First millennium AD. From Late Antiquity, we have for the first time languages with earliest records in manuscript tradition (as opposed to epigraphy).Thus, Classical Armenian is first attested in the Armenian Bible translation. The Vimose inscriptions (2nd and 3rd centuries) in the Elder Futhark runic alphabet appear to record Proto-Norse names. Some scholars interpret the …

An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.. The first fully phonemic script, the Proto …

Karelian (North Karelian and Livvi Karelian: karjala, karjalan kieli; Ludic: kard'al, kard'alan kiel'; Tver Karelian: kariela, karielan kieli) is a Finnic language spoken mainly in the Russian Republic of Karelia.Linguistically, Karelian is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland, and some Finnish linguists have even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish, …

The Ugric or Ugrian languages (/ ˈ juː ɡ r ɪ k, ˈ uː-/ or / ˈ juː ɡ r i ə n, ˈ uː-/) are a proposed branch of the Uralic language family.The name Ugric is derived from Ugrians, an archaic exonym for the Magyars (Hungarians) and Yugra, a region in northwest Russia.. Ugric includes three subgroups: Hungarian, Khanty, and Mansi.The last two have traditionally been considered single ...

In computing, a Unicode symbol is a Unicode character which is not part of a script used to write a natural language, but is nonetheless available for use as part of a text.. Many of the symbols are drawn from existing character sets or ISO/IEC or other national and international standards. The Unicode Standard states that "The universe of symbols is rich and open-ended," but that in …

Canadian syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of writing systems used in a number of Indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and (formerly) Athabaskan language families. These languages had no formal writing system previously. They are valued for their distinctiveness from the Latin script and for the ease with which literacy can be achieved; …

The Armenian alphabet (Armenian: Հայոց գրեր, Hayoc’ grer or Հայոց այբուբեն, Hayoc’ aybuben) is an alphabetic writing system used to write Armenian.It was developed around 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader. The system originally had 36 letters; eventually, three more were adopted. The alphabet was also in wide use in the …

The Samoyedic (/ ˌ s æ m ə ˈ j ɛ d ɪ k,-m ɔɪ-/) or Samoyed languages (/ ˈ s æ m ə ˌ j ɛ d,-m ɔɪ-/) are spoken around the Ural Mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 25,000 people altogether.They derive from a common ancestral language called Proto-Samoyedic, and form a branch of the Uralic languages.Having separated perhaps in the last centuries BC, they are …

Demotic (from Ancient Greek: δημοτικός dēmotikós, 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta, and the stage of the Egyptian language written in this script, following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic.The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.

Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family.Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic, they have more than 200 million speakers each and together account for close to 90% of …

Many scripts in Unicode, such as Arabic, have special orthographic rules that require certain combinations of letterforms to be combined into special ligature forms.. In English, the common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t (spelling et, Latin for and) were combined. The rules governing ligature formation in Arabic can be quite …

The Livonian language (Livonian: līvõ kēļ or rāndakēļ; Estonian: liivi keel) is a Finnic language whose native land is the Livonian Coast of the Gulf of Livonia, located in the north of the Kurzeme peninsula in Latvia.Although its last native speaker died in 2013, there are about 40 reported L2 speakers and 210 having reported some knowledge of the language.

Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters used in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, as prescribed by the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters.Along with traditional Chinese characters, they are one of the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language.The government of the People's Republic …

Most specialists believe that the Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek during the early 8th century BC, perhaps in Euboea. The earliest known fragmentary Greek inscriptions date from this time, 770–750 BC, and they match Phoenician letter forms of c. 800–750 BC. The oldest substantial texts known to date are the Dipylon inscription and the text on the so-called Cup of …