#writing systems

[yourfaveisintersex]

The Letter Q from the Latin Alphabet in Real Life is intersex!

[city-of-ladies]

Zambia's lost language invented by women but almost killed by colonialism

How social media is pushing back against the still common idea that African societies never had a knowledge system.

"One of Yonga's personal favourites in the Frame project is Sona or Tusona, an ancient, sophisticated and now rarely used writing system.

It comes from the Chokwe, Luchazi and Luvale people, who live in the borderlands of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yonga's own north-western region of Zambia.

Geometric patterns were made in the sand, on cloth and on people's bodies. Or carved into furniture, wooden masks used in the Makishi ancestral masquerade - and a wooden box used to store tools when people were out hunting.

The patterns and symbols carry mathematical principles, references to the cosmos, messages about nature and the environment - as well as instructions on community life.

The original custodians and teachers of Sona were women - and there are still community elders alive who remember how it works.

They are a huge source of knowledge for Yonga's ongoing corroboration of research done on Sona by scholars like Marcus Matthe and Paulus Gerdes.

"Sona's been one of the most popular social media posts - with people expressing surprise and huge excitement, exclaiming: 'Like, what, what? How is this possible?'"

The Queens in Code: Symbols of Women's Power post includes a photograph of a woman from the Tonga community in southern Zambia.

She has her hands on a mealie grinder, a stone used to grind grain.

Researchers from the Women's History Museum of Zambia discovered during a field trip that the grinding stone was more than just a kitchen tool.

It belonged only to the woman who used it - it was not passed down to her daughters. Instead, it was placed on her grave as a tombstone out of respect for the contribution the woman had made to the community's food security.

"What might look like just a grinding stone is in fact a symbol of women's power," Yonga says."

[yuk-tepat]

what would you say is the best way to start out making a logography?

Thanks for the ask, this is just a note that I HAVE read the question & am going to get to it.

[nihongo-ni-hon-yaku]

Japanese Company Truck Name Mishaps

or, “How the transition to horizontal writing went both ways on the sides of cars”

In Japan, some company cars and trucks write the company’s name from the front of the car to the back: left to right on the left side, but from right to left on the right side.

It’s not well documented why people did that, but my personal pet theory is that this started when Japanese was still in the transition from vertical writing (columns right to left) and had to decide between which way to write Japanese horizontally.

Top to bottom, right to left

According to Wikipedia’s article on “horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts”, before WWII, Japanese was written horizontally only in one row when constrained for space, and since columns went from right to left, the one row went from right to left.

Here is an old print ad for Calpico (カルピス) where the logo, being horizontal, reads from right to left, and the ad copy underneath goes from top to bottom, right to left:

This is a lot like writing words top to bottom with upright Latin letters. Here are two signs in Dutch for a liquor store (slijterij), one vertical and the other horizontal.

But especially after WWII when Japan rushed to Westernize, Japan adopted left-to-right horizontal writing to match the Latin alphabet. This follows the footsteps of the January 1915 issue of the Chinese magazine Science, which wrote Chinese horizontally to make various scientific formulae easier to read.

本雜誌印法，旁行上左，並用西文句讀點之，以便插寫算術及物理化學諸程式，非故好新奇，讀者諒之。

This magazine is printed sideways from the top left, and marked with Western punctuation. This is to make more convenient the insertion of mathematical, physical and chemical formulae, and not for novelty's sake. We ask for our readers' understanding.

Coincidentally, this solution was mostly equivalent to rotating vertically written Japanese 90° to the left, then rotating every letter 90° to the right.

Why not both?

The thing is that there was a pretty long time in Japan where left-to-right and right-to-left writing coexisted. So when writing text on vehicles, people wrote the name from the front to the back, so that a stationary observer can read it better when the vehicle is in motion. But it’s weird now that left-to-right won out by a huge margin.

Here are two advertisement plaques for Calpico—I don’t know when the specific dates are—that have motly the same design, but the older one (using the kyūjitai 戀) goes from right to left, and the newer one (using the shinjitai 恋) goes from left to right. (I don’t know why the character in the ad looks so blackface-y, but it’s what it is...)

This post was prompted by this Quora question, which listed some times when this practice went sideways (pun definitely intended). Translation follows.

トラックなどの横に書いてある会社名などが右から左に書かれてるのは何故ですか？

平野 幸司 (Koji Hirano)さんの回答: 諸説ありますが、船は進行方向から文字を先頭にして書くことで「どっちが先頭か」をわかりやすくしており、それを真似ている…というのが有力ですね。トラックは別にどっちが先頭かわかりにくいわけではないので真似しなくても良いと思いますけど

Q: Why are company names, like on the side of a truck, written from right to left?

Answer by Kōji Hirano • president of idealShip, Inc. (2006–now) • 1215 answers written, seen 130.87 million times

There are various hypotheses, but the prevailing one is that it’s in imitation of ships writing letters from the front to the back to make it clearer which side it’s facing. Though, I don’t think a truck needs to imitate that, being obvious which end is the front end of one...

