Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Writing systems/Archive 9

image:Yi Syllabary Chart.svg
File:Yi Syllabary Chart.svg has been nominated for deletion -- 76.65.128.252 (talk) 05:56, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

New cat Category:Arabic braille
I noticed there are several forms of Braille based on transliterating forms of the Perso-Arabic alphabet, so I created Category:Arabic braille. Any suggestions on where to place it within cat trees, anyone prefer "Perso-Arabic braille", etc? Just bringing it to the attention of interested editors. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:30, 17 September 2012 (UTC)


 * It cross-cuts the existing cats, so I think it's fine as is. — kwami (talk) 01:52, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Omniglot
An editor just removed linking to Omniglot from the project to-do list because he claims Omniglot is not a reliable source. It doesn't really fit into the questionable or self-published realm at WP:RS, and there hasn't been a discussion on the notice board about it, either. I think removing that link from Writing system articles merits a pretty unambiguous decision, otherwise the utility of Omniglot, in terms of providing copious links on scripts is pretty overwhelming. What do others think? VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 02:25, 18 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I fully agree with the removal. Omniglot is clearly not a RS by any definition.  The author of the site is not an expert on the individual scripts for which he maintains pages, and for many scripts Omniglot provides inaccurate or deficient information, and we should not be directing readers to a hobbyist site like Omniglot.  Some of the links are useful, but there is no need to link to Omniglot as any useful links provided at that site should be added to the EL section of the Wikipedia page directly. BabelStone (talk) 08:35, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Northwest Caucasian mythoepic alphabet
Personal project, no indication of notability, such as actual use. Probably should be deleted, but I'll leave that to y'all. I've removed links from articles, where this was portrayed as an "ancient" alphabet. — kwami (talk) 08:12, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Logic symbols
Template:Logic symbols has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. RockMagnetist (talk) 16:56, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Berber Latin alphabet needs some cleanup
See Where does the thumbnail table belong? on the Talk page. --Thnidu (talk) 00:41, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Character mapping in Proto-Canaanite / Semitic letter pages
I've been thinking about adding character mappings to Proto-Canaanite letters like Aleph, Bet (letter), etc. and was wondering whether Ugaritic letters, or even the Egyptian precursors of the Proto-Sinaitic letters, should be included or not. Thoughts, opinions, dissuasion, and constructive criticism are all welcome. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 16:01, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Signary
Signary currently redirects to Syllabary. However, a signary (consistent with the obvious etymology of the word as "collection of signs", analogous to vocabulary, dictionary, or legendarium/legendary "collection of legends") appears to be either an ordered alphabetical sequence or – more generally – the full set of characters of a writing system, ordered or not. The term is definitely in use for alphabetic scripts, too (an alphabetic signary, however, is usually simply called an alphabet), as in Ogham; only writing systems where a full set of characters is hard to come by (because there is no defined standard set, as in logographic scripts) will not usually have this term applied to them. Note that Wiktionary also incorrectly equates the terms signary and syllabary. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:44, 31 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Changed both. Nothing depends on the rd anyway. — kwami (talk) 12:41, 1 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I would have done it myself; I was just unsure about the precise technical meaning of signary and if there is a better page to redirect to than the very general Writing system (of the possibilities I've thought of, Character set is IT-centred, and Abecedarium is about inscriptions, and exclusive to alphabetic systems). Alternatively, can we explain the term somewhere in that article? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 15:26, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Devanagari letters, or Brahmic?
Discussion at Articles_for_deletion/Devanagari_ka over whether that article should be about the devanagari letter specifically, or if the brahmic scripts should be conflated, the way we do for letters of the semitic scripts. Maybe a good thing to discuss before a bunch more get written. (Also, I'm dubious about listing grammatical particles written with each letter, per NOTADICTIONARY.) — kwami (talk) 12:39, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I personally think that we are likely to run into a lot less trouble - Devanagari ka is already undergoing an unfortunate AfD discussion - if we build articles on the Pan-Brahmic cognates and derived letters, and then fork any individual letters if their content gets large enough to justify a separate treatment. Take a look at the Caananite/Semitic letters, which use the template Phoenician glyph to supply a standard header, for an example of how these kinds of articles can be built. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 18:38, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Second article at Devanagari kha. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 21:51, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Alerts
I have put in a bot request for WikiProject Writing systems/Article alerts to be activated. It may take a couple of hours. It will pick up AfDs RMs etc which already have the WikiProject Writing systems banner. For example current discussion at Talk:Han tu which is tagged but which project participants here may not have noticed without Alerts. (And yes input is welcome). All the best In ictu oculi (talk) 02:18, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Rejang, Rencong
Knowledgable input on Talk:Rejang_alphabet would be appreciated. -sche (talk) 09:32, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Is there anyone here? Input needed
We have a merge discussion. Vietnamese language, Vietnamese literature, Vietnamese alphabet, Chữ Hán, Chữ Nôm are longstanding articles. (Vietnamese script Vietnamese writing system are redirects) 9 March article creation Han-Nom duplicates content of both Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm‎ and User:BabelStone has placed a merge tag on the new creation. In ictu oculi (talk) 05:06, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

SaypU (universal alphabet)
Some people are proposing that SaypU (Spell As You Pronounce Universal) be used as a universal alphabet. —Wavelength (talk) 16:20, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
 * BBC News - Could a new phonetic alphabet promote world peace? (19 February 2013)
 * SaypU: Home page - Spell As you Pronounce

