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Does anyone know an online resource/chart/table that shows the correspondence (even if it's sometimes only approximative) between the alphabets/writing systems of different languages, either directly or via IPA, e.g. there's a correspondence between the sound written u in French, written ü in German, or between ch in French and sch in German ( Read more... )

The other day I wrote an entry in my Russian-language blog about SignWriting in Unicode:
An ASL Wikipedia project is not (yet?) incorporated into main Wikipedia, because it uses SVG rather than plain text, but as soon as the Unicode Consortium adopts

Allocation
Count
Name
UTC Status
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Okay, I'm having fun with a fantasy story of mine. So much fun I started getting ahead of myself and had to stop to think about this. XD This isn't a terribly urgent question or set of questions rather, but it's been bugging me for a while and I'm kind of overwhelmed by the possibilities now that it finally hit me what a massive undertaking I was ( Read more... )

My gut tells me the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) letters and the Old Norse, and therefore modern Scandinavian letters are related. I'm talking mostly about wynn, ash, ethel (i.e. the letters that are now obsolete ( Read more... )

I have a general question for Chinese experts here. When I studied Mandarin in college, it was strongly implied that my learning simplified hanzi would enable me to interpret a great deal of written Cantonese as long as it also used the simplified forms. I have still never studied Cantonese and thus have yet to test this myself. In any case, I ( Read more... )

I'm a native English speaker acquiring the Hebrew alphabet for further study. English is written L→R, and Hebrew is R→L.

In my note-taking, the general form is L→R. I am doing Hebrew R→L, but within a space that I'm allotting by L→R measurements ( Read more... )

When new writing systems were created by scholars for the languages that had not had them before (like those of indigenous peoples of North America or Siberia), were the verbs meaning "read" and "write" also made up for those languages? And if so, in what fashion was that done (just coining new words from the scratch or borrowing them from other ( Read more... )

Does anyone know why Christian seminaries use Hebrew block script instead of regular script? Does anyone else use it? I'm learning Biblical Hebrew and I can't for the life of me figure out why someone would use such a clumsy system when script is so much easier.

Is there an explanation why most Chinese characters for internal organs (e.g. 脳 肺 腹 肝 臓 脾 腸) have the 月-radical?

P.S. "Semitic" tag was accidental, but now I can't delete it :)