Omniglot - the blog

If you would like to turn your constructed alphabets into fonts, there are a number of ways to do so: you could buy one of the professional font creation tools available from Fontlab, you could use a free font editor such as FontForge or Softy, or use the font creation service Fontifier.

Today I found out about another font tool, FontStruct, a free online font editor which looks good and fairly easy to use. The site also has a gallery where you view fonts created by other people and add your own creations. When I can find a spare moment or two, I’ll have a go at converting some of my ideas for con-scripts into fonts.

Transliteration, from the Latin trans, across, and littera, letter, is the practice of transferring a text from one writing system to another. Transliteration can be used to give people who can’t read other alphabets an idea how to pronounce words and names, though without some knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of pronunciation of the original languages, their pronunciation will probably sound only vaguely like the original.

In phrase books you often find transliterations designed to show how to pronounce things based on the mother tongues of the readers. Such guides tend to be confusing as the ‘phonetics’ might not make much sense to you. A few phrase books and language course provide IPA pronunciation guides, which are great, if you’re familiar with the IPA.

In the phrases section on Omniglot, I try to provide transliterations for all languages written with non-Latin writing systems. Many languages have several different transliteration systems and I usually choose the most widely-used. The transliterations may not make sense to everyone, but there are recordings of quite a few of the phrases, so you can at least hear how to pronounce them. Ideally there would be sound files for all the phrases, plus maybe IPA transcriptions, and with your help, maybe that will be the case one day.

I chose this word today because someone suggested that some of the transliterations on my phrases pages are confusing, especially to Americans. The trouble is, if I made the transliterations American-friendly, people from other countries might not find them useful.

Here’s a text in a mystery alphabet sent in by one of my correspondents. Any ideas which alphabet it is and which language it’s being used to write here?

The British Library website, which I came across today, has some interesting information about language and writing in the Language and the written word section. It tells the story of written English from the Beowulf, the earliest known narrative poem in English, to Virginia Woolf’s early 20th century novels, with samples of each.

The site also includes recordings of the accents and dialects of the UK, details of cook books through the ages, and a history of English language dictionaries, among other fascinating information.

Believe it or not the Chinese characters shown below are all variants forms of the ’same’ character.

The character in question is 壹 (yī) - the complex form of ‘one’, which is used on banknotes, coins and cheques. Well actually the first one is a version of 一, the simple from of ‘one’.

The first two characters come from this site, which includes a number of other rare and unusual Chinese characters. The only one of them I’ve seen ‘in the wild’ is the Shanxi noodle one (no. 2), which appears in many Chinese restaurants in the UK.

The other day someone asked me if I knew where the con-script below came from. He found it on the web somewhere, but can’t remember where. Do you recognise it?

One of the things I do in my job is to prepare html emails in many different languages, which are sent out by our web marketing bods. We’ve discovered that the text of emails in non-Latin writing systems often gets mangled in transmission, so to make sure the recipients can read the text, we send the emails in English with links to web pages containing text in the relevant languages.

Maybe one day you’ll be able to send emails in any language/writing system and be sure the text will display correctly at the other end. This doesn’t seem to be the case just yet.

I’ve also noticed that Latin transliterations are used by quite a few people who speak languages written with non-Latin writing systems in instant messages and other online chat and discussions. This may be because the systems don’t support of writing systems, or because they don’t always have the necessary input software and/or hardware to hand. Then again, some people might just find it easier to type quickly in the Latin alphabet.

During the past few months only one or two constructed scripts per week have been coming into Omniglot headquarters, sometimes fewer than that. This week however, there has been a small flood of them with five new scripts so far, two of which are now online: Betacap, an alternative alphabet for English invented by Polly, and Handaues, an alphabet for a conlang invented for a calligraphy project. I’ve even been inspired to create a new script myself: Curvetic, another alternative alphabet for English.

I have numerous bits of paper scattered around my desk with ideas for con-scripts. Few of them seem to work very well when I try writing texts in them though. What I try to achieve in a script is one that looks elegant and/or could be a real writing system.

People sometimes question the way the writing systems on Omniglot are classified. Most writing systems fit well into one category or another, but others straddle several categories, or don’t fit well into any category.

For example, when used to write Hebrew, the Hebrew script is an abjad or consonant alphabet. When it’s used to write Yiddish all the vowels are usually written, so is the Yiddish version a fully vocalised abjad or a phonemic alphabet?

Writing systems like Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Mayan are the most difficult to define. In many sources Chinese is classified as logographic, i.e. a writing system consisting of logographs or logograms, which are defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word”. This is not the best name for the script as only some Chinese characters are logograms. Other terms include morphosyllabic, logosyllabic, ideographic, pictographic.

In Visible Speech, John DeFrancis says that:

The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems.

Morphosyllabic seems to be a good term for Chinese, but what about Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Mayan, etc?

Any suggestions?

According to a recent post on Language Log, chimpanzees in the wild have been observed make pencil-like tools. They take sticks, tear off any branches, peel the bark off, and then sharpen one end. They then use the stick to make mark on large flat leaves. In one cases, a female chimp made marks on a leaf, showed it to a male, who looked at it briefly, then rushed off on some errand. Researchers have, as yet, been unable to examine the symbols because the chimps eat usually them.

Perhaps writing has been around a lot longer than we realise.