Writings of the world

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The scriptures of the world can be on the nature of each used writing systems in different font areas divided. According to the thesis “The alphabet follows religion” ( David Diringer ), the classification largely corresponds to the areas of influence of the world religions. It can be said, for example, that regions influenced by Catholic and Protestant influences write in Latin script, Christian Orthodox regions in Cyrillic or Greek script and Islamic regions in Arabic script. The Indian writing system migrated to Southeast Asia with Buddhism , the Chinese writing to Korea and Japan via the mediation of Chinese monks. However, the history of Scripture is much older than the great religions of the present day. Not only were religions pioneers of the scriptures, but also other currents in intellectual history and the spread of education.

Writing systems of the world
লরেন্স
Selected fonts in their own names
Left block:
the word Hanzi ( Chinese characters , from top to bottom) on the left in long characters , next to it in short characters ; below Braille in Braille , at the very bottom Morse in Morse code
Right block: Japanese syllabary
• Left side (from top to bottom): Hiragana in Hiragana
• Right side (from top to bottom): Katakana in Katakana
Middle block:
• Top line: ABC in Latin script , right next to it Devanagari in Devanagari script ,
Schesch (= writer's palette ) in Egyptian hieroglyphs , right of it Alefbet in Hebrew script
• Middle line: Alphawito in modern Greek script , Kirilliza in Cyrillic script , Abdschadiyya in Arabic script
• Bottom line: Thai alphabet in Thai , Futhark in older runes , Hangeul in Korean script

East asia

This area essentially comprises the Chinese characters (Hanzi), the Japanese script ( Kana and Kanji ) and the Korean script (Korean alphabet and Hanja ). The Chinese script spread to Korea and from there to Japan, both countries with completely different languages. In addition, the adoption of the foreign script in both countries meant that the original pronunciation of the Korean or Japanese words was retained for most characters, but the Chinese pronunciation was also adopted with the Chinese characters.

Chinese letters

The syllable ka in Chinese script and bopomofo

A Chinese character basically represents a monosyllabic morpheme of language. So it is not a syllabary, because the character encodes the meaning of the syllable, not its pronunciation. Identical syllables with different meanings are written differently.

Chinese characters are divided into six categories:

  1. Pictograms , e.g. B. 山 for mountain.
  2. Ideograms , e.g. B. 一 "one", 二 "two" and 三 "three".
  3. Compound symbols , e.g. B. 女 "woman" + 子 "child" = 好 = "good".
  4. Phonograms, which are composed of a sound and a sign indicating a meaning, e.g. B. 媽  /  妈 ( mā , "mother"). The right component 馬  /  马 ( mǎ , “horse”) gives the pronunciation, while the left component 女 ( nǚ , “woman”) gives an indication of the meaning.
  5. Borrowings that are used for a different meaning because of the same sound with little modification.
  6. Synonyms .

The majority of Chinese characters belong to the phonograms category and are made up of a conceptual, meaning-determining element and a phonetic element (Deuter-Lauter), which gives an indication of the pronunciation. Such characters are typically used to encode new words. However, it is usually not possible to infer the meaning or pronunciation of the sign without knowing the word and its coding.

Historically, the direction of writing was from top to bottom. These columns were then written from right to left, motivated by using the brush as a right-handed writing tool. Through contact with the Latin script and the use of other writing tools, everyday life on the mainland is usually written from left to right and the lines are arranged from top to bottom. However, the classic writing direction is still used for calligraphy or special emphasis in typesetting.

In 1956, simpler variants of Chinese characters developed from various manuscripts were standardized in the People's Republic of China and declared the norm in everyday writing, the so-called abbreviations , which were later also adopted in Singapore . The original, more complex traditional characters with usually more strokes are only used in everyday life in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and by overseas Chinese abroad, for calligraphy or special emphasis also in the PRC.

Japanese writing

The syllable ka in the Japanese scripts Hiragana and Katakana

The Japanese writing consists essentially of three writing systems, the Chinese Kanji characters, the Hiragana and the Katakana syllable writing. While Chinese is an isolating language in which every word is unchanged in every context, Korean and Japanese are agglutinating languages in which endings and particles are very important. This led to the fact that two syllable alphabets ( kana ) developed in Japan , katakana for foreign words (originally in Buddhist texts) and hiragana for Japanese particles and grammatical endings.