Universala skribo (unueca ortografio)
The book Universala skribo, by Manuel Halvelik, is about a universal alphabet for all languages. I have a copy. —Wavelength (talk) 16:21, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
 * UEA.ORG: Katalogo - Universala skribo

Logogram vs. ideogram vs. pictogram
Talk:Chinese character classification presents a valid concern in my opinion. Where would the best place to explain the terminology be? Anyone up to it? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:28, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Are the articles ideogram and pictogram not doing it for you? The article of concern there seems to have been fairly well-tended in the 3+ years since that question was brought up. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 14:28, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

notation of spelling or graphemes between angle bracket
We currently have a lot of articles using ⟨ U+27E8 Mathematical left angle bracket and ⟩ U+27E9 Mathematical right angle bracket to indicate spelling, eg. ⟨spelling⟩ or ⟨a⟩. The problem is that those two characters are not present in fonts installed by default on some systems, notable Windows. We sometimes find &lt;&gt; (less-than, greater-than) used instead but they are too short and too wide, eg. &lt;spelling&gt; or &lt;a&gt;. The single pointing angle quotation marks ‹› are in most fonts but tend to be too short for this kind of notation as well, eg. ‹spelling› or ‹a›. &#x2329; U+2329 and &#x232A; U+232A are out of the question since they are normalized to full-width CJK characters &#x3008; U+3008 and &#x3009; U+3009, eg. &#x3008;spelling&#x3009; or &#x3008;a&#x3009;.

So what should we use? Unless we use web fonts U+27E8 and U+27E9 are not useable on vanilla Windows. --Moyogo/ (talk) 09:10, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
 * ⟨ U+27E8 Mathematical left angle bracket and ⟩ U+27E9 Mathematical right angle bracket have been supported by Cambria Math since Vista and Segoe UI Symbol since Windows 7, so recent versions of Windows do display these characters out of the box. BabelStone (talk) 09:53, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm OK. It does work in IE and Firefox on Windows 8. But for some reason Chrome does not fetch Cambria Math's or Segoe UI Symbols's glyphs for ⟨⟩. --Moyogo/ (talk) 06:12, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
 * It works for me in Chrome on Windows 7. I mean I can't tell which font's angled brackets are being used, but I can see the angled brackets ⟨ and ⟩ just fine even when I have my default font set to one that doesn't have them, like Arial. Pais (talk) 14:53, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

CJK unicode blocks
Ok, we had a bit of an eruption this afternoon. Someone was trying to sort out CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C, and we ended up with articles transcluding templates that redirected back to that same article, double and triple redirects, and all sorts of other junk - we ended up with an ANI posting, a Requested Move, and an admin fully protecting pages and templates for about an hour till we could sort the mess out. It's obvious that we have way too many pages and templates with the same information, so we're looking to get feedback on what the template with the unicode block table should be called, what articles should be preserved or redirected, and where those articles should redirect. The end result should also be applied to at least some of the other CJK ideograph blocks as well. Comments are at Talk:CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 05:03, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

CJK Unicode blocks revisited
So last month, there was apparently some kerfuffle with List of CJK Unified Ideographs, Extension C, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C, et al. From what I gather, it has been all (mostly?) resolved now. However, we are left with these two pages I just linked two, which are largely redundant. List of CJK Unified Ideographs, Extension C contains no lead paragraph or any extra information, only a transclusion of the Unicode chart (from template space, over redirect), whilst CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C transcludes the same chart (sans redirect) and provides some context. Note also that Talk:List of CJK Unified Ideographs, Extension C is itself a redirect. To me, it looks like the List of article should be made a redirect or deleted, but since this was apparently a mess, I want to ask here first, as someone might know something I do not. — daranz [ t ] 07:37, 6 June 2013 (UTC)


 * All the "List of CJK Unified Ideographs X" articles, where they just transclude or duplicate "template:Unicode chart CJK Unified Ideographs X", should be checked for compliance with WP:CWW and WP:CPMV, then deleted as a duplicate of the template, with any incoming links changed to the "CJK Unified Ideographs X (Unicode block)" article. However, "List of CJK Unified Ideographs X (Part N of O)" articles should be kept as separate articles, even if they simply transclude or duplicate a Unicode chart template, because they are linked as mainspace content from "CJK Unified Ideographs X (Unicode block)" articles, in order to keep file sizes manageable for slow connections and older information architecture. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 08:15, 6 June 2013 (UTC)


