Good luck, because adult, educated Mongolians spend decades reading and writing in it every day and still make frequent mistakes. Boy, that sounds like yet another terrible writing system! The correct vowel is always predictable in writing, even if it is quite indistinct when heard. I once tried to put the spelling of verbs in some kind of order at Spelling of Verbs in Mongolian Cyrillic Script. It was the wrong approach because there are still exceptions.
I can never learn spelling according to that kind of rule. The script, by the way, was actually created by Mongolians. They partly referred to the old script…. And despite its shortcomings, I actually like the old script better….
This is a slightly strange transcription, partly phonemic, partly showing minute phonetic detail. No doubt English obliterates important semantic connections by writing king, royal, regal instead of king, kingly, kingish. You are talking different historical backgrounds.
English never developed that way. Japanese did exploiting the fact that Chinese characters had a system of multiple readings , and it is an element in its vocabulary development. It would be difficult to create an ex post facto system for English vocabulary that could match the Japanese one. We call it indeterminate because we have determined that that is what it is. Holmstedt, posted this month, that if I understand it proposes alphabet creation from Canaanite city of Byblos interaction with Egypt:.
HIs criticisms are much more compelling than his theory. Indeed, as revolutionary as we may consider it, the alphabet is but a simplification of syllabic writing:. Of course, the Byblian obligate syllabary is the more important development, not the later abjad. Abstracting language entirely away from logographs is a big step.
From there, dropping vowels, and later picking them back up, is trivial. Although frankly, the development from rebus to obligate syllabary is also stepwise.
The only real invention I can see is the rebus itself. That is the moment of abstraction from picture of thing to representation of sound via an early graphic pun. The rest is an extension and refinement of the initial principle. As to who actually developed the alphabet, I think Holmstedt is interesting but ultimately not convincing.
But it seems likely that any West Semitic speaker who encountered Hathor might well have called her Lady.
His strongest point in favor of Byblos is that the Wadi el-Hol and Serabit el Khadem graffiti are surely just remnants of a much larger and earlier corpus on perishable materials. Their content is not the content of the developers of a communication system; their medium is the most likely to survive rather than the easiest to experiment with; and their separation from each other by at least a century and probably more is statistical evidence that they are lucky finds in a longer arc of development.
If perishable material is the most likely medium for experimentation, then Byblos is well placed as an importer of papyrus, and they do have a goddess called, like many other goddesses, Lady. I guess you could find reasons in varying relations with Egypt and Mesopotamia and in the availability of papyrus vs. This strikes me as profoundly wrong. It only seems trivial in hindsight. Related, probably, somehow. If it were, that step would have taken place commonly among syllabary-users.
It distinguishes vowels after aleph. I agree that his criticisms is better than his arguments. The syllabary argument is no argument for Byblos specifically as the cradle of the alphabet without a clear derivation of one system from the other. His graffiti argument is refuted by his own criticism, in which he recognizes that the importance of inscriptions is an artefact of conservation.
But it led me to a fun thought. What if Pallas Athene were a calque of the epithets of Phoenician city godesses? Given that all manuscript Ogham is LTR, I think it really makes more sense to see it as a natively LTR script that is able to go vertical in either direction, like other horizontal scripts. The Unicode vertical text model characterizes each character as being always upright whether vertical or horizontal, rotated 90 degrees when vertical, or replaced by a different glyph when vertical with a fallback to either of the other two positions if no vertical glyph is available.
A character with a diacritic is treated the same as its base character, unless the diacritic is an enclosing square or circle, in which case the combination is treated as always upright. Nice, what a beautifully stubborn approach to consonants. Speaking of stubborn things, it also made me realize that there was nothing unique about the stubborn survival of the Basque through the Iron Age and into the early centuries of the Roman era.
I realized that the Iberian languages with their semi-syllabary writing system shared quite a bit with the Basque, including a whole set of numerals, a set of suffixes, and elements of toponymy … but of course too little is know about the Iberian to make a conclusive case about its genetic relationship with the Basque.
But in terms of plain DNA genetics, both peoples were essentially identical through the Iron Age half derived from the descendants of the Steppe migrations overall, and nearly fully descended from the Steppe on the male lines. Does the DNA equivalency make the case of the common roots of Iberan and Basque a bit more attractive? Would code cracking be more difficult in a syllabary? Seems like it would.
It was just an intriguing thought. It seems to have begun as a misinterpretation of the Phoenician alphabet. And why do you think that LTR is a more natural choice? Would it perhaps be that that is the model that they adopted from the West? Or is something more profound at work. Please enlighten us. Perhaps it was all a huge mistake. Perhaps syllabaries are a more natural way of analysing speech sounds.
