Category: Writing, fonts & typography

Hungarian runes

By Simon

Yesterday at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod I was quite surprised to see Hungarian Runes / Rovás (Székely Rovásírás) being used. They appear on the logo and publicity material of a Hungarian drumming group who perform Hungarian folk dances and songs that date back to the 11th century, a time when the Székler Magyars were writing with the rovás.

The group, called Feher Taltos Traditional Hungarian Drummers (Regélő Fehér Táltos), is very good, and well worth going to see.

Here are some examples:

Examples of Hungarian rovás

I think the bit of writing on the right, which comes from the group’s flyer, reads, “Regélő Fehér Táltos Hagyományőrző Egyesület Dobcsapata”, which I assume is the group’s name in Hungarian.

Playing school

By Simon

The subject of children playing school came up today in a lecture in the context of how children acquire literacy. The study we were discussing focused on literacy in monolingual English families and polyglot Bangladeshi families in a poor area of London. The researchers found that in the Bangladeshi families it was almost always the older siblings helped their younger siblings with reading, while in the monolingual English families, it was often the parents who helped with reading.

The Bangladeshi children saw reading as something very serious and they all went to classes almost every day after school to learn to read Bengali and Arabic, while the English children saw reading outside school as a fun activity that they enjoyed doing, but didn’t take seriously.

When playing school the Bangladeshi children took it seriously, were strict and imitated their teachers both from their day schools and their evening classes. This involved the younger children reading aloud until they came to a word they didn’t know, which the older children would tell them. The older children also corrected their mistakes. As the younger children became more confident in their reading skills, the older ones gradually removed this supportive scaffolding. This is a technique used in their Bengali and Arabic classes, but quite different to the methods used in the day schools, where the teachers will often simply repeat the words the children have read rather than helping with the next ones.

For the English kids the emphasis when playing school was on the play rather than the school, and it was more popular with the girls than the boys.

Did you play school when you were a kid? Do your children do this? How seriously did you/do they take it?

Southwest script

By Simon

The longest running text in the undeciphered Southwest script of Iberia was discovered recently in southern Portugal, according to an article I found today.

Inscription in the Southwest script

The script dates back to about 800-500 BC and quite a few fragments of texts have been found. Some experts believe the texts were written by pre-Roman tribes such as the Tartessians, Conii or Cynetes, others think the Celts wrote them. The script appears to be an adaptation of the Phoenician and Greek alphabets and symbols representing syllables, consonants and vowels have been identified. However as the language in question is unknown, the script has resisted all attempts to decipher it.

Fabricating fonts

By Simon

Last week I discovered a very useful site – Fontstruct. It has easy-to-use tools for constructing fonts; you can share your fonts in the online font gallery, though you don’t have to; and you can also download and edit fonts created by other users of the site. Once you’ve signed up to the site, which is free, you can start making fonts. The finished fonts can be saved on the site and downloaded.

I’ve started constructing a font for an alphabet losely based on British Sign Language finger spelling that I’ve been playing with for a while. I’ll post it on Omniglot once I’m satisfied with it. This may take quite a while though.

[Update] My finger spelling-based alphabet, which I named ‘Fingers’, is now online.

Animated Chinese character dictionary

By Simon

Arch Chinese is a very useful site I came across the other day. It includes a Chinese character dictionary which provides animations showing how to write six thousand traditional and six thousand simplified Chinese characters, and gives you pinyin pronunciation (with audio recordings), stroke counts, English translations and examples of words and phrases that use each character. You can search characters by pronunciation, radical, English words, etc.

It can also character worksheets in PDF format, converts pinyin with tone numbers to pinyin with diacritics, and keeps track of the characters you’ve studied. You can even add your own characters and phrases, and import and export word lists to/from the flashcard function.

Email etiquette

By Simon

A correspondent has asked about email etiquette and would be interested to know about formal and informal email openings and sign offs. Do you, for example, always start with a greeting of some kind and finish with a farewell? Or do you sometimes omit one or other of these? What kind of greetings and sign offs do you use, and do they depend on the context?

In my previous job some of the emails I sent were simple one word or one sentence ones without greetings or sign offs which said things like “Done”, “Sorted”, “I’ve done that now”, etc., but I only wrote in this way when replying to colleagues I knew well. Normally I almost always include greetings, such as Hi or Hello, and farewells, such as Regards or Best wishes, in my emails, except in some replies.

Portuguese spelling reforms

By Simon

Reforms to the spelling of Portuguese were officially adopted in Brazil yesterday and will be adopted by Portugal and Cape Verde and the other lusophone countries eventually, according to this report. The reforms have not been welcomed by all in Portugal as many of them are existing Brazilian spellings and thousands of people have signed petitions against them. There are more details of the opposition to the reforms here.

The reforms include the removal of silent letters, such as p in optimo (great) and of unnecessary diacritics. The letters k, w and y, which are already used, are being officially added to the Portuguese alphabet The idea is the make written Portuguese uniform globally, which will make things like internet searches easier.

Mysterious medallion inscription

By Simon

This medallion belonged to Kevin Silver’s father and was believed to be his grandfather’s originally. Kevin has been told is “probably” a protection device that his grandfather wore to protect himself from harm and evil spirits. His grandfather was an Orthodox Jew from Russia who was very religious.

Kevin has tried to match the letter to the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Ancient Greek, Russian, & Ancient Russian alphabets without success. Can you help?

Medallion with mysterious inscription

I’ve decided to put puzzles on this blog to make it possible for you leave comments rather than having to send them to me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

Solution from Aharon Shmuel

The language is Hebrew written in the Paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician alphabet (abjad). The script is taken from the style used on coins minted during the Jewish revolts against Rome; indeed, this seems to be a replica of a coin from that period.

The text reads שנת אחת לגאלת ישראל; SHNAT ACHAT LEGE’ULAT YISRAEL; year one of Israel’s redemption. This phrase was used on coins minted during the revolts. In fact, Israel has issued stamps featuring ancient coins with this exact phrase on them: here and here.

One interesting feature here is the backwards letter Gimmel (the 8th letter, reading from right to left). I’ve been scouring the internet looking for an example of coins from this period with a backward Gimmel, but each one I’ve found has been facing forward. This, along with the owners comments, leads me to believe that this replica was made by a reader/writer of the Cyrillic alphabet who mixed up the Gimmel with the corresponding letter Ge – after all, what is a Cyrillic Ge if not a backward Gimmel.

Also, the Alephs are inconsistent (4th, 9th & 15th letters), and the Nun (2nd letter) looks more like a Mem but that could just be the picture quality.

As a side note, the current 1 and 10 New Israeli Shekel coins make use of Paleo-Hebrew; the ₪10 has a similar phrase, לגאלת ציון; LEGE’ULAT TZION; for the redemption of Zion.

All in all, a very cool coin to have – I’m jealous. As far as protection from spirits etc., could well have been intended for that. I’d wear it if I had it. -Aharon

Chinese etymology

By Simon

Yesterday I found a useful looking website about Chinese Etymology which shows variant forms of characters including Oracle Bone characters (甲骨文 jiăgŭwén), Bronze characters (金文 jīnwén) and Grass script characters (草書 căoshū). Some characters have many forms in the older versions of the Chinese script – up to 50 or so in some cases.

It also has information about the etymology and history of characters and written Chinese.

Another useful website I came across recently is a Chinese text annotation tool, which adds pop-up annotations containing pinyin transcriptions and English translations when you move your cursor over the characters in a Chinese text. The annotations can be applied to web pages or to Chinese texts pasted in the box on that site.