 * I've redirected the List of CJK Unified Ideographs, Extension C to the corresponding CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C article. The "List of..." article doesn't seem to contain any history that needs to be elsewhere, so it could be deleted as is. List of CJK Unified Ideographs, Extension D is in the same situation, and has a trivial history. I did not nominate these myself.
 * There's also List of CJK Unified Ideographs, Extension A, which at this point transcludes Unicode chart CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A but has history that includes an explicit, non-transcluded table. I'm not really sure whether there was copy-pasting of the two pages going on in either direction, so I'm not sure what to do with this. List of CJK Unified Ideographs, Extension A is, however, redundant with CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A right now.  — daranz [ t ] 00:04, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd use Admin help to get an admin to check the attribution of the template (it looks good to me), and delete the "List of" article if everything's kosher. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 02:17, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Ue ligature
We know about the ae and oe ligatures, but some Webster dictionaries use the ue ligature as well. Any thoughts about its popularity?? Georgia guy (talk) 22:46, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
 * It's popular enough to have its own Unicode symbol ᵫ (U+1D6B), but I can't say I've ever seen it anywhere except Merriam-Webster dictionaries. I'm not aware of its being used in any practical orthography. Angr (talk) 13:47, 16 June 2013 (UTC)
 * It is shown in "Phonetic symbols in Unicode" (version of 23:43, 24 March 2013) and at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D00.pdf.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 02:47, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * MUFI has a ligature ue in its pipeline for MUFI version 4.0 . --Moyogo/ (talk) 08:35, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Oracle bone script characters
Several variants of the Oracle bone script characters have been nominated for deletion at Files for deletion/2013 June 18 -- 65.94.79.6 (talk) 23:07, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Document of Ancient Alphabets
I have a document in my possession titled "The Ancient Alphabets by Hani Za'Roura," which shows alphabets of the ancient times, and within it shows the letters of the Byblos syllabary with their English-letter equivalents. Is it worth the time to upload an image of aforementioned letters? Other alphabets shown with English equivalents are: Sinai, Ugarit, (Byblos), Hieratic, Moab, Aramic, Petra, S. Arabian, Palmyrenean, Syriac, Mandean, Latin, Arab, along with years they were in use(?). Porokello (talk) 08:08, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * You need to make sure that the document is out of copyright, or can get permission to upload, otherwise, the best you can do is upload individual letter images under PD-Text, or to commons under PD-Unicode. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 22:49, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * There are no discernible copyright symbols or other information indicative of copyright. However, there is faded text in the bottom left-hand corner titled "S A R Damascus" under which is "TEL 454737". Porokello (talk) 23:32, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I also have transferred some information onto paper and have taken a picture of it. Is it within my rights to upload this image to demonstrate the writing as long as I give credit to the author of the document? Porokello (talk) 23:49, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The lack of copyright notices is actually more of a problem than an opportunity. You need to affirmatively show that it is not under copyright, so that lack of information makes it harder to assert that it is, say, too old to be under copyright protection or published in a place that the US does not recognize copyright claims. As to your hand-made drawings, if you have legitimately authored a text - not just copied the original, but written up your own thoughts, etc, then it is yours to do with as you want. But it is the actual content of the work, not the presentation, that is under copyright, and in fact, with text, the presentation is distinctly exempt from copyright protection - so the individual letter forms, and even individual words, are exempt as PD-Text, but when they are combined into unique expressions of thought, they are no longer exempt. VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 00:12, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

""
The usage of is under discussion, see talk:Ћ  -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 10:25, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Move discussion (single digits)
See Talk:1 (number) for a discussion that you may be interested in. -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 05:53, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

(Somewhat OT) Userboxes for favorite obsolete letters
Among the themed Wikipedian userboxes are a couple of sets for "User favorite letter/___ alphabet". Template:User favorite letter/English alphabet contained 26 userboxes, like "This user's favorite letter in the English alphabet is T."

These are clearly for fun rather than utility, which is fine by me. And in that spirit I've added a set for obsolete letters that were once used in English but no longer are: yogh Ȝ ȝ, ash Æ æ, thorn Þ þ, wynn Ƿ ƿ, eth Ð ð, and long s ſ. I thought the members of this project might enjoy them, and possibly even want to apply the same idea to other scripts.

I've annotated them in Template talk:User favorite letter/English alphabet/doc. I also created Template:User favorite letter/English alphabet/Obsolete to ease the complex task of adding these to the very complex "User favorite letter/English alphabet" template and its doc template, and annotated that with and on its talk page.

Have fun!

--Thnidu (talk) 00:09, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you for making those available. You may be interested in knowing that people with grapheme–color synesthesia may wish to revise the colors for their own use.  Of course, you are absolutely under no obligation to go the extra kilometer.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 00:23, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:IPA diacritic description
Template:IPA diacritic description has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Lfdder (talk) 14:43, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Letter to Russia with krokozyabry.jpg
image:Letter to Russia with krokozyabry.jpg has been nominated for deletion -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 05:28, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Nomination for merging of Template:Infobox Hieroglyphen
Template:Infobox Hieroglyphen has been nominated for merging with Template:Infobox hieroglyphs. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Lfdder (talk) 12:13, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Missing topics page
I have updated Missing topics about Languages - Skysmith (talk) 10:44, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Transl
Template:Transl has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.

Ken fyre (talk) 11:08, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Transliteration warning boxes
See Templates for discussion/Log/2013 September 23 where 3 of these templates are up for deletion -- 70.24.249.39 (talk) 05:45, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Language
has been nominated for deletion -- 76.65.131.217 (talk) 11:22, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Encoding and display of typographic marks
There's a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Typography about the information concerning Unicode and HTML representations (and other details), which appear in many (most?) of our articles about marks/glyphs, eg. ¶, Ampersand, and most of the other contents of Diacritical marks and Punctuation marks.

