph

^ Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn, 1974.

$ 8 f

Source: Pfiffig, A.J . (1969) £>i<r Etruskische Spra he, Graz.

106 107
 THE ROMAN ALPHABET

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP
abcdefghijklmnop
AB £ F GHIJKLMNOP
C D
abcdefghijklmnop
QRSTUVWXYZ
qrstuv wxyz
QRSTUVWXYZ

e: Galbraith, V.H. (1962) The Historian at Work, L

 .

'.
!!::!

K :

THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT

SAMARITAN
THE ALPHABET

Column 1: square form column 2: cursive; colurnn 3; transliteration; column

4: phonetic value.

/ 2 3 4 J 2 3 4
A member of the Semito-Hamitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of
languages, Samaritan was a written and spoken form of Western Aramaic.
Three stages may be distinguished in the development of the language:
0,' 4 1 l,t

1. Fourth century BC to eighth century AD; in this oldest period

a J b b r
Samaritan was both a spoken and a written language. Samaritan
translation of the Targum. 7 g g

2. Ninth to twelfth century; medieval period; spoken Samaritan ousted d

by Arabic though the language continued to be written.
d
>
3. Thirteenth century onwards: Samaritan no longer spoken; growth of h V,0
a hybrid literary language, influenced by both Hebrew and Arabic.

w,b, u f f

The script, shown in the accompanying and very

table, is consonantal,
close to its Phoenician original. As in Hebrew and Arabic y and w, func- r? in s *
tion as matres tectionis for and /u:/.
I'v.l

Certain diacritics accompanying individual wordsin Samaritan manu-

scripts have been construed as short-vowel markers; thus, P. Kahle
h ',',0 \ 7 q q

identified as /a/, < as /i, el,

|
A
as In, o/. This interpretation is not univer- <\
sally accepted. t

5 J
m y J

k k

er, L. 1 1974) Samariian.sk jazyk, Moscow.

111
w
THE SINHALESE SCRIPT
SINHALESE
CONSONANTS
255 a CO 63 a
ka kha ga gha nga

Q d 2SD
jha nya
Sinhalese (Sinhala) is a New
Indo-Aryan language, and it is natural that
the oldest Sinhalese inscriptions (dating from the third century BC) should
cS Q -Sra

be written in a script which is close to the Asokan Edict script of northern da dha
India. In the tenth/eleventh century AD, however, Tamil incursion into
Ceylon brought with it a south Indian Grantha-based script (see Tamil).
m $ a 255
tha da dha na
and it is this script which has been ever since, and still is, used for
Sinhalese. £3 a a SO ©
The table shows the basic consonantal inventory of Sinhalese, along pa pha ba bha
with the independent vowels (used as initials and after other vowels). It
should be noted that the original distinction between aspirate and non-
C3 6 c Q
ya ra " va
aspirate, e.g. ka/kha, galgha, is not relevant in modern where
Sinhalese,
/ [ka] = [kha] = /ka/. The aspirates are, of course, written where they are C3 m C3 50 ©
etymologically appropriate, e.g. in Sanskrit and Pali loan-words. Sa sa sa ha
m¥ :
The shows the secondary forms of the vowels as applied to
table also
the consonants na. As in all Indian scripts, each base consonant has an
la

y- inherent vowel. In Sinhalese this vowel is /a/ or hi depending on syllable

VOWELS
position.
Independent:
;
Conjunct consonants: the subscript model as used in Telugu and
|S". :|i;i.