Kanji

There are around 3600 different characters of the Kanji ( 漢字 ) in both the Chinese and Japanese versions . There have been ministerial guidelines since 1981, so that today 2136 Kanji are taught in schools and used in publications. Kanji are used for verbs, adjectives, and nouns.

What makes reading Japanese texts with Kanji so enormously difficult are the different readings for the same character . A distinction is made here in Japanese between the Kun reading (Japanese reading) and the On reading (Sino-Japanese reading; On = sound). As a rule, each character has at least one On and Kun reading, with a large number of characters having several Kun readings (several On readings are comparatively rare).

Hiragana

Hiragana ( ひ ら が な ), the round Japanese syllabary , is mainly used for particles and endings.

Katakana

Katakana ( カ タ カ ナ ), the angular Japanese syllabary, is mainly used for foreign words (today mostly from English).

Rōmaji

Rōmaji is the name for the translation of Japanese characters into the Latin alphabet. The term is made up of the Kana ロ ー マ for Roman and the Kanji 字 for characters. Rōmaji ( ロ ー マ 字 ) is mainly used in the natural sciences (e.g. in chemistry).

Korean script

The syllable ka in Korean script

The Korean script is a special kind of letter font . It mimics the square shape of the Chinese characters, but reproduces all the sounds of the Korean language. Under King Sejong, Korea introduced an alphabet that has completely replaced the Chinese characters ( 漢字 , Hanja ) in North Korea and largely in South Korea. To commemorate this invention, October 9th became Hangeul Day . In 1446, King Sejong introduced the reimagined Korean alphabet. At that time, the Korean alphabet was called Hunmin Jeongeum ( 訓 民 正音 ) or "the right sounds to instruct the people". The Korean alphabet is unique among the world's writing systems in that it was invented at a specific time by specific people and without outside influence. It has also been spread through an explanatory work. The alphabet originally had over 28 letters. After some of them were later no longer used, today it consists of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. The Hunmin Jeongeum was declared National Property No. 70 and was added to the list of UNESCO World Monuments in 1997 .

South Asia and Southeast Asia

The syllable ka in North Indian scripts, from above: Tibetan, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Bengali and Oriya

Based on the ancient Indian scripts Brahmi and Gupta , syllabary scripts developed throughout the region . The most famous of these scriptures is the Devanagari script ("script of the divine city"), in which Sanskrit was written. What all of these scripts have in common is that they are all syllabic scripts and almost all of them have the vowel "a" in almost every syllable. If another vowel should follow, this is indicated by diacritical marks above, below or next to the syllable. The shape of the characters changes with the writing material used: If the birch bark in northern India allows straight lines, these would split the palm leaves used in southern India. The cornerstones of this development are the Devanagari script, in which all syllables are hung on a line like a clothesline, and the Burmese script, which essentially consists of circles.

North Indian writings

are used in the following languages:

South Indian writings

The syllable ka in South Indian scripts, from above: Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Sinhala

are used in the following languages:

Southeast Asian writings

are used in the following languages:

  • Burmese (official language in Myanmar ): The Burmese script is similar to the South Indian scripts in terms of its rounded shapes, but in contrast to the South Indian scripts it has seven vowels and differentiates between three pitches, which makes the vowel system considerably more complicated.
  • Lao ( Laos )
  • Cambodian (Khmer, Cambodscha , Kampuchea): The Khmer script lies between the Indian script and the Thai script and has no specific characters for vowels. All independent signs are consonants.
  • Thai ( Thailand ): The Thai script is similar to the Khmer script and, like this, does not have its own characters for vowels. All independent signs are consonants that all have the vowel "o" with them.
  • There are four different native writing systems in the Philippines . Baybayin , which comes from Luzón , was developed into Buhid , Hanunó'o and Tagbanwa by ethnic minorities in Central Philippines . All these systems are Abugidas with the inherent vowel [⁠ a ⁠] . In addition, they all have three vowels, do not distinguish between pitches and, with the exception of the colonial version of Baybayin, are not able to represent single consonants. Baybayin itself is derived from the Kawi script .

middle East

In the area of ​​the fertile crescent from approx. 4000 BC The earliest writing systems in the world can be found in city-states. The script developed there around 2700 BC. To cuneiform writing ( verbal and syllabary ). The various Egyptian scripts ( hieroglyphs , hieratic , demotic ), the Hebrew script (consonant script ) and the Arabic script (consonant script ) are considerably more recent . The Ethiopian script (syllabary) is derived from an older level of Arabic script . Even if the Egyptian hieroglyphic script looks like a picture script at first glance, it was not far from becoming a letter or at least consonant script. Consonant scripts are also the Hebrew and the Arabic script. Anyone who reads these scriptures has to think about the vowels for himself. The punctuations that are used in both languages ​​are only used in children's books and religious writings.