Please give feedback there, on whether or how this information should be kept (and if so in what form it should be standardised), or whether it falls afoul of WP:NOTHOWTO (or other guidelines) and must be deleted (or moved). Thanks. –Quiddity (talk) 05:51, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

start with Egyptian or Proto-Sinaitic?
Our articles are rather inconsistent. For alphabets descended from Phoenician, should we start the tree in the info box with hieroglyphics, proto-Sinaitic, or what? — kwami (talk) 02:10, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Inflated age claims for ancient medicinal literature
Not sure where best to ask about this general problem, but since it is about various ancient literature claimed to be older than the oldest verified examples of actual writing, I put it here.

This kind of outrageous claim has bugged me for years now, and now I've found an example even in a scholarly article cited in Malaria:
 * EARLY WRITTEN RECORDS
 * The first written records of what are almost certainly parasitic infections come from a period of Egyptian medicine from 3000 to 400 BC, particularly the Ebers papyrus of 1500 BC discovered at Thebes (29). Later, there were many detailed descriptions of various diseases that might or might not be caused by parasites, specifically fevers, in the writings of Greek physicians between 800 to 300 BC, such as the collected works of Hippocrates, known as the Corpus Hippocratorum, and from physicians from other civilizations including China from 3000 to 300 BC, India from 2500 to 200 BC, Rome from 700 BC to 400 AD, and the Arab Empire in the latter part of the first millennium.
 * The first written records of what are almost certainly parasitic infections come from a period of Egyptian medicine from 3000 to 400 BC, particularly the Ebers papyrus of 1500 BC discovered at Thebes (29). Later, there were many detailed descriptions of various diseases that might or might not be caused by parasites, specifically fevers, in the writings of Greek physicians between 800 to 300 BC, such as the collected works of Hippocrates, known as the Corpus Hippocratorum, and from physicians from other civilizations including China from 3000 to 300 BC, India from 2500 to 200 BC, Rome from 700 BC to 400 AD, and the Arab Empire in the latter part of the first millennium.

Even if these are only generalised dates for ancient literature (probably taken from general reference works based on outdated sources), Chinese and Indian literature clearly does not go as far back as 3000 BC or 2500 BC respectively. Neolithic signs in China or the Indus script can hardly count as "literature", since they are not even deciphered, provided that they are true writing at all (which is highly dubious). But there is even a quite specific claim:
 * The characteristic periodic fevers of malaria are recorded from every civilized society from China in 2700 BC through the writings of Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Indian, Arabic, and European physicians up to the 19th century.

Ancient Chinese medicine is implied to go back even before the oracle bone script in countless articles related to the subeject in both English and German Wikipedia, and existing texts may even implied to be much older than they are actually known to be. Has anyone else noticed this? Perhaps this is related to a reliance on Chinese sources, which apparently have a tendency to exaggerate the age of specifically Chinese civilisation and history (and Chinese-language literature), although anything older than the Xia and Shang dynasties, i. e., the 2nd millennium BC, is almost assuredly mythical (for example mythological emperors of China), and even the historicity of the Xia Dynasty is quite dubious.

Likewise, Indian (probably Hindutva-inspired) sources keep cropping up arguing that the Vedas are much older (millennia older) than estimated by foreign scholars, and Tamil literature and civilisation is subhecject to similar exaggerations, leading to a race between Hindu and Tamil nationalists whose civilisation is older.

This is not even limited to Sanskrit and Tamil: Other Dravidian languages such as Telugu are claimed to have very early attestations which are not accepted by the scholarly mainstream but keep being repeated in Indian mainstream media, like sensationalist reporting of blatant pseudoscience elsewhere, Sinhalese nationalists trying to find ancient examples of Sinhala writing, and even speakers of modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Marathi claiming that their native language is not descended from Sanskrit (or at least an Old Indo-Aryan dialect very similar to Vedic Sanskrit) but an independent development and that there is ancient Marathi literature apart from Maharashtri Prakrit ... nationalistic nonsense knows no bounds.

However, my experience is that much more so than in the case of India, Chinese nationalistic nonsense is taken as fact by most non-experts outside China, such as claims of Chinese literature (in some form of Old Chinese, and some ancient form of Chinese characters) dating back to long before 1000 BC, that pre-Shang Bronze Age and even Neolithic cultures are to be identified as ethnic Chinese and even claiming just about any ethnic group currently residing within the borders of China as ethnic Chinese. (The only comparable case I can think of is probably Hebrew history, where naive acceptance of Old Testament sources as historical descriptions is still widespread, even predominant, outside expert academic circles, especially for Iron Age Palestine.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:20, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

What about Blissymbols?
Can we make code for Bliss like Egiptinian hieroglyphs? (see also WikiHiero) Lublu.literaturu (talk) 07:30, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

What should we use for angle brackets?
Discussion here. — kwami (talk) 03:37, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

braille alphabets need confirmation
VanIsaac found a 2013 edition of the Unesco pub on braille, but it's still a single source and has some apparent errors, so we could use additional sources on a lot of the alphabets. (The nav box, BTW, is braille.)