Malayalam is not found in Sinhalese. Instead, there is an extensive reper-

tory of ligatures, many of which are of great complexity, particularly those

3 cp qi e?i <g)
d C Co
representing combinations found in Pali and Sanskrit loan-words.
Ligatures may be replaced by writing the two components separately. &3a 6 € @6 ® a ©»

The vowels as applied to the ntna

25*> 2»l :sn 2$ 28 s a

na nee nS ni nl nu nil

2513 ®zn ®&f ©©255 ©2513 ©Slcf ©251>3

The Arabic numerals are novv in general use

112 H3
 THE SYRIAC SCRIPT
SYRIAC
THE CONSONANTAL ALPHABET

lte Alaph N
.a a
1
WW Beth 3 b, bh (v)

This North- West Semitic language, centring on the Mesopotamian city of ^ ^ *w Gamat
Dalath
J
1
g.gh
d,dh
Edessa (present-day Urfa in Turkey) was one of the most important deriv- ? *f°
at OlOiO He n
atives of literary Aramaic. The oldest inscriptions in what is recognizably
o oas Vau 1
Syriac go back to the turn of the millennia. From the third to the seventh
11» Zatn J
century, Syriac was the medium for a rich and important Christian liter- t

^uu. Heth n
ature, comprising both original writing and translation from Greek. The
Syriac Vulgate is represented by the peshitta, i.e. 'simple', redaction of 4 i 4U Teth to

the Old Syriac translation of the New Testament. The peshitta was more
uj Yud '

or less complete by the end of the fourth century. Kaph n

Until the fifth century Syriac was written in the consonantal Estrangelo/ <si 45 Lamad ?
Estrangela script (< Greek OTQOYYuM] 'circular'), in which the letters •» SO )*Mn Mim o a
alaph, yud and vau were used as matres iectionis to denote the long vowels 4* Nun 1
*

8, a (cf. Hebrew), Table 1 shows the Estrangelo consonantal alphabet.

r, Semkath D
Following the Council of Edessa (431) two successor writing systems <J i. <iii 'E V
took shape, neither of them differing to any great extent from Estrangelo.
The Eastern Syrians in the Persian Empire adopted the Nestorian variant,
with pointing on the Hebrew model, while the Western (Jacobite) church
.S

•o
ffl

a
5
-°y»g.

55
doao
s
Pe
Tsade
fcuph
» p
opted for the so-called serto ('line') script, with inverted-reversed Greek j *r*» Rish n
letters acting as vowel markers: see Table 2.
Daghesh (see Hebrew): theoretically, in Syriac, the daghesh point which
marks b, g, d, k, p or t as a stop, is placed above the letter; placed under
the letter, the point marks the correlative spirant. However, there is no
tor, London, Bagster (n. d.).
consistency, and the rule is generally disregarded.
A point placed under a verbal initial was frequently used to indicate
the perfective aspect. Two points (known as ribui) may be placed over a
word to indicate the plural number.
A short line drawn over or under a consonant indicates that it is mute.
THE VOWELS TAMIL
Jacobite notation

The Tamil syllabary derives, via Grantha forms, from the Brahml script.
The grid consists of eighteen consonants (each with inherent /a/) and
twelve vowels (including two diphthongs, /ai/ and /an/). See the accom-
panying table. Traditionally, the consonants are known as 'body-letters'
A and the vowels as 'life-letters'; the vocalized consonants are then known
as 'life-body letters' or 'animated forms'.
From the table it will be seen that the typical Brahrm-Devanagari posi-
tional row is reduced in Tamil to its first and last members, i.e. the

unvoiced non-aspirate and the homorganic nasal: e.g. for the velar row,
[k] and [n]. This means that positionally determined aliophones have to
share one and the same graph with their base consonant. Thus, «/ka/
also represents /ga/ (following nasals), Ix/ (in non-initial syllables if not
preceded by «, i_, or a nasal) and the aspirates /kha, gha, h/ (in Sanskrit
loan-words). Similarly <* represents /tf]/, d3/ and hi.
Five Grantha letters are used in Sanskrit words for /ja - sa - sa - ha
- ksa/. Use of these Grantha letters may depend on register, i.e. whether

formal or everyday language is being used.

