The other day I came across a useful site that helps you learn various alphabets and other writing systems – Henrik Theiling’s Script Teacher. It includes tests on CJK radicals, Hiragana, Katakana, Bopomofo, Hangul, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, a number of constructed scripts, and even a Blackletter (Gothic) typeface.
Other writing-related sites I found recently include the ambigram magazine, which includes a gallery of ambigrams, an ambigram generator and other ambigram-related information; and an ambigram generator.
An ambigram is “typographical creation that presents two or more separate words within the same physical space.” (source). Some ambigrams present the same word when read both ways up, or from left to right and right to left.
Here are some examples of ambigrams:
This says Thank you and comes from this site.
This is a biscriptal one:
It reads Sameh – سامح in the Latin and Arabic alphabets and comes from this site.
There are other examples of bilingual / biscriptal ambigrams on Chinese-English Ambigrams and on Inversions.
My introduction to amphigrams was a doormat I saw for sale that read “Welcome” one way, but “Go away” When rotated 180 degrees.
Well, the Arabic version isn’t very much like “Sameh” I’d say.
That reminds me of a signature of a friend. He was an artist and he signed his name in Arabic in the shape of a violin. His name (or last name) was “Bin Ghaith” and everyone was asking “who is Smith?” just because it looks so from left ro right. After all… none did manage to see the violin as it seems!
Just for fun, this is my friend’s FB page… although it is in Arabic mostly but for some reason that buttons in the page appeared in Swedish for me!!!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/bdr-bn-gyt/216587788218
I came the other day across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my number one comment. Keep writing, cause your articles are awesome! Doesn’t it take up a lot of time to keep your blog so fascinating ?