Also, I’ve directly heard before that many companies do it as a good luck charm to keep the company moving forward. They seem to associate going against the direction of movement with things going badly, and want to avoid that.

I often hear the hypothesis that it’s easier for a moving car to read it when the text goes from the front to the back, but I don’t trust that...

You see this↑ brand often! It’s Sujahta. [Note: written “スジャータ”, a dairy product company, and the #1 brand of coffee creamer and chilled soup in Japan as of 2009]

Writing backwards causes these kinds of... mishaps...

Not 送輸—トイレ : [portTrans — Toilet]... but レイトー輸送 [Reitō Transport]

Not わかいあの肉 [That Young Meat]... but 肉のあいかわ [Aikawa Meats].

Not 所業エロ山 [Actions Lewd Mountain]... but 山口工業所 [Yamaguchi Industrial Works]

Not クッサア [EW, IT REEKS!]... but アサック [Asack]

I’m personally against this practice of writing right to left...

[silkentine]

Do y'all ever get so sidetracked on a project that you just invent a bunch of new scripts/writing systems? These ones are just pigpen cipher and are inspired by different alien races from Dungeon Crawler Carl. They represent the different ways these aliens would write in Syndicate Standard. If you find typos let me know!! I'm still learning how to use these :)

[dedalvs]

I uploaded an old work stream from 2019 when I was creating the Chakobsa font for Dune. It had no audio, so I never did anything with it. Today Jessie and I watched it and recorded commentary seven years on. It was fun. :)

[blindbeta]

Hi, this is such an informative blog, thank you for running it. I enjoy reading your thorough responses!

Do you think cuneiform could be used similarly as braille? The scenario I’m writing is more in the time period and location of cuneiform, compared to those of formal braille. This would be the universe’s written language style, so as to be inclusive to all the characters, visually impaired or not.

Cuneiform Braille Variant - I Have No Idea

From what I can understand, cuneiform is concave. And according to the internet, it isn’t technically a writing system of a language so much as something else involving symbols for many languages ???

I’m not sure how easy that might be to read through tactile means. Although a blind person might be able to write in this way if they have a guide such as a signature guide. Although that is assuming the language would be written and read in a certain way, such as vertical or horizontal lines.

As far as concave goes, I do remember that when I used a Braille eraser, I was kind of able to read it still, although I would usually write over it.

I think clay tablets would hold up well over time, which is good for Braille in particular since it tends to wear down over time in real life, such as when pressed in big book pages.

However, I’m not sure how well this would work as it would be a concave Braille of sorts. It wouldn’t be as easy to feel. Additionally, if you’re using Braille cells as inspiration, the writing instrument used would need to be small because the writing itself would need to be small. Basically, actual raised print letters needed to be big. Reading with them took much longer. That was what they were using before the Braille system. Braille can be read with one or two fingers and is therefore much faster and easier to read. The same would probably need to apply to your cuneiform writing system. And I have no idea how big or small actual cuneiform is.

So the short answer is, I have no idea. Would it be possible to use a clay tablet like a slate and stylus? Turning the tablet over and pushing the stylus in so the writing is tactile on the other side? I really don’t know.

My other concern is for blind people who aren’t reading this tactily. For example, today most blind people use large print, regular print, or audio formats. Not great. Braille literacy is declining. While I assume that would not be the case in your world due to lack of technology to replace tactile reading, I still wanted to mention it. Would reading this with your fingers be a common practice? For those who don’t or can’t, but also have low vision, I wonder if the writing would be large enough to read comfortably with one’s eyes. Because, remember, it also needs to be small enough to have a chance at being read easily in the tactile way.

Using my own experience as an example, I could sometimes see well enough to read Braille with my eyes only. That is possible and, in fact, a lot of Braille teachers can also read it by sight when grading homework and such. My teacher did both.

However, sometimes my eyes were not doing well on a certain day due to strain, poor lighting, weather, anxiety, increased eye shaking, etc. Sometimes the Braille was just too small.

With that in mind, how accessible would this be? Maybe I’m thinking too much.

Maybe @askablindperson or @cripplecharacters can figure it out? Any cuneiform enthusiasts out there who can give their thoughts for a cuneiform-inspired system? Any ideas you have that might work for this anon.

Sorry I couldn’t help much.

[satractic]

Viltrumite script concept!

I haven't made any grammar or actual phonology or some words, but I did make some glyphs.

The script above is designed with the assumption that Viltrumites carve their glyphs onto objects with their raw fingers. Imagine a metal slab. A Viltrumite would use their index finger to carve almost-perfectly straight lines onto the scripture in the shape of these glyphs.

This can also be done on the land of a planet on a larger scale, by using their whole bodies. or theoretically with ink, but ever since Argall banned all art, literature, and things that give meaning to life that aren't combat arts, that's almost never happened.

Direction and orientation theoretically do not matter, since the script has been used mostly for military purposes and marking planets, but the standard orientation would be up-to-down, and every line break is reverse of that (ie. up-to-down, and the next line is down-to-up, and then the next line is up-to-down again, like how very very Ancient Greek worked).

Also I didn't mention this above but the glyph for Ragnars comes from the glyph for danger repeated twice.