Inherent /a/ is cancelled by a superscript dot.
The Arabic and Roman numerals are now standard. Punctuation is as
 THE TAMIL SCRIPT
THE SYLLABARY Q* ke G* M «»« kai q*/t /co Sarr kd Q* OT fan

Qau he CSna «e «« hat GWr « Qisiit ho Qffl/ar «««

Q* qe G* qe *»« qai «»„ <*, Gtffr qo o™ C»«

® kit «x ku
Q© he a© hi «r>© hat GXqt no QlQrrnd G)(sj«r n««

Ql. <fe Gi_ de- «- <*» Giu.rr do Gi-fr do Qi_aT dau

G\<mr ne d^ le- &nr «fl( ® m no Si® no Qssurair nau

4- d * di <5> du (3 da
Qgi te 0^ te *»2 to" Q&tT to ^ to G) # «r tau

* na <g?> na «rafl n •
6Mf ni mi nu &tr nu
Qis ne a^ ni ^ n« Q$it no <*m no ©36TT nau

Qu pe 3u pi «>u p«i fluff po Qurrpo Qu«r pau

$ tt $ a m lu m tu

Qw me 3u> me «» ffldi Qwa mo Out md QlOMT mau

& n $ ni m nu m nu
Qu ye Qm ye «>iu ya/ Qvnyo CSiurr yo ©.«, yau

Q? re Grr re «>jr „i Ovrr r0 Qrrrr ro Q^^r rau

Gte fe S«u le &» /a/ fflsurr h Ssun- Id Qwr lau

uS) yi u? yi H yu % yu

if) ri if
a™ ve S«u vi Qeutr vo (Sain vo Q^^r vau
ri 05 ru (3 ru

eSl sS ®v> ?e «iP ?e .* z* Qffirr zo Giprr zd Q^ OT zau

li If

Qar le Ser !e &w /a/ Qmrr \q Garnlo fflmOT lau

of) vi aJ vi

G)jb Re Op Ri «njD Re; Q(g R 3C3> Ro Q,,,, Rau

ifi zi zi ZU zu
(Jf

eifl li of ft
£W /Ve <3sw Ni &w Ato SI© No 3© No Q^^r Nau
i
/« ess la

$ Ri Ri yi Ru g)ir Ru Source: Steever, S.B. (1987) 'Tamil and the Dravidian Languages', in B. Comrie (ed.)
The World's Major Languages, London, Routledge, adapted from Pope, G.U. (1979)
, N <** Na @ Na asft Ni ®$ Ni gu Nu $grr Nu A Handbook of the Tamil Language, New Delhi, Asian Education Services.
 THE TELUGU SCRIPT
TELUGU
CONSONANTS
g ip K $0 K
ka kha m gha nga

Z $ S3 c* ?
ca cha jha «y«
The Telugu script derives from Brahml via a transitional Grantha char-
acter, which was, until the fourteenth century, also used for writing
to a E3
Kannada (q.v.). Even Telugu and Karmada syllabaries
after separating, the ta tha da dha flfi

remain very close to each other. The table shows the full Telugu inven-
tory of thirty-four consonants, as set out in the traditional Devanagafi
<s $ es $ J5

(q.v.) order. in modern Telugu the ten aspirated consonants are

However,
found a few Sanskrit loan-words, while nga and nya are also rare.
in only 3 5 s> $ 2)
|:
The great majority of Telugu words can be written in terms of the pa pha ba bha ma
remaining twenty-two consonants, plus O the polyvalent sign for nasal-
ization (anusvara).
C&> Q O $ s
ya ra la /a ra
Surprisingly, the vowel inventory includes no graph for the important
phoneme /as/ which acts, inter alia, as a past-tense marker; cf. wacae:du * 3. c6 3*
'he came', cadivce:du 'he read'. In the official orthography, a: is generally
•""
[
used to denote the missingon. The base from inherent vowel is /a/.

