The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets

159 Pages·2016·5.79 MB·English

by  George L Campbell

The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets
The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets is a unique reference to the main scripts and
alphabets of the world.
The Handbook presents over sixty alphabets covering an enormous scope of languages, from
Amharic and Chinese to Thai and Cree. Full script tables are given for every language and each
entry is accompanied by a detailed overview of its historical and linguistic context.
New to this second edition:
• new introduction discussing the basic principles and strategies utilized by world writing systems
• expanded to include more writing systems
• improved presentation of non-Roman scripts
• organized into ancient, contemporary and autochthonous writing systems
• many new entries on fascinating and lesser-known writing systems.
This handy resource is the ideal reference for all students and scholars of language and linguistics.
George L. Campbell worked for the BBC World Service and was a polyglot linguist and translator.
Christopher Moseley is a linguist and lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European
Studies, University of London. He is co-editor (with Prof. R.E. Asher) of the Atlas of the World’s
Languages (Routledge 2007) and general editor of the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in
Danger (2010).
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The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets
Second edition
George L. Campbell and Christopher Moseley
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First published 1997
by Routledge
This second edition published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
©1997 George L. Campbell
©2012 George L. Campbell and Christopher Moseley
The right of George L. Campbell and Christopher Moseley to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-415-56098-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-56097-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-86548-4 (ebk)
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Contents

Preface to the second edition
Acknowledgements
Note on phonetic symbols

Introduction: the world’s families of scripts
Ancient writing systems
Aegean scripts
Anatolian scripts
Aramaic
Syriac
Brāhmī
Coptic
Egyptian
Epigraphic South Arabian
Etruscan see under Roman (Latin)
Gothic
Javanese (Kawi)
Maya
Ogham
Persian Cuneiform
Runic
Turkic Runes
Contemporary writing systems
Arabic
Armenian
Batak
Bengali
Berber (Tifinagh)
Buginese-Macassarese
Burmese
Cambodian
Cherokee
Chinese
Archaic Chinese
Classical Chinese (Wenli)
Modern Chinese
Cree
Cyrillic
Devanāgarī
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Ethiopic
Georgian
Greek
Gujarati
Gurmukhi
Hebrew
Yiddish
Japanese
Kannada
Korean
Lao
Malayalam
Mongolian
Oriya
Roman (Latin)
Sinhalese
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Tibetan
Yi
Autochthonous writing systems
Fraser script (Lisu)
Munda language scripts
N’ko
Pahawh Hmong
Pollard script
Rongorongo
Vai

Further reading
Index
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Preface to the Second Edition
The present volume originally appeared as a supplementary part of the late George L. Campbell’s
two-volume Compendium of the World’s Languages. That work has established itself as a unique
survey of the major languages of the world and very many of the minor ones as well, and in 1997
Routledge published the supplement on scripts, virtually unchanged from the version included in the
larger work, as a guide to the many and diverse writing systems of the world.
George Campbell created the surveys of both languages and scripts more or less single-handed,
and it was the work of a virtuoso linguist. Campbell’s breadth of knowledge of languages was
legendary and prodigious, but inevitably there were small errors in, and omissions from, his great
work which have later come to light. It has fallen to me to prepare an enlarged, amended version of
his little volume on scripts and writing systems, and in this I have tried to be both comprehensive
and circumspect.
George Campbell (1912–2004) was born in Dingwall, Scotland, into a bilingual Gaelic–English
family, and soaked up languages avidly from an early age, studying German in Leipzig and mastering
several more languages during his sojourn there. Stories of his voracious appetite for foreign
languages are legion. During his working life he was employed first by the School of Slavonic and
East European Studies in London, and the BBC World Service – the same two employers as I have
had, but in the reverse order. It was only after his retirement from the BBC in 1980 that he was able
to devote himself full-time to his true passion, the creation of the Compendium and the
supplementary volume on Scripts which you have before you.
This volume is fairly considerably amplified, but I hope it retains the spirit of the original work,
and will serve as a useful guide for anyone wanting an introduction to the many and fascinating
scripts in which the languages of the world have been written. The emphasis is on the contemporary,
but ancient writing systems that have fallen into disuse are also given their due in these pages. For
this reason I have divided the scripts and writing systems into three separate, alphabetically
ordered sets:
Ancient writing systems;
Contemporary writing systems;
Autochthonous writing systems.
By this set of definitions, an ‘ancient’ writing system is one that has long since fallen out of use, and
is applied to a now dead language; a ‘contemporary’ writing system is one that is still in use for at
least one language; and an ‘autochthonous’ system is one that has arisen, usually in the past couple
of centuries, within or for a particular small speech community, unrelated to any system used for
surrounding languages.
The term ‘writing system’ is deliberately chosen to encompass the widest possible range of
methods of committing a language to a permanent surface. This includes, for instance, the Maya
glyphs (not previously included) and Egyptian hieroglyphics, because, although they clearly derive
from pictorial images, they do obviously strive to represent the sounds of spoken language in a
particular sequence that reflects that speech. What are not included in this volume are hitherto
undeciphered scripts, such as the ancient script of the Indus valley (although recent work on the
script has resulted in a fairly convincing decipherment), and primitive pictographic systems which
cannot be said with certainty to consistently represent the sounds of spoken language.
It would be rash to claim that this book’s coverage is comprehensive. Apart from the undeciphered
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ancient scripts, there are also small branches of the family tree of scripts that have been omitted
because of great similarity to their parent scripts, and some more recent systems which have not
gained wide currency. I hope we have made up for any omissions by attempting to show in family
tree diagrams the complex interrelatedness of the main branches of the world’s writing systems.
Christopher Moseley
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Acknowledgements
The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce material in this book:
Die Etruskische Sprache for The Early Western and Greek Etruscan Scripts chart from Die
Etruskische Sprache, Pfiffig, A.J. (1969).
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc for The Etruscan Script as used for Latin (1974).
The British Library Board for extract of German Fraktur: © British Library website ‘images online’,
ref. 060445, Gutenberg Bible, shelf mark C.9.d.4.
The University of California Press and the British Museum for Maya Glyphs by S.D. Houston © 1989
by the Trustees of the British Museum, published by the University of California Press.
The University of Oklahoma Press for the Cherokee Alphabet from Beginning Cherokee by Holmes
and Smith (1978).
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked
the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
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Note on Phonetic Symbols
The following symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet are used in this book:
Χ voiceless velar fricative
θ unvoiced dental fricative
β voiced bilabial fricative
voiceless retroflex stop
ɖ voiced retroflex stop
ɲ palatalized dental nasal sonorant
ð voiced dental fricative
ʐ voiced retroflex fricative
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