Cuneiform

In Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC , in an area between the Euphrates and Tigris , the history of writing in city-states began in the Middle East. The country was divided into the Akkad Empire in the north and that of the Sumerians in the south. The first clay tablets with cuneiform script are made in Sumerian Uruk . These first written records do not represent myths or poems , but are primarily agricultural lists and tables that can be understood as a mnemonic for bookkeeping and as information about the social administration of the empire. By the records it is clear that the Sumerians both title deeds introduced, as well as computing system and method of payment and beyond interest rates and loans could handle.

See also: Assyrian , Babylonian , Hittite , Ugarit , Rawlinson

Hieroglyphics

The earliest hieroglyphic finds date from around 3000 BC. BC , but it is not certain whether the script was not created earlier. The writing was essentially retained until around 390 AD , but the number of characters used increased from around 700 to an astonishing 5000. It was not until the Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion that the hieroglyphic writing was deciphered in 1822, and with it the history of ancient Egypt known.

Like the cuneiform pictograms from the same period, hieroglyphic writing consists of stylized drawings. But it differs from it in that the individual signs reproduce the sound of the spoken language. As a result, both concrete and abstract realities can be represented with their help. Agricultural and medical texts are written down as well as texts on educational issues, prayers, legends, legal texts and various kinds of literature. Hieroglyphic writing allows for enormous variety and originality because it contains three types of characters:

  • Pictograms that represent stylized symbols for objects and living beings, but which can also express thoughts in a special combination of symbols,
  • Phonograms , often the same signs but identifying sounds, and
  • Determinatives , signs that make a distinction between pictograms and phonograms clear.

See also: Coptic script

Phoenician alphabet

The origin of Phoenician signs is still unclear today. According to one theory, this new type of writing developed from a gradually converted cuneiform script; Another thesis says that the Phoenician signs were derived from the demotic .

The Phoenician alphabet contains only consonants , and even today the scripts contain Semitic languages, e.g. B. Hebrew and Arabic , very few vowels . It is believed, for good reasons, that the Phoenician alphabet served as the source for the Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic script .

Aramaic and Hebrew script

In the 8th century BC In the land of Aram , in today's Syria , the Aramaic alphabet was used, which differs from the former Phoenician alphabet in only a few details. In this scripture some books of the Old Testament are written. The oldest written finds of ancient Hebrew , also known as angular Hebrew , go back to the 10th century BC. BC back. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. Writing and language do not differ significantly from today's official written language of Israel . In addition to block letters, italic letters are used for everyday writing. The most famous fragments of writing are the leather scrolls from Qumran by the Dead Sea , which were written in Hebrew and Aramaic.

Arabic writing

The first Arabic inscriptions on 512 / 513 dated n. Chr., Spreading the scripture begins only when the followers of the religious founder Mohammed the Koran write.

See also: History of Arabic script , Arabic script , Arabic alphabet , kufi , nastaliq , naschi , pehlevi , thuluth , alefba

Europe

The starting point of the European scripts is the Greek script (alphabet script), from which the Latin script , the Cyrillic script and, ultimately, the runic script can be derived.

Greek script

Due to the different structure of Semitic and Indo-European languages ​​with regard to the role of the vowels, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician script around 800 BC. Then some of them unneeded consonants were used to write vowels with these characters instead. But they still took over the Semitic letter names (Alpha, Beta, Gamma ...), which the Etruscans and subsequently the Romans abandoned (a, be, ce ...).

See also: Bustrophedon , Alphabet , Linear A , Coptic script

Latin script

Peculiarities that developed in the Latin script were gradually adopted by other writing systems. The distinction between capital and small letters ( capital letters and lowercase letters ) came with the Renaissance on, as the humanists, the Latin texts in Carolingian minuscule read and the inscriptions on the monuments of ancient Rome had in mind. In Chinese, for example, there is no space between the individual words.

