At Home with John and Debbie

(If these scripts don’t come out on your browser — sorry!)

For some reason this morning, I noticed a claim that Wikipedia has “over 9m articles in 250 languages”. Nine million is a big number, but I was more drawn by the 250 languages. What does that say about the sheer scale of the world, and how much of it you could possible experience or understand in a lifetime? Behind each of those languages will be endless depths of culture: stories, music, idioms, literature, moral codes, attitudes.

… and that reminded me of the day I got distracted and went looking for non-Roman scripts.

I’m pretty good with Japanese katakana (e.g. “アメリカ”) and hiragana (e.g. “ã?„ã‚?ã?¯ã?«ã?»ã?¸ã?¨”) now. Like all but the most dedicated gaijin student of Japanese, kanji (e.g. “漢音” is too much for me — although at least I know enough to be able to look up kanji (slowly).

I’m taking Russian classes at the moment, and the Cyrillic alphabet isn’t that difficult. It changes the way you perceive familiar Russian words such as “glasnost” — “ГлаÌ?Ñ?ноÑ?Ñ‚ÑŒ” — that last character is a ’soft sign’, meaning the final T gets swallowed up a bit.

On to languages I don’t know. Korea’s Hangul writing system is, as far as I understand, awesome:
모타는사�미
This looks great in blocky typefaces such as those found on signs and road markings. Like Japanese kana (but not kanji) each character represents a syllable — but unlike kana, components within each block tell you what the syllable sounds like.

Arabic is a writing system many Britons see every day, yet I think very few of us know the first thing about deciphering it. I certainly don’t:
اللغة العربية الÙ?صحى

We probably also see a fair amount of Sanskrit, (Sanskrit tangent: here) without even knowing it, in a wide variety of related scripts. This one is called Devangari:
संस�कृता वाक�

… and India will have many more scripts I’m sure.

(Apparently Siva blesses those who take delight in the language of the gods, so if you’ve got this far, well done.)

I think I’ve saved the best until last:

Georgian: ქ�რთული დ�მწერლ�ბ�

Armenian: Õ°Õ¡ÕµÕ¥Ö€Õ¥Õ¶ Õ¬Õ¥Õ¦Õ¸Ö‚

Both of these look to me like the sort of thing seen above sinister looking entrances in Indiana Jones films, behind which Lovecraftian horrors await. Yet 5.2 million people speak Georgian today, and 6.3 million speak Armenian — putting Welsh to shame with its lowly 750,000 speakers and Roman alphabet.

Any more good ones I’ve missed?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 11:16 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.