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Exotic Locales

(Most of the material here was posted by Glenn Adams, and can be found in "The Unicode Standard, Version 1.0 Volume 1".)

The Burmese script therfore ultimately derives from Brahmi, and so shares the structural features of its relatives: Consonant symbols include an inherent vowel; various signs are placed before, above, below and after a consonant to indicate a vowel other than the inherent one; ligatures and conjuncts are used to indicate consonant clusters.

The Khmer language has a much richer set of vowels than the Indo-Aryan languages for which the ancestral script was used. By the same token, there is a much smaller set of consonant sounds. The Khmer script is adapted to the language by adding extra vowel signs and various diacritic marks, and by using the choice of consonant as well as of vowel signs to determine the particular vowel sound represented. Thus most vowel signs do not have a single value but must be interpreted in the context of the associated consonant. This is very similar to the situation in Thai and Lao, where different consonant symbols have the same sound but encode different tones. Khmer writing does not normally separate words with white space as European languages do.

Each visible glyph of the Ethiopian script represents a syllable rather than a single letter. The syllables can all be treated as simple (consonant + vowel) pairs, so that each glyph can be thought of as a ligature of two underlying letters.

According to The Unicode Standard, the Tibetan script is used for writing the Tibetan language in Tibet proper and for Tibetan and related languages spoken elsewhere in the Himalayan region, including Bhutan, India, and Nepal. Consonant clusters are sometimes rendered as conjuncts formed by stacking letters along a vertical axis. Conjuncts are represented in the text stream by placing a conjunct marker between letters to be conjoined. (In a personal communication, Christopher J. Fynn writes, "In ISO 10646 at least (and there is no other standard for encoding Tibetan script) conjunct markers are *not* used. The Tibetan consonants have been encoded twice - one set of 'headline' consonants and one set of combining consonants. Tibetan conjunct stacks are encoded by adding combining (subjoined) consonants to an inital headline consonant.")

The Mongolian script originated ultimately from the Aramaic, a right-to-left Semitic script. At some point the whole page underwent a rotation through 90 degrees counterclockwise, with the result that Mongolian is traditionally written vertically in columns advancing from left to right. (In recent usage in China, when Mongolian is to be integrated with left-to-right horizontal text, the Mongolian lines may be rotated a further 90 degrees.) In contrast to many other Indic scripts, Balti is written from right to left horizontally, in the Arabic manner. All of the vowel signs except long a are integrated into the glyphs used for consonants, becoming projections from the consonants rather than being separate marks as in most of the modern Indic scripts.

Batak is read from left to right, but is often written similarly to Tagalog and Buhid, by writing vertically along the length of a piece of bamboo.

Buginese seems to use spaces between certain units, which are noted by Sirk to be ``longer than a word in its grammatical definition.'' There is one punctuation symbol, pallawa, used ``to separate rhythmico-intonational groups, thus functionally corresponding to the full stop and comma of the Latin script.''

The Etruscan civilization lived alongside the Romans and there was much contact between the two. Etruscan is written horizontally from right to left. Archaic inscriptions have no spaces between words, but later inscriptions frequently have single or double dots between words.

Glagolitic, sometimes called by its Russian name Glagolitsa (``verbal script''), was developed in the 9th century to write Old Slavic. It arose more or less in parallel with the Cyrillic alphabet for the same language, and the two alphabets correspond to each other quite closely. The relationship between the origins of Glagolitic and Cyrillic is unknown, though St. Cyril is said to have had a hand in both. The Cyrillic script gradually supplanted Glagolitic, but Glagolitic continued in some liturgical use until the 19th century.

The script called Linear B is a syllabic system that was used on the island of Crete (and parts of the nearby mainland) to write the oldest recorded variety of the Greek language. Linear B clay tablets predate Homeric Greek by some 700 years, the latest being from about 1375 BC. Major archaeological sites include Knossos, first uncovered in about 1900 by Sir Arthur Evans, and a major site near Pylos on the mainland. The majority of inscriptions currently known are inventories of commodities and accounting records. The script resisted early attempts at decipherment, but it finally yielded to the efforts of Michael Ventris, an architect and amateur decipherer. Ventris' breakthrough in decipherment came after the realization that the language might be Greek, and not (as had been previously thought) a completely unknown language. Ventris formed an alliance with John Chadwick, and decipherment proceeded quickly. Ventris and Chadwick published a joint paper in 1953.

Maldivian is written from right to left and partakes of features of both the Indic and Arabic script varieties. Consonants have an inherent a vowel sound, but they are always written with either a vowel sign or a null ``vanishing vowel'' sign above them.

Tifinagh is a living script used among the Berber people of the Sahara. It seems to be a direct descendant of the ancient Numidian script. Numidian was normally written from bottom to top, in columns from left to right. In some bilingual Numidian and Punic inscriptions, the Numidian parts were written from right to left horizontally in the Punic manner.

The Ogham script was used in Ireland and England prior to the introduction of the Latin alphabet. The form of its letters seems heavily influenced by the medium with which it was used; it was most often scratched on stones and posts, as well as on the frames of doors. At least one interactive variety called ``leg Ogham'' (reported in the Book of Ballymote) was also apparently used; it was signed with the hands upon the shin, the five fingers being used in a manner suggesting the horizontal lines of the script.

Phoenician is generally written from right to left horizontally. Phoenician language inscriptions usually have no space between words; there are sometimes dots between words in later inscriptions (e.g., in Moabite inscriptions). Typical fonts for the Phoenician and especially Punic have very exaggerated descenders. These descenders help distinguish the main line of Phoenician evolution toward Punic from the other (e.g., Hebrew) branches of the script, where the descenders instead grew shorter over time.

The Rong script (also called Lepcha) is used to write the Rong language of Sikkim (located between Nepal and Bhutan, just south of Tibet). Rong occasionally makes use of a floating dot (U+xx2E) below consonants to distinguish special pronunciations.

Tagalog is a script of the Philippines. The Tagalog language is very much alive, but now utilizes the Latin script. The script has only the two vowel signs I and U, which are also used respectively to stand for the vowels E and O. Though all languages normally written with this script have syllables possessing final consonants, they cannot be expressed in the script. Reforms to express final consonants or to add the missing vowel signs were apparently proposed at various times, but were always rejected by native users who considered the script adequate. Tagalog is read from left to right in horizontal lines running from top to bottom. It may be written either in that manner, or in vertical lines running from bottom to top, moving from left to right. In the latter case, the letters are written sideways so they may be read horizontally. This method of writing may be due to the medium and writing implements used. It was often scratched with a sharp instrument onto beaten strips of bamboo which were held pointing away from the body and worked from the proximal to distal ends, from left to right.

The Hittite language written with a unique hieroglyphic system is the oldest recorded Indo-European language. The Hittite hieroglyphics came to light gradually during the latter half of the 19th century. There are some 110 signs or so.


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