Someone at LanguageLog suggested something like this. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, traditional Mongolian… all traditionally worked with syllables. But Japanese is a kind of counterexample: it lends itself to syllabic writing more than most languages, but this creates contortions in the traditional analysis of verbal morphology because the script has no good way of writing consonant-final verb stems. Korean writing is an alphabet, surely, unless you mean Hanja? If they came heavily under Arabic influence instead, they might have been written RTL.
But when is RTL in fact used? One context is newspaper headlines, which can be thought of as vertical as the text below them normally is but limited to a single row rather than being multi-row columns. As I mentioned, LTR is now outdated, although still occasionally found on sides of buses, etc. Korean is alphabetic, true, but it combines letters into square shapes that correspond to syllables.
Perhaps it combines the best of both worlds, but the nod to syllabicity is significant. Traditional Mongolian script can be decomposed into letters but is taught to Mongolian children as syllables, set out in syllabic tables. Inputting the traditional script would be far easier if they had adopted a syllabic approach.
Input methods in Inner Mongolian adopted the syllabic approach, setting aside private-use code points, and they work a lot better than Unicode. The traditional Chinese phonetic analysis splits syllables into initials and finals. This is enshrined in bo po mo fo and is certainly not harder than pinyin.
This meant that since you start on the right when reading vertically, you started on the right here as well. The benefit is to literature and poetry, where the many lexical strata in English offer choices of register, associations and sound. A lot depends on the type of language e. Anhui becomes Ankhoi, and so on. All that depends on the language. Bathrobe: I admit that I added that point for punch, not for truth.
The discussion that followed has been very enlightening. Something in their economy, culture and language led them to ungrok and rehack the concept of writing, not once but at least three times. The existing logographic models of Egyptian hieroglypics and by then Babylonian cuneiform were difficult to adapt to Semitic languages.
The idea would be that merchant houses, ships and caravans were all small operations, and the wealth and political position of their owners came and went with the luck of their latest expeditions. They needed clerks, but being unable to plan years ahead they would naturally develop a system that any bright kid could hack their way along in without much formal training. City authorities would also need officials on the docks and city gates, but as soon as there was a class of trained clerks around, they would recruit from that.
Also, or maybe as a counterpoint, the West Semitic languages ended up using an abjad, which on the face of it is particularly ill suited to represent the important morphological processes in those very languages. Could the abjad be what happened to he syllabary when it was taken up by officials trained in recognizing the image of the word and supplying all phonology by context and rote learning?
Imagine the poor scribe in a trading group that dealt with both Egypt and Mesopotamia. But imagine needing to be tri-lingual and learn two logographic systems! Scribal desire to maintain a monopoly of literacy is the only possible explanation for the Pahlavi writing system, easily the worst ever to use an alphabet. Me three. The throwaway suggestion that the alphabet was intended as an improvement on the Byblian syllabary is really, really hard to imagine and indeed there is no precedent.
Based on what little evidence we have, the proportion of the population that was literate in ancient Canaan fluctuated wildly; any amount of political and economic upheaval will do that. So why should illiterate mine workers have been too stupid to put themselves in something similar to a Sequoyah situation? The very fact that the letters are hieroglyphs used not for their Egyptian, but for their Semitic pictorial sound values argues for such a situation — even though not exactly the same situation, because the principle that signs stand for consonants was transmitted.
And that principle, to go back to the OP, comes straight from the logographic principle. Morphology is not written. In China that meant the pre- and suffixes were ignored and can only be reconstructed nowadays; in Egypt it meant the vowels were ignored.
The Ugaritic alphabet has been mentioned. It does kind of look like something intermediate between Egyptian and Phoenician, but it has yet to be deciphered and may never be, because the corpus is so small. The Ugaritic system is nearly but not completely an abjad; it deviates only in having three alephs, depending on whether the following vowel was a, i or u. If n is next, you just solved the riddle of where elementum comes from.
Michael David Coogan has written two or more? His work has been cited approvingly, e. Hallo in his book on Ancient Near East Origins. Meroitic The writing system for the Meroitic language of Nubia appeared around the 2nd century B. The alphabet consisted of a combination of hieroglyphic signs and cursive letters.
Although the individual signs can be pronounced, the Meroitic language is still not fully understood and its texts are waiting to be deciphered and read. Part of a limestone lintel inscribed with hieroglyphs E , Dynasty 18 B. Fragment of papyrus written in hieratic , 20th Dynasty ca.
Gallery Tour. Of these languages, only ancient Greek could be read at the time. Rebekah Richards is a professional writer with work published in the "Atlanta Journal-Constitution," "Brandeis University Law Journal" and online at tolerance.
Richards earned a master's degree at Carnegie Mellon University. Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning. Classroom is the educational resource for people of all ages. Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language. See disclaimer. He was able to decipher the text, which was a message from Egyptian priests to Ptolemy V written in B. Figuring out the meaning of texts written in hieroglyphic writing remains a big challenge for scholars, and requires a certain amount of subjective interpretation.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Below are nine key facts about hieroglyphic writing.
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