The Lowest Protocol
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[Graphic Version]
[Tokyo GeoCity]
[Italiano, prego]
About This Page
The World Wide Web is built over a big pile of technological strata
called protocols; from time to time, a new stratum is added on top
of the pile to provide some kind of new or improved functionality.
If you dig deep down the pile, under HTML, under IP, under TCP, under anything
else, you'll find the lowest protocol: the thousands-years-old
writing systems.
This ancestral layer has not been forgotten by the citizens of
the upper levels: the Internet has plenty information about
alphabets, syllabaries, ideograms, logograms, pictograms...
I love this kind of things ending by -gram and -graph,
so I often step into interesting WWW sites about writing. But,
since my bookmarks became too many to fit my menu bar, I started
dumping them in this page. Thanks to
GeoCities for the free
remote storage...
Still Working...
Now that my bookmarks are public, I realize that they are not so many as
I thought: more will come as I'll find new interesting information on the
Net.
If you have any comments, critics, or suggestions, please
drop me a line.
Among other things, please feel free to point out my blunders with
English: my mother tongue is Italian!
M.C.
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I have divided the world's writing systems into families.
This subdivision has no scientific significance; please take it
for what it is: simply a way of splitting the list.
- The Han Stock
- Chinese characters are called logograms, as each character
("-gram") represents a word ("logo-").
- The Phoenician Stock
- For the Phoenician businessmen, learning thousands ideograms
was an annoying waste of time -- and time was money!
- The Brahmi Stock
- Brahmi spread throughout India and Asia following religions, and is the
forefather of a wide family of scripts.
- Science And Fiction
- An illiterate Klingon deserves as much esteem as a Vulcanian, so you're
better follow my links and learn the alphabet!
- And More...
- This section contains anything that does not belong to one of the
other sections and doesn't justify a section on its own.
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Chinese characters (hanzi in Chinese; kanji in Japanese) are
called ideograms or, more properly logograms, as each
character ("-gram") represents a word ("logo-").
Tradition says that the Chinese script had been invented around 2700
b.C. by Cang Jie, a minister of king Huang Di, but archaeologist found
written documents dating back to 6000 years ago: some pieces of inscribed
pottery discovered in 1954 at Banpo (near Xi'an, Shaanxi, China).
Hanzi are perfectly suited for the Chinese language, as (over-simplifying)
each character equals a syllable, which equals a word.
This perfect equation among writing, sound and meaning, however, did not
hold when the Chinese characters started to be used for different
languages, such as Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese.
These new users of hanzi soon felt the need to supplement the script with
phonetical signs to represent grammatical particles, non-Chinese words or,
simply, to mark the pronounciations of all those imported Chinese words.
The Japanese kana and the Korean hangul arised from this
need.
The Chinese Script
-
KANJIDIC is a plain text database containing most of the
Chinese characters (kanji, in Japanese) in the JIS character set.
Each character lists a lot of useful information such as: Japanese and
Chinese pronunciation(s), JIS and Unicode code, traditional radical,
usage frequency, Japanese "grade" (i.e. at what age Japanese kids
learn it).
The work of putting this database together has been initiated by
Stephen Chung and Mike Erickson, but the project soon became a
collective Linux-style work to which a lot of people on the Net, under
the coordination of Jim Breen, contributed for free.
-
Statistical information about Chinese characters: frequency of
usage and average number of strokes.
-
Characters Tables by Koichi Yasuoka: cross reference tables of
various national CJK characters sets and Unicode.
-
A Survey of Chinese Input Methods: an introduction to some
popular Chinese keyboard codes.
-
Chinese fonts from Yamada (PC).
-
Documentation for using the Chinese script on Macintosh.
-
Documentation and software for using the Chinese script with
various operating systems and applications.
-
JavaScript utility to get the Chinese pronunciation of Han characters
(Mandarin or Cantonese dialects; Guobiao and Big5 characters sets are
accepted).
-
Notes on CJK Character Codes and Encodings, by the
Chinese Community Information Center.
An informative introduction the main Far Eastern character sets:
Big5 and
CNS (the traditional Chinese characters, used in Taiwan and Hong-Kong);
Guobiao (the simplified Chinese characters, used in the People's
Republic of China);
JIS (the Japanese national standard);
KSC (the Korean national standard);
CCCII/ANSI Z39.64-1989 and
the Unicode/ISO-10646 "CJK" section (international encodings).
Encodings of 94x94-Character Sets is another interesting article;
it covers the popular "shifted" or "multibyte"
schemes, that allow embedding the 14-bit Far Eastern characters in normal
8-bit "ASCII" text.
The Kana Script (Japanese Syllabary)
The Hangul Script (Korean Alphabet)
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Brave sailors, smart merchants, fierce pirates, the Phoenicians were the
lords of all the sea routes within the Mediterranean and towards the
Atlantic coasts of Africa and Europe.
For the dynamic Phoenician businessmen, learning the thousands ideograms
used by their neighbours was an annoying waste of time -- and time was
money!
We don't know exactly how the process evolved, but we know that around the
13th century b.C. the solution to this problem was up and running: a
short list of 22 letters (possibly derived from Akkadic or Egyptian
signs) was all that the Phoenicians needed to represent the consonants
of their language.
The alphabet was a best seller: all the neighbors of Phoenicians
adopted it and, with minor modifications, still use it today.
The most important "localization" was introduced in Greece at early
times: a few Phoenician-specific consonant signs, that would have been
useless in Greek, were redefined to represent the vowels.
