100 Historical Things, Number 17

OK, to start with, just to clarify: onomastics is the study of names.

Now, I enjoy onomastics. It's useful in what I do, because I don't only study scripts and languages, I'm also very much invested in studying the people writing and speaking those scripts and languages. (I did talk a little bit about this already ( Read more... )

Something just struck me. The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet without any vowels[1]. Phoenician is written in txtspk!

[1] Yes, I know a couple of letters end up getting vocalic functions, but that's a whole nother story...

If you could design your writing system (let's say for writing English to keep things simple), what would it be like?

I suspect everyone reading this will be most familiar with the Latin alphabet, as is standardly used to write English. But this script wasn't developed for English, as I'm sure you know - it came from Phoenician, via Greek (through ( Read more... )

Your Score: Ogham

You scored


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I may have mentioned this before, but part of my work now involves transcribing Hebrew because some annoying academic dudes in the 60s decided it was cool to transcribe Phoenician inscriptions into Hebrew ( Read more... )