art with code

2010-04-12

Writing systems, part 3

I drew Glacolitic, Georgian, Armenian, Gothic, Pahlavi and Manchu since my last update.

Glacolitic is an early Slavonic alphabet, and while you can see some Greek letters there, the letterforms are quite different. Cyrillic resembles a more Greek Glacolitic, in a sense.

Georgian and Armenian are somewhat similar. Both have funky ┑ serifs (like the tail in Cyrillic sh and sha) in their letters and both have a quite distinct look to them. You have some Greek/Latin shapes there too, like the phi, h, b and S. They're both said to be legacy of Saint Mesrob and date from around the early-to-mid-400s.

Gothic is a basically Greek letters with some oddballs and two Futhark runes.

Pahlavi is an old Iranian abjad derived from Aramaic (and thus has the Phoenician letter order ABGDHWZ. Greeks added vowels there and theirs goes ABGDEZH...)

Manchu script is a derivative of the Mongolian script, which is a derivative of the Uyghur alphabet, which is a derivative of the Sogdian alphabet, which is a derivative of Syriac, which is a derivative of Aramaic, which is a derivative of Phoenician, which is a derivative of Proto-Canaanite, which is a derivative of the phonetic set of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which look like animals and people and are a total pain in the ass to draw. Manchu is written top-down, columns advance left-to-right.

I still have Egyptian hieroglyphs and Hanzi to go. And they are a bit daunting. Maybe I should add some American writing systems to the mix so that I get to draw grimacing dudes and jaguar heads...

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