Many of the alphabets are simply repeated from the 1990 edition, as Unesco never heard back from the governing bodies. But the 1990 ed. was a really bad source. So for Armenian, Georgian, etc. we don't have a reliable source at all. Others have been confirmed by Unesco 2013, but with some problems. Dutch Braille looks to be Flemish (the Dutch orgs contradict it), and the Maltese alphabet was a proposal that, AFAICT, was never used. And then there are apparent typos, inconsistencies in the punctuation, etc. (If you get 3 sources, you're likely to find 3 conflicting accounts of punctuation.) So, every additional source helps, esp. if you're familiar with one of the orgs for the blind that publishes braille material. Wikipedia is already more reliable than Unesco, but it would be nice if we could verify all their data. — kwami (talk) 12:57, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Ancient Somali
This is one of the worst articles on a writing system that I've seen. It references encyclopedias from 1878 to 1900 and the propaganda ministry of the 1970s. I moved it to Ancient incriptions in Somalia, but the claims of inscriptions on coins (assuming they are the same script as the others) suggests we should be able to say something intelligent about it. How old is it? Has it been deciphered? Which language is it in? Etc. — kwami (talk) 16:58, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

The article was actually quite well written and sourced until it was recently turned upside down on the grounds that its contents were "bullshit" (c.f. ).

Some facts on the Somali ancient script and sites where/artifacts on which it has been found, from an official publication on Somali writing systems by the Ministry of Information and National Guidance of Somalia :

Note that the script is actual writing, and is believed to be an older orthography for Somali. In a 1974 interview with Afriscope magazine, former President of Somalia Siad Barre explained that his administration's adoption of the Latin script over other writing systems, including the ancient Somali script, was inspired by practical considerations :

A number of the structures on which examples of the inscriptions have been found have also been dated. According to the East African Handbook, they are estimated to be around 2,500 years old, so they date from just before the Common Era :

Could members of this project please help me fix the page? I've already done much of the legwork here. I would also like to add a new section on the script's form, which "was apparently based on vowel sound, not a Word-Picture writing as in ancient Egypt". Middayexpress (talk) 17:49, 27 October 2013 (UTC)


 * The propaganda ministry of the old republic is not a RS. Nor is a missionary review from 1900 or an encyclopedia from 1878.  Certainly a claim of a vowel-based alphabet in the Horn of Africa dating to 1500 BCE would be extraordinary – far older than consonantal Ge'ez and far older than any other vowel-based alphabet in the world. And amazing that it encoded a language which did not even exist at the time.  That's why I called this "bullshit".  But prove me wrong if you have the sources.  — kwami (talk) 18:44, 27 October 2013 (UTC)


 * J.M. Hildebrandt's testimony is the first account in English on the inscriptions, which he indicates are in actual characters. The Ministry of Information indicates the same thing in the quoted material above. Per all of the people who have actually seen and described the script, its inscriptions aren't in Sabaean or any other known writing system. It hasn't been deciphered yet, but it is believed to be an ancient Somali script. This is mainly because the stone structures (taalo) and other cultural artifacts that the script has been found on or in association with have been shown to be of Somali extraction. A number of the tumuli that the Ministry alludes to have been excavated and skeletons were found in them. According to the Somali Studies scholar I.M. Lewis, the latter closely resembled Somali remains across a battery of physical measurements. That said, the 2,500 ybp date for the inscriptions would appear to have been supplied many years earlier by a British colonial officer, not the Somali authorities. How the official arrived at that date is unclear, though . Middayexpress (talk) 19:38, 27 October 2013 (UTC)


 * In other words, we have no RS. We certainly don't want to state that they're Egyptian/hieroglyphic or pre-hieroglyphic as has been suggested on the talk page. — kwami (talk) 18:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Question
I pose a question here. Why are the participants of this project named alphabetically? Speling12345 (talk) 2:41, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
 * If any wikiproject should have a member's list in alphabetical order, it's probably the one responsible for all the alphabets, wouldn't you say? VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 08:14, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Dating problems at Tamil-Brahmi
We have a 2ary source, and 1ary sources by an author that the 2ary source says is authoritative, dating the script to the 2nd c. BC, and primary sources apparently dating it to the 5th c. BC (though I can't confirm they're actually dating Tamil Brahmi and not just Brahmi). We have an editor who insists on reporting the latter date in the info box as if it were certain. I could use some help verifying that the sources say what is claimed and defending our general policy on preferring 2ary sources. The dating argument in the text isn't even about Tamil Brahmi, but Prakrit Brahmi, and so should probably only be summarized in this article. — kwami (talk) 18:22, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Foo alphabet and Foo (Unicode block)
Is there really any need to have separate pages for Deseret alphabet and Deseret (Unicode block), and so on for all the others? Marnanel (talk) 18:28, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * We don't need it in two places. In this case we practically have a content fork.  There are cases where a split is justified.  We wouldn't want all 12,000 Unicode characters in the hangul article, for example.  On the other hand, there's Category:Unicode blocks. If for completeness we want a separate article on each Unicode block, then I'd say remove the block from the alphabet page and direct the reader to it in the See-also section.  — kwami (talk) 20:22, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Merge discussion for Guwen
An article related to this WikiProject, Guwen, has been proposed for a merge with Classical Chinese. If you are interested in the merge discussion, please participate by going here, and adding your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. — Llywelyn II   08:11, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

PUA upkeep
I'm mentioning this here because sometimes PUA characters are the result of pasting text in Chinese or classical Mongolian or some other complex script, from documents that date from before the script was fully unicodified (or even today in Inner Mongolia), and we want to unicodify them rather than hexadecimalizing them or simply deleting them. The people at Checkwiki are mostly unfamiliar with non-Latin scripts, and I figured some of you here might find it a nice challenge.