See also: Capitalis , Unziale , Textura , Fraktur , Kursive , Antiqua

Armenian script

The Armenian alphabet today consists of 39 letters. It originated in the 5th century from the Greek alphabet, but also has influences from the Syrian , Aramaic and Ethiopian script . The writing style is similar to that of other fonts used in Europe: clockwise , marking the word boundary with spaces, as well as upper and lower case letters.

Georgian script

The Georgian alphabet has 33 letters, and each letter corresponds to a phoneme . It has a long tradition as a written and literary language. The order of the letters in the alphabet corresponds to the order of the Greek alphabet, although the letters are not variations of the Greek script. At the end of the Georgian alphabet there are all sounds that have no equivalent in ancient Greek. The Georgian script is written from left to right.

Cyrillic script

In the year 862/3 should by two scholars, the brothers Konstantinos (827-869) and Methodios (815? -885), on behalf of the emperor Michael III. In preparation for the Moravian-Pannonian Slavic Mission, church records are translated into Slavic . For this purpose Konstantinos developed a new script, the (later) so-called Glagoliza . When a new Slavic script was created in Bulgaria around 893 on the basis of the Greek majuscules using specifically Slavic elements of Glagoliza, it was incorrectly named Kyrilliza ( Kyrill script ) in memory of the monastery name of Constantine " Kyrill " .

See also: Church Slavonic , Slavic languages , Russian language , Belarusian language , Ukrainian language , Serbian language

Runes

Runes are called the letters of the old Germanic alphabet. They were usually carved in wood, bone or metal, later also carved in stone, so the signs consist almost entirely of straight lines. There were 24 different characters. After the first letters of this alphabet, it is also called Futhark . Runes were also used for magical purposes.

Ogham

The Ogham - or (Old Irish) Ogam script (Irish ['oɣam]) was used in Ireland and some western parts of Britain or Scotland (Scottish Gaelic Oghum) from the 4th to 6th centuries on the edges of stones or to put short texts, in most cases personal names, on other carrier material.

Local fonts

In two regions of Europe people are thinking about old, actually extinct writing systems and using them again. The old Hungarian script and the Glagolica should be mentioned here . These are not really used for communication, however, inscriptions and signposts are sometimes also labeled in this regional script.

America

Different writing systems have developed in North, Central and South America, most of them before the colonial era.

Cherokee

The Cherokee syllabary is more recent . The illiterate Sequoyah (sequoia trees have their scientific name Sequoiadendron giganteum in his honor ) created a syllabary for the Cherokee tribe that quickly caught on and is still used today.

Cree

The Cree Indian script, known as the Cree script, was developed by the missionary James Evans and is also a syllabic script that does not use Latin letters, but allows different syllables to be represented by rotating the individual elements. This script is also used today by the Canadian Inuit for their language Inuktitut .

Maya and Aztecs

An example of an independent writing invention is the Central American writing of the Maya , with which everything that was spoken could also be reproduced in writing. The Aztec writing system is not a full script .

See also: Maya script , Maya calendar , Maya numerals , Vigesimal system , Diego de Landa

Inca

The Quipus ( khipu ) of the Peruvian Incas are not to be regarded as full script, because the knotted script is only a numerical script for bookkeeping.

Oceania

On to Chile belonging Easter Island a unique ritual script was developed that Rongorongo is called. It has not yet been deciphered.

Africa southern of the Sahara

An African script with a long tradition is the Ethiopian script , an Abugida syllable script that developed from Old South Arabic and is used for various languages ​​of Ethiopia .

Other African scripts such as Vai , Mende , Bassa Vah , Kpelle , Bété , N'Ko (in West Africa), Osmaniya (for Somali ) or Mandombe ( Democratic Republic of the Congo , Angola ) and Mwangwego ( Malawi ) were used in the 19th and 20th centuries. Developed in the 19th century in order to enable and promote the writing of languages ​​that were previously only orally transmitted. The Africa alphabet is an extension of the Latin alphabet with special characters that are supposed to better capture the peculiarities of African languages.

