Archive for Alphabets and Letters
The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship site has the look of a site from the 1990s or so, but it’s still active. The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship (E.L.F.) is an international organization devoted to the scholarly study of the invented languages of J.R.R. Tolkien. The primary activity of the E.L.F. is carried out in the pages of its […]
I recently read a couple articles on how to identify many languages by how they are written. Harbeck offers good, often cheeky mnemonics for recognizing languages based on Roman lettering (Western and European languages), as well as Asian, Middle Eastern, Cyrillic, and North African languages. Helpful, although I would like to see tips for identifying […]
I just read/skimmed a story from 1983—“Cryptic,” by Jack McDevitt—in which the protagonist has come across a radio signal that seems to include “sixty-one distinct pulse patterns, which was to say, sixty-one characters.” The protagonist consults the only linguist he knows, who says, among other things: “Sixty-one letters seems a trifle much.” And goes on […]
I’ve been transcribing my grandmother’s diary from 1926, and found that there are a few lines written in shorthand, which she was studying at the time. I don’t read shorthand, and wasn’t sure what kind of shorthand it was. But many years after writing the diary, she provided a sort of Rosetta Stone in a […]
I’ve long been fascinated by writing systems across languages and history. Languages, whether written or spoken, sometimes remind me of living organisms: Over time they not only change and adapt, but can become endangered and extinct. To reduce the chances of language extinction, the Endangered Alphabets Project aims to play an active role in preserving […]
Back in column OOO, I wrote a fairly detailed discussion of ogham, an alphabet used in some contexts in ancient Ireland and elsewhere. I recently came across a cute ogham transliterator tool online; you type in a sequence of letters, and it shows you what the ogham equivalent of that sequence would be. This is […]