Category: Writing, fonts & typography

Alphabets and Ambigrams

By Simon

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:

Ambigram of thank you

This says Thank you and comes from this site.

This is a biscriptal one:

Multilingual Rotational Ambigram

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.

Puzzle

By Simon

Here’s some mysterious writing from a napkin ring.

Mysterious writing from napkin ring

Can any of you identify the script or decipher it?

This writing comes from a puzzle that appeared in the Puzzle Museum in 2005 and since then no-one has been able to identify the script or decipher it.

Some of the letters look like Thai or Lao, while others look like Tagalog to me.

The person who sent in the puzzle thinks the writing might be in a magical alphabet like the ones here.

Mysterious inscription

By Simon

This mysterious inscription was sent in by an editor at the Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona. One of their reporters is working on a story about a book that was donated to a local library there. It’s a portfolio of prints apparently related to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad that was compiled for the 1939 World’s Fair.

The inscription below is on the flyleaf, and they’ve been trying to determine what language it’s in in the hopes of getting it translated.

Mysterious inscription

The writing appears to be in a cursive form of the Hebrew script, and the language might be Hebrew or Yiddish.