History Of Writing Systems

The Thaana Script: Why Maldives Writing Looks Like Math

Discover the linguistics behind Thaana, the unique writing system of the Maldives, where the alphabet is literally built from numbers.…

2 weeks ago

Sütterlin: The Handwriting That Divided Generations

In the early 20th century, Ludwig Sütterlin designed a unique handwriting script that became the standard in German schools, only…

2 weeks ago

Palimpsests: The Science of Recovering Erased Text

In the Middle Ages, scarce parchment was often scraped clean and reused, creating layered manuscripts known as palimpsests. Today, linguists…

2 weeks ago

Ostraca: The Post-It Notes of the Ancient World

Long before paper became affordable, the ancient world ran on ostraca—broken pottery shards used for everything from grocery lists and…

2 weeks ago

The Ezana Stone: Decoding Ethiopia’s Rosetta Stone

Long before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the Kingdom of Aksum produced the Ezana Stone, a trilingual monument inscribed…

2 weeks ago

Why China Abandoned the “Latin of the East”

For over two millennia, the Sinosphere was united by a written language completely divorced from spoken speech—a "Latin of the…

2 weeks ago

Code-Switching on Paper: How Japan “Hacked” Classical Chinese

Japanese scholars spent centuries using Classical Chinese as their formal written language, despite the two languages having completely incompatible grammar…

2 weeks ago

Runic Roots: From the Futhorc to the Letter Thorn

While modern English relies on the Latin alphabet, our language was originally written in the angular, 33-character runic system known…

2 weeks ago

A Century of Change: Azerbaijani’s 4 Script Swaps

In the 20th century, Azerbaijani speakers were forced to change their official alphabet three times—from Perso-Arabic to Latin, to Cyrillic,…

2 weeks ago

Cyrillic Persian: Why Tajik Scripts Changed 3 Times

Tajik is the only variety of the Persian language officially written in Cyrillic, a result of turbulent 20th-century Soviet policies…

2 weeks ago

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