literature

  • David V. Barrett: Little Oracle - Runes and What They Mean . 6 vols. Flechsig, Würzburg 1998. ISBN 3-88189-170-6
  • Johannes Bergerhausen, Siri Poarangan: decodeunicode: The characters of the world, Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz, 2011, ISBN 978-3874398138 . All 109,242 characters according to the Unicode standard
  • Maria C. Betro: Sacred Signs . Fourier, Wiesbaden 2003. ISBN 3-932412-12-5
  • Ernst Doblhofer : The deciphering of ancient scripts and languages. Paul Neff, Vienna 1957. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1993, Leipzig 2000. ISBN 3-379-01702-7
  • Cao Rong Fang and Klaus-Dieter Hartig: Chinese calligraphy . ISBN 3-426-66829-7
  • Berthold Forssman: Studies on a runic Swedish grammar. The nominal inflection in the runic inscriptions of Västergötland . Kovač, Hamburg 2002. ISBN 3-8300-0512-1
  • Edoardo Fazzioli : Painted Words. 214 Chinese characters - from picture to concept . ISBN 3-937715-34-7
  • Andreas Foerster, Naoko Tamura: Kanji ABC. Charles E. Tuttle, Rutland Vt 1994. ISBN 0-8048-1957-2
  • Elvira Friedrich: Introduction to the Indian Scriptures. Part 1. Devanagari. Helmut Buske, Hamburg 1999. ISBN 3-87548-176-3
  • Elvira Friedrich: Introduction to the Indian Scriptures. Part 2. Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Bengali, Oriya. Helmut Buske, Hamburg 2002. ISBN 3-87548-219-0
  • Johannes Friedrich: Deciphering lost writings and languages. Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York 1954, 1966
  • Harald Haarmann : Lexicon of the lost languages. CH Beck, Munich 2002. ISBN 3-406-47596-5
  • Harald Haarmann: The history of the font CH Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-47998-7
  • Wolfgang Hadamitzky: Kanji and Kana. Langenscheidt's manual and lexicon of Japanese writing. Handbuch Vol. 1. Langenscheidt, Berlin 1995. ISBN 3-468-49388-6
  • Christian Jacq : Say it with hieroglyphics . Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verl., Reinbek near Hamburg 2003. ISBN 3-499-21240-4
  • Bernhard Karlgren : Writing and language of the Chinese . ISBN 3-540-42138-6
  • Johannes Kramer, Sabine Kowallik: Introduction to the Hebrew script . H. Buske, Hamburg 1994. ISBN 3-87118-986-3
  • Edith W. Lewald: You don't write with ABC everywhere. The meaning of Chinese and Japanese characters. For friends of Asia. For China / Japan travelers. With character templates for designs & tattoos . Lewald, Munich 2002. ISBN 3-9805637-8-2
  • Rawiwan Bunnak Kaldrack: Thai as a Foreign Language. Part 1. The Thai writing system. Metta-Verl., Königswinter 1999. ISBN 3-00-004334-9
  • Mohammad-Reza Majidi: Introduction to the Arabic-Persian script . Buske, Hamburg 1986. ISBN 3-87118-728-3
  • Mohammad-Reza Majidi: History and Development of the Arabic-Persian Script . H. Buske, Hamburg 1986. ISBN 3-87118-727-5
  • Wolfgang-Ekkehard Scharlipp, Dieter Back: Introduction to the Tibetan script . Helmut Buske, Hamburg 1995. ISBN 3-87548-114-3
  • Andrew Robinson: The History of Scripture. Albatros, Düsseldorf 2004. ISBN 3-491-96129-7
  • Wolfgang GA Schmidt: Introduction to Chinese writing and drawing . ISBN 3-87548-108-9
  • Berthold Schmidt, Sven Günzel: Introduction to the writing and pronunciation of Japanese. H. Buske, Hamburg 1995. ISBN 3-87548-062-7
  • Jan Tschichold : History of writing in pictures , Holbein-Verlag, Basel 1941 a. 1946. - Also: Hauswedell, Hamburg 1951 a. 1961. - Engl .: An Illustrated History of Lettering and Writing , n.v., London 1947
  • Bruno Lewin , Tschong Dae Kim: Introduction to the Korean language . Helmut Buske, Hamburg 1997. ISBN 3-87548-153-4
  • Karl-Theodor Zauzich : Hieroglyphics without a secret. An introduction to the ancient Egyptian script for museum visitors and Egypt tourists (= cultural history of the ancient world . Volume 6). Published by the Association for the Promotion of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin-Charlottenburg eV Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1980, ISBN 3-8053-0470-6

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