These were not present in the first time because in Semitic languages
(like Phoenician, Arabic and Hebrew) words are basically identified by
their consonants, the vowels having a secondary role.
The Arabic Alphabet
-
Introduction to the Arabic alphabet: the letters, their name
and transliteration in English and French spelling.
-
ISO 8859-6, an Arabic 8-bit character set, with a BDF font, is
one of the ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.
-
Picture showing the ASMO character set.
-
Picture showing an alternative Arabic character set (7-bit, based
on ASCII).
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Arabic fonts from Yamada (Mac).
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Persian font from Yamada (Mac).
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Urdu font for Windows.
-
Arabic Typer is an utility to type Arabic in Windows (Visual
Basic source available).
-
ArabTeX is an Arabic version of the popular TeX typesetting
software, (by Professor Klaus Lagally, Stuttgart).
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Documentation for using the Arabic script on Macintosh.
The Armenian Alphabet
The Cyrillic Alphabet
-
Introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet: the letters, their name,
and audio files with the Russian pronunciation.
-
ISO 8859-5, a Cyrillic 8-bit character set, with a BDF font, is
one of the ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.
-
Russian fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).
-
Old Church Slavonic font from Yamada (Mac).
-
Documentation about the configuration of WWW browsers for
Cyrillic character sets (includes
Lynx,
Mosaic and
Netscape).
-
Documentation for using the Cyrillic script with various
operating systems and applications.
Focuses on the KOI-8 character set.
-
Documentation and software for using the Cyrillic script on
Macintosh.
-
Documentation and software for using the Cyrillic script with
various operating systems: MS Windows and DOS, OS/2, Linux, Macintosh.
The Futhark Alphabet
The Georgian Alphabet
The Greek Alphabet
-
Introduction to the Greek alphabet: the letters, their name
and Modern Greek transliteration.
-
ISO 8859-7, a Greek 8-bit character set, with a BDF font, is
one of the ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.
-
Greek fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).
-
Coptic fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).
The Hebrew Alphabet
-
Introduction to the Hebrew alphabet: the letters in printed
and manuscript form, their transliteration and audio files with
Modern Hebrew sounds.
-
ISO 8859-8, a Hebrew 8-bit character set, with a BDF font, is
one of the ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.
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Hebrew fonts from Yamada (Mac and Postscript).
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Hebrew fonts for Windows, Mac and Unix.
The Latin Alphabet
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The Brahmi ("Brahma's") script has been used India since 4 to 8
centuries b.C.
Possibly introduced from the Semitic area, Brahmi spread throughout India
and Asia following religions, and is the forefather of a wide family of
scripts in Northern India (e.g. Devanagari), Southern India (e.g. Tamil),
South-East Asia (e.g. Thai), Himalaya (e.g. Tibetan).
Brahmi-derived scripts are alphabetic: consonants are represented by
letters, while vowels are indicated by modifying marks. Compared to
Phoenician-derived alphabets, however, Brahmi and its derivatives have
somewhat a syllabic nature; in fact, if not explicitly marked,
consonants are implicitly associated to an inherent vowel.
The Bengali Alphabet
The Burmese Alphabet
The Devanagari Alphabet
The Gujarati Alphabet
The Gumurkhi Alphabet
The Kannada Alphabet
The Lao Alphabet
The Malayalam Alphabet
The Oriya Alphabet
The Sinhalese Alphabet
The Tamil Alphabet
The Telugu Alphabet
The Thai Alphabet
The Tibetan Alphabet
-
Tibetan fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac), plus a Windows
utility to type Tibetan.
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I don't know why ever one should want to learn Klingon (when the bastards
speak there are subtitles, after all).
However, if you really have so much free time, you should consider that
an illiterate Klingon deserves as much esteem as a Vulcanian, so you're
better follow my links and learn the alphabet!
Anyway, invented alphabets (but aren't them all?) are not only for
science-fiction: they exist also in science tout court and
are used by linguists to provide formal spellings for modern, ancient, or
supposed languages.
Alphabets For Linguistics
Star Trek Scripts
Middle Earth Scripts
-
Tolkien fonts from Yamada (Mac).
-
Tengwar and Cirth fonts.
The page also contains an Old English font, but
the author warns that it obsolete, as the special þ and ð letters
are now more commonly available on PC's.
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As I said, the subdivision in families that I used is strongly arbitrary.
I don't feel that I should discard some interesting information just
because I can't find a specific box where to push it!
So, this section contains anything that does not belong to one of the
other sections and doesn't justify a section on its own.
Possibly, if lots of related information crowd here, new ad hoc
sections will be created (the most obvious candidates, by now, are the
Egyptian and Babylonian scripts).
The Akkadian Script
The Assyrian Script
The Cherokee Script
The Cypriot Script
The Cree/Inuit/Inuktitut Script
The Egyptian Script
The Disc Of Phaistos
-
Infinity One: one more guy has translated the enigmatic
terracotta from Crete and wants the world to know it! The author is
certainly kidding, but the translation is more sensible than other
ones made in the past by supposed scientists. At least, the basic
presupposition that the script should be syllabic is respected.
The Ethiopic Script
The Mayan Script
The Mycenean Script
The Ogham Script
The Olmec Script
The Persian Cuneiform Script
The South-Arabian Script
The Zapotec Script
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Page by Marco Cimarosti.
Last updated: March 10, 1997.
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