Conjunct consonants in Telugu are mostly geminates, the second VOWELS

"'
component being subscribed in primary or secondary form. (a) independent:

m^ 55 £3 S) 8* & & 8X0

a 8* L ar
i m
te.|;
p|t;.'-;
:
(b) as applied to the c

s* §
7" fta:

& sr>
fffi;^ ka fa k! Ah ka £
g t 1 r S* T
ke ke km to kd ifcflU

There are nany irregularities.

NUMERALS

O _S 3 V 31 k. e cr r* o
1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9

,»
 ORTHOGRAPHY AND TONE
THAI
(a) Without tone mark

1. Low- or middle-class initial; final is

JJ1 ma'

11014 r,

The Thai from the late thirteenth century, seems to have

script, dating
2. high-class initial; final is not k, t or p: rising tone, e.g.
been borrowed in part from the Khmer version of a south Indian script.
It has no ligatures. The short vowel hi is inherent in the base form of ffQ3 song 'two'
each consonant. The degree of redundancy is high, with five graphs for
/kh/, six for /th/ and four for hi, etymologically explicable but no longer 3. low-class initial plus short vowel plus k, t or p final: high tone, e.g.

phonologically justifiable. Ufl nak 'very'

The table shows the Thai inventory of consonants representing the five
positional series originally present in the Indian source. It will be seen 4. low-class initial plus long vowel plus k, t or p final: falling tone, e.g.
that forty-four used to notate twenty-one consonantal
letters are
phonemes; a further fourteen symbols serve, single and in combination,
JJlft m&k 'much, many'

to denote over thirty vowel sounds. There are no capital letters. Words
5. high- or middle-class initial plus short or long vowel plus k, t or p
in connected text are not separated from each other by spaces.
final: low tone, e.g.
As be seen from the table, the Thai consonants are divided into
will
three classes: high, middle and low. This division is in part phonological lhfi buat 'to ache'
in that the unaspirated consonants are grouped as middle-class, the aspi-
rates as high- or low-class. 6. low-class initial plus short open vowel: high tone, e.g.
The table also shows the vocalization system as applied to the low-class lias If 'and'
consonant /kh/. Thai has no forms for independent vowels. Seven collinear
7. high- or middle-class initial plus short open vowel: low tone, e.g.
symbols: 1, ^ , I , II, I, I, I , five superscripts: ,

and two subscripts > ,

« combine with each other and with the conso- Tit ca' (future marker)
nants 1 ti t) to generate the vowel system. Some combinations are
, , ,

very rare. Permissible consonantal finals are the nasals and p, t, k. Final (b) With tone mark
p, t, k are not fully released. In final position, the affricates and the mai-ek changes tone of syllable with middle- or high-class
':
initial
sibilants are all realized as Thai IAI. Ci. samrej > /samred/ 'accomplished', to low tone, irrespective of ending:
angris > /angrid/ 'English', prathes > /prathed/ 'country'.

HI ha 'five*

also changes tone of syllable with low-class initial to high t<

}J1 ma 'horse'
 THAI

* THE THAI SCRIPT

Ul nam 'water'.
CONSONANTS
Two further tone markers are found in a very few words: maitri <~^J and
maicadtawa *. The former raises a syllable with a middle-class Mid Mid High High Low Lov, Low Low
initial to a high tone; the latter gives such a syllable a rising tone.

n fl rl
Other signs used in the Thai script:
k kh kh kh kh kh

(a) °1 : this sign marks repetition of a syllable: Uflfj °] bojbsj 'often*. fl ft V % m n

ch ch ch
(b) i : this superscript sign marks its bearer consonant as mute: cf.