All PUA characters in WP mainspace have either been deleted, corrected, or hexadecimalized. (The latter so they won't cause problems w bots. These are tagged as PUA and in most cases have html forcing a supporting font.) But new ones pop up periodically, mostly as editing errors. Results of the daily Checkwiki scan of articles edited that day are here; search for "{PUA}" and you'll see the context of the PUA character so you can locate it in the article. (Only about 3% are PUA, the rest other problematic Unicode, such as invisible formatting characters.) Now that the backlog is taken care of, it should be easy to keep up with new additions. (See MOS:PUA for what to do when one of these characters is something we'd want to keep.)

— kwami (talk) 19:20, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Category request: Category: Egyptian hieroglyphics templates
Articles which are already in this category:

Example articles which belong to this category:


 * Template:Infobox hieroglyphs
 * Template:Hiero
 * Template:Hiero/Serech
 * Template:Hiero/serekh
 * Template:Hiero/cartouche
 * Template:Hiero/1cartouche
 * Template:Hiero/2cartouche
 * Template:Hiero/3name
 * Template:Hiero/5Fold
 * Template:User Egyp-1

Parent category/categories:


 * Category: Egyptian hieroglyphs
 * Category: Writing system templates

-- 70.50.148.122 (talk) 08:56, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Georgian alphabet
This was stable for a while, but now a couple of old edit-warriors have returned, armed with little but inane rhetoric. Of particular concern is an OR chart suggesting that apparently random similarities between Armenian and Georgian mean that Georgian derives from Armenian, contradicting every source I've found on the topic. — kwami (talk) 03:17, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Romanization in MoS/Japan-related articles
Someone with linguistic background is needed to make sense of romanization applied to Japan-related articles. Come to visit Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Japan-related articles and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Japan-related articles. --Nanshu (talk) 14:04, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Template edit suggestion
Hello, is it possible in any way to edit this template? I think it would be better if we add little question mark at the end of linking it to the Georgian script article like it has in this template. Currently it is locked and under full-protection and I am unable to edit it. Can anyone help? Jaqeli (talk) 07:10, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Here is the example how would it look like:
 * (ქართული? |undefined)

Georgian alphabet — comment on proposed rename to "Georgian script"
There is a proposal at Talk:Georgian alphabet to rename the article to "Georgian script". Much of the discussion so far on this proposal seems to deal with a general terminology question of "alphabet" vs. "script". Editors interested in the general subject of writing systems may wish to go comment on this renaming proposal. — Rich wales (no relation to Jimbo) 02:20, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Arabic gaf or keheh with three dots above
I think in the article of gaf, Moroccan used "kaf" with three dots is displayed ݣ (which appears to be keheh w3dots, decimal 1891), but confused with gaf w3dots ڴ (decimal 1716) in name and codepoints. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%DD%A3#Gaf_with_three_dots and below its "character encoding". --134.151.33.163 (talk) 16:14, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Inherent vowels in ISO 15919
Hi, I noticed that according to the Indic scripts transliteration guide, unpronounced a's should be left out of the transliteration if the script doesn't indicate the removal of the inherent vowel. Does anyone know if this is actually part of ISO 15919, or a Wikipedia-made rule? In other words, by ISO 15919 should I transliterate e.g. ਪੰਜਾਬ as paṃjāb or paṃjāba? Thanks, Jafeluv (talk) 12:27, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Font display
The glyphs in Cypriot syllabary do not display in either FF or IE, despite having compatible fonts installed. I tried forcing a font with, but that didn't work either. The words do display properly at Wiktionary, though only in the text. Any idea what's going on? — kwami (talk) 18:58, 25 April 2014 (UTC)


 * As far as I can tell the glyphs look all right on my system (Windows 8; Firefox 28.0), but the direction is left-to-right. The fonts Firefox has selected (I have more installed for these Unicode ranges) are MPH 2B Damase for the syllabary and Quivira for Aegean Numbers. LiliCharlie (talk) 20:06, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I bet that's it. I don't have Damase installed, though I do have other fonts that include this range, such as Aegean.  But when I change my language settings to install fonts as needed, I still can't see it.  Do you suppose this might be part of that bug with the language settings, that once you have fonts installed as needed, you can never go back to a normal display?  — kwami (talk) 20:49, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
 * They show in FF for me with Aegean, but not in IE. It seems IE can't auto-pick a font to use. — lfdder 23:32, 25 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Does it happen with other characters from outside the BMP, too? — Christoph Päper 09:00, 26 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Some, but not all. Other blocks supported by the font Aegean are numbered blocks, as are some which I presumably don't have fonts for, but Old Italic script, Gothic alphabet, Ugaritic alphabet, Deseret alphabet, and many others look fine.
 * Something similar happens with parts of the BMP Latin range, ever since I switched on font downloading to display Burmese. (I have Burmese fonts installed, but FF doesn't have specific Burmese support.)  For example, I can't see anything formatted as Yoruba or Bavarian, even the basic Latin alphabet.  But while those produce blanks, Cypriot is Unicode-numbered boxes.
 * Some fonts have numbered boxes for unsupported characters. Could it be that one of these is displayed in preference to Aegean, over-riding it? — kwami (talk) 16:39, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Southwest Paleohispanic script
This article needs work, and almost certainly a new title as we seem to have invented yet another name for this script. See my comments at Talk:Southwest Paleohispanic script. Dougweller (talk) 16:52, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

en:Languages in censuses
I invite you to help write Languages this article.--Kaiyr (talk) 13:50, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Backup images of alphabet charts
One of the many nice things about Wikipedia is its collection of articles on different writing systems. Most articles of this sort include one or more tables that summarize and display the writing system. Since many of the world writing’s systems are represented in Unicode, it is standard practice to use Unicode characters in those tables, whenever they exist. The problem is that many of our readers do not have Unicode fonts that include all defined glyphs, and so often see a bunch of squares in the tables instead of the characters they are looking for. Such articles typically include a warning that this may happen, but that does not help the casual reader who is not prepared to hunt down and install a font with the characters needed.

I would like to propose a fairly simple remedy to this problem: establish the practice of including a small link at the bottom of each such table that takes the reader to a screen shot of the table in question, taken with the needed font installed. The link might be the just letters PNG or perhaps a suitable icon. These tables are likely by now to be pretty stable, but if some maintenance is required, the screen shot can be rerun and uploaded as a replacement image. As a temporary measure, a notice of the change could be placed in the image's file descriptor. Since the editors who maintain these articles presumably have the needed fonts, they would not require anything more than a screen capture utility and an image editor to crop the screen shot. Such programs are widely available for most operating systems. There is information at Screenshots of Wikipedia about how to do this. (Thanks to User:Whatamidoing (WMF) for this link.) A suitable category on Commons, just for screen shots of Wikipedia writing system tables, would be simple enough to create. No new WikiMedia development activity would be needed. Comments?--agr (talk) 23:37, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I prefer the solution used in Glagolitic alphabet, viz. an image for each letter, not for the whole table. Gorobay (talk) 15:45, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * What I prefer is the “vector solution” that allows high quality magnification of the often tiny glyphs. There are two ways to achieve this: either embed an appropriate font via a template or use vector images (SVGs or PDFs) instead of bitmaps. LiliCharlie (talk) 15:56, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

There is a webfont for the Javanese script called Tuladha Jejeg which is automatically enabled. However, it cannot properly display conjuncts in many browsers. Recent attempt to change images to font was deemed inaccessible, so it was reverted back to images. Alteaven (talk) 22:22, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Quite frankly, my preferred solution would be to have a link on each of the Foreign character warning boxes that will load the page with a web font. VanIsaacWScont 19:57, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * How hard is that to do?--agr (talk) 20:08, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I have absolutely no clue, whatsoever. I've never actually done anything with webfonts, although I know that there are webfonts available on-wiki. If anybody knows anything about Wikipedia webfonts, any contributions to this discussion would not go unappreciated. VanIsaacWScont 22:08, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * To summarize, there are these options:
 * Just a table with Unicode characters, maybe with suitable fonts suggested by CSS.
 * Just a table with Unicode characters with suitable automatically downloaded font (webfont) suggested by CSS.
 * Image of the table, linked from the table.
 * Bitmap picture (PNG) of the table, linked from the table.
 * Vector graphic (SVG) of the table, linked from the table.
 * Image instead of the table.
 * Bitmap picture (PNG) instead of the table.
 * Vector graphic (SVG) instead of the table.
 * Image of each character or glyph in the table.
 * Bitmap picture (PNG) of each character in the table.
 * Vector graphic (SVG) of each character in the table.
 * I’m not sure which solution I prefer, but I think I like the last one (5.2.) best, because 2. is not (yet) possible with MediaWiki software on an article base as far as I know. — Christoph Päper 08:40, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
 * AFAIK the only embeddable font format allowed to upload to the Commons is SVG, but browser support for SVG web fonts is still unsatisfactory — in the current versions, Trident (Win IE) and Gecko (FF) users won’t be able to see any changes, but others will.
 * We might even try both: embed a web font and show vector image specimens of the graphemes as a table or individually. LiliCharlie (talk) 12:29, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
 * P. S.: It would be nice if we could persuade the Commons to allow us to upload web fonts in OTF and/or TTF format. These two formats have seen long support in all major browser layout engines. LiliCharlie (talk) 12:53, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
 * It’s not just that you need to have the fonts – with proper license – downloadable from somewhere (en.wikipedia.org, commons.wikimedia.org or elsewhere), but you also need to change the sidewide stylesheets, e.g. common.css. — Christoph Päper 13:48, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Style information doesn’t have to be in a CSS file; the HTML of templates can contain CSS style definitions as well. LiliCharlie (talk) 18:21, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * You can even put it in the article directly, but not . — Christoph Päper 18:57, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Does MediWiki parse  rules like comments and ignore them? If that (or something to this effect) is the case: Who is experienced enough, and authorized, to change the sidewide stylesheets if someone comes up with a self designed free license font for a Unicode script with extremely poor font support? (Alternatively, with a PUA font for a not-yet-in-Unicode script.) LiliCharlie (talk) 22:33, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * is – like all of CSS – parsed by the browser, not by the wiki software. It cannot occur in an HTML  attribute (inline stylesheet), though, only in a   element in the head section of a document (internal stylesheet) or in a separate, shared resource (external stylesheet). Wiki commands in articles and templates are – with rare exceptions – parsed into the body of an HTML document only. Authors can therefore only add inline styles. Administrators can edit the site-wide stylesheets, but it’s unlikely that they’re willing to include many rules for single articles, since most of these specialized web fonts would only ever be used in the article about the script in question, but they might be downloaded by browsers for any page visited.
 * I once heard that there were plans to allow templates (and maybe articles, too) their own stylesheets (and scripts) in a sub-page like “Template:Foo/style”, but I can’t find recent mentions of such a thing. There is a MediaWiki extension that adds a  tag for internal stylesheets, but it’s not installed on Wikipedia. Either of these is what we would need. — Christoph Päper 10:56, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Given the complexity of other solutions, I would like to again argue for Option 3, in Christoph's helpful taxonomy above, at least as an interim approach, with 3.1 as a minimum and 3.2 where possible. Note that even the Glagolitic alphabet article, which exemplifies 5.2, includes a Unicode table that would still benefit from option 3. It currently displays as all squares on my browser. A screen shot generated from that table using a font that supports the Glagolitic alphabet, would not only be easier to create, but would be less prone to error than manually filling the table with the .svg glyphs for each letter. --agr (talk) 17:24, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
 * It can be done now, in all relevant articles, with modest effort. It even works with scripts that need PUA fonts.
 * Unlike option 4, it doesn't detract from existing articles when a reader does have the required font.
 * It doesn't interfere with better solutions, such as 5.2, as they are deployed.