IJT11 sow 'Saturday'

a I m m
d th th th

(c) 1 marks abbreviation; for example, the very lengthy (155 letters)
ft fl VI 5 u
full name of Bangkok is abbreviated to TiWYlVI <1 d th th th

grungthep.
U fJ y\ n jj

(d) <zt; this superscript sign shortens the vowel sound marked by
b p Ph / ph f Ph m
l (rarely by 11) followed by a consonant: cf. mil hen 'to„jee',
Tho sixth group i /owels, and the spirants, is

lltVi ben 'to be'. C^ is not used when a tone mark is present. Note, represented in T ai as follows:

however, that a tone mark itself often shortens the relevant vowel: (a) the semi-vow els (all low class consonants
cf. tflVl len (falling tone, shortened) 'to play'. 3 1

(b) the spirants (all high clas unto):

ft -y ff

(c) the mixed group *H h (high), VI 1 (low), 9 1 (n iddle), 9

h (low).

NUMERALS

o co <sL 0) Ca d oo
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10
\

124 125

'
 VOWELS
Long Short
TIBETAN
Withfinal Without Withfinal
Without
y Other final
y •" Other
.*

- fll Ifi Ifl tfll ft) flU riz n

Tibetan belongs to the Bodish branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of
3 mo inw ma languages. The ethnonym is bod.pa (whence Bodish), pronounced as
ifies when
/poe.pa/. The literary language dates from the seventh century AD,
m IfiU Buddhism began to penetrate into Tibet. As a necessary first step towards
the translation of the Buddhist scriptures into Tibetan, King
o In Srong.brTSan.sGam.po commissioned a group of scholars to study Indian
IfC writing systems with a view to finding a script for Tibetan. BrahmT was
chosen as a suitable model. In the Tibetan version, the phonological series
fb
fix are ordered as in Devanagan (q.v.) but the voiced aspirate member of
each series is missing: e.g. the velar series is ka - kha - ga - nga (minus
ifiti
gha).As in Devanagan, the short vowel /a/ is inherent in the base conso-
nant.The basic vowels are /i, e, o/, marked by superscript sign, and Ai/,
la IflO marked by subscript.
ifios;
The accompanying table shows the thirty Setters of the consonantal
inventory, plus the five additional letters used to denote the retroflex
arm
sounds found in Sanskrit words; some examples of conjunct consonants;
fit) the vowel signs as applied to the consonant /ka/; the numerals.
fie 14 mis The enormous task of translating the Sanskrit/Pali canon into Tibetan
in the eighth century and was not completed until the fourteenth.
i fm flO began
The Tibetan canon comprises two main divisions: the Kanjur (in Tibetan,
bKa'.'gyur 'word-change', i.e. the Buddha's own words in translation) and
' n fi the Tanjur (in Tibetan, bsTan.'gyur 'treatise-change', i.e. the translation
of the commentaries). The Tanjur alone is in 225 volumes. Part of the
" ft
fj translators' task was to provide a lexicon of caiques on Sanskrit technical
terms, in consistent and one-to-one correspondence with their originals.
*>««*; Hudak, T.J. (1987) 'Thai', in B.
Comrie (ed.) The World's Ma
A measure of the accuracy with which this was accomplished is given by
London, Rouiledge, adapted from Brown, the fact that it is often possible to reconstruct with some certainty Sanskrit
J.M. (1967)
3, Bangkok, Social Science Association Press
AHA
Center T)
of Thailand', pp. 211-12 originals,which are no longer extant, from their Tibetan caiques.
Tibetan spelling, as exemplified in the three proper names given above,
requires some explanation. The language is syllabic. Syllables are simple
or complex. simple syllable coniist> m a consonantal initial (any one
A
£"
of the thirty letters in the basic list) plus a vowel: £)' /mi/ 'man';
 A complex syllable has from one to five additional components. These components we

q-§'q '5^ [bsGrubs] > /tup/ of the item tjR /tup/ 't(
1. The finals: the nine letters *l|,t;,<,ar,.q, *(, o,,oi,4I func-
tion as mute permissible finals. Addition of a final may affect tone
and pronunciation: e.g. (initial Roman letters are capitalized here):
This syllable comprises a collinear prefix £j a superfixed prefix
;

*!**]' [Mig] > /mil/ 'eye' 5^ initial

, ^fl subscript
, ^
in secondary form -. the vowel ,

/u/ n= , and two finals, R and 3T.