I was trying to look into webfonts issues and found Universal Language Selector/WebFonts which may be interesting to all of you. I did a little experiment on Saurashtra alphabet, for which my browser previously just displayed weird boxes in the alphabet chart. I clicked on the gear icon next to languages, selected "display" then "fonts" and checked the box "Download fonts when needed". After that, the alphabet chart displayed perfectly. (Or, not having any knowledge whatsoever about Saurashtra script, I assume it displayed perfectly...) It appears that Mediawiki (as installed here) has webfonts available natively, but they have to be manually enabled (?). Calliopejen1 (talk) 23:41, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I found the option you are talking about under Preferences --> more language settings -->Fonts button. It makes a big difference, but does not handle all cases. Saurashtra alphabet displays characters now, but Glagolitic alphabet does not. Georgian scripts display but the Nuskhuri letters do not. According the the page you referenced, the download fonts option is not enabled due to increased server loading. Perhaps the notice in the info box should be expanded to encourage users to enable this setting. A backup PNG would still be handy in some cases, it seems,--agr (talk) 21:44, 22 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Sadly, that preference setting cannot be linked to easily as it seems. (It’s also only accessible in certain skins like default Vector, although it works elsewhere, too.) — Christoph Päper 14:10, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
 * That sounds like something worth reporting. Are you up for filing a Bugzilla report?--agr (talk) 18:26, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Where exactly should I do that? — Christoph Päper 11:05, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
 * It's described in Bug reports and feature requests. Let me know if you have any problems.--agr (talk) 14:07, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Christoph (or anyone else), if you don't want to bother with a Bugzilla account, then write up what you want to tell the devs, and I can post it for you. Just leave me a note on my talk page to make sure that I see it.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

text lifted without credit
The lede section of Palaeography– two paragraphs, before the first subsection heading– is lifted verbatim without attribution from Encyclopædia Britannica, probably from the public domain 1911 edition, which is credited (in the reference note) for the following sections but not for the lede section. See http://gluedideas.com/content-collection/Encyclopedia-Britannica-Volume-17-P-Planting-of-Trees/Punctuation-Accents.html.

This is the text in question; boldface in reference added:
 * Attention should be drawn at the outset to certain fundamental definitions and principles of the science. The original characters of an alphabet are modified by the material and the implements used. When stone and chisel are discarded for papyrus and reed-pen, the hand encounters less resistance and moves more rapidly. This leads to changes in the size and position of the letters, and then to the joining of letters, and, consequently, to altered shapes. We are thus confronted at an early date with quite distinct types. The majuscule style of writing, based on two parallel lines, ADPL, is opposed to the minuscule, based on a system of four lines, with letters of unequal height, adpl. Another classification, according to the care taken in forming the letters, distinguishes between the set book-hand and the cursive script. The difference in this case is determined by the subject matter of the text; the writing used for books (scriptura libraria) is in all periods quite distinct from that used for letters and documents (epistolaris, diplomatica). While the set book-hand, in majuscule or minuscule, shows a tendency to stabilise the forms of the letters, the cursive, often carelessly written, is continually changing in the course of years and according to the preferences of the writers.


 * This being granted, a summary survey of the morphological history of the Latin alphabet shows the zenith of its modifications at once, for its history is divided into two very unequal periods, the first dominated by majuscule and the second by minuscule writing.

--Thnidu (talk) 02:10, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, not to approve of plagiarism, but if the text is taken from a public domain source, it is actually not a copyright problem. The section introduction should still be paraphrased, just from a scholarly perspective, but if you are still concerned, {{subst:copyvio}} can be used to get help from people with more experience with copyright problems. VanIsaacWScont 02:25, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I've added a sentence to the credits in the References, footnote 20. --Thnidu (talk) 06:47, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Leaflet For Wikiproject Writing Systems At Wikimania 2014
Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:

• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film

• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.

• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.

• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____

• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost

For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to: Project leaflets Adikhajuria (talk) 16:17, 13 June 2014 (UTC)