<3W [Cas] > imi 'clothes'

3&' [Cos] > mbl 'dharma, religion'

2. The letters ™ ,
* , *l , 1 , t\, function as mute collinear prefixes,

preceding the initial; again, tone and pronunciation are affected: e.g.

^SP]' [dMag] > /maa/ 'war'

^^' °^ [bsTan.'Gyur] >

{'gyur 'to become, be changed'; bKa' 'direct word of the Buddha';

^^f\ [mDun] > /tfittn/ 'front' bsTan - perfect stem of verb sTon.pa 'to show, teach').

,
o?, ^ e superfixed to the initial; a voiced initial n of the traditional and etymological orthography means
that the correspondence between sound and symbol is very weak. For
example, kra. khra, gra, phra, bra, sGra, bsGra are all ways of writing
W^ [sGom] > /qo/ 'meditation'
the phoneme /ta/.

^jpW [sTabs] > /tap/ 'because' It should be pointed out that mute finals may be activated, according
to rules of sandhi, in compounds. Thus, while final [g] in [dMag] is mute
in citation form, it is activated in e.g. [dMag.cen] > /maqceen/ 'great war'.
^ [IHa] > /lha/ 'god'

The letters % , «! , S, , a* are subfixed tt

forms for T > J and 5, > -j :

trj" [sGra] > /ta/ 'sound'

|p [Zlos] > /too/ 'chanting,

The letter -^ may follow a final (see 1 above):

3&pr [TSHogs] > /coo/ 'assembly'

PiPPiPil
 THE TIBETAN SCRIPT
spya 9
CONSONANTS 4
spra
1 %
The dbu. -an (Ai.ce Ml) s npt, con istins of thirty basic etters plus Ave
denoting retroflex sounds in Sansk it wor ds, is shown he e, accompanied
* -a
% $ phu *
by a tab! net consonants: phya 3
a
s phra *
Aa kya rju bla
*\ 3 I a da § bu
3 rba f 5 *
kha 3 kra I Ija
F bya
g" kla ma i Iba 3 *
1 31 1
bra
t; na
"I
kva
% sha 3 sba * *
•5 ca tra sbya
*\ rka 5 3 9. shown here as applied to the
* cha
rkya na 11
sbra
*\ *
Ika Ita 3
* 1
? na
3 mya
ska
* %
1
skya ,hra 3
tha 8 5
9
da 4 *
rmya
dva
1
Za 1
^ Pa khra
P srnya
1 pha Ida
khva
3 ba sda
3 gw 1 tsu

gra

tsha
51

si
gla z 1
gva ma
* dsa 1 1
* stsa

rga sna rdsa

% wa 1 * i
snrn
ia j rgya 1 zu
1 1
za Iga 4 pu
* * .1 zu
<\ a, a
sga a pya
zla
"1 ya
*l
pra
1
sgya *
1
'4 ipa
sgra 53 yu
la 1 4 ipa
s riu 4 £ ru
sa
1
 REFERENCES

Beeston, A. F. L. (1937) Sabean Inscriptions, Oxford.

Budge, W. (1978) The Egyptian Language, Routledge, London

Conti Rossini, C. (1931) Chrestomathia arabica meridionalis epigrapi

Krjukov, M. V. (1973) Jazyk In'skix Nadpisej, Moscow.

Macdonell, A. A. (1924) Sanskrit Dictionary, Oxford and London.

Minassian, M. (1976) Manuel pratique d'armmien ancien, Paris.

Pflffig, A. J. (1969) Die Etruskische Sprache, Graz.

Sirk, J. X. (1975) Bugijskij jazyk, Moscow.