AramaicAramaic (Ārāmāyā; 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; אֲרָמִית; Western Neo-Aramaic ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria, and quickly spread to Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia where it has been continually written and spoken, in different varieties, for over three thousand years. Aramaic served as a language of public life and administration of ancient kingdoms and empires, and also as a language of divine worship and religious study.
Phoenician alphabetThe Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician alphabet is also called the Early Linear script (in a Semitic context, not connected to Minoan writing systems), because it is an early development of the Proto- or Old Canaanite or Proto-Sinaitic script, into a linear, purely alphabetic script, also marking the transfer from a multi-directional writing system, where a variety of writing directions occurred, to a regulated horizontal, right-to-left script.
Semitic languagesThe Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
Hebrew alphabetThe Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, Alefbet ivri), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze.
Arabic alphabetThe Arabic alphabet (الْأَبْجَدِيَّة الْعَرَبِيَّة, ALA ʔælʔæbʒædijːæ-lʕɑrɑbijːæ or الْحُرُوف الْعَرَبِيَّة, ALA), or Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing Arabic. It is written from right to left in a cursive style and includes 28 letters. Most letters have contextual letterforms. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, meaning it only uses consonants, but it is now considered an "impure abjad". As with other impure abjads, such as the Hebrew alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel diacritics.
Syriac alphabetThe Syriac alphabet (ܐܠܦ ܒܝܬ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ ʾālep̄ bêṯ Sūryāyā) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and Sogdian, the precursor and a direct ancestor of the traditional Mongolian scripts. Syriac is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script where most—but not all—letters connect within a word.
Hebrew languageHebrew (; ʿÎbrit; ) is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. It was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a spoken language by their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans, before dying out after 200 CE. However, it was largely preserved as a liturgical language, featuring prominently in Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. Having ceased to be a dead language in the 19th century, today's Hebrew serves as the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival.
Sasanian EmpireThe Sasanian Empire (səˈsɑːniən,_səˈseɪniən), officially known as Eranshahr ("Land/Empire of the Iranians"), was the last Iranian empire before the early Muslim conquests of the 7th–8th centuries AD. Named after the House of Sasan, it endured for over four centuries, from 224 to 651 AD, making it the longest-lived Persian imperial dynasty. The Sasanian Empire succeeded the Parthian Empire, and re-established the Persians as a major power in late antiquity alongside its neighbouring arch-rival, the Roman Empire (after 395 the Byzantine Empire).
Writing systemA writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form of information storage and transfer. Writing systems require shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script.
Persian languagePersian (ˈpɜrʒən or ˈpɜrʃən ), also known by its endonym Farsi (فارسی, , fɒːɾˈsiː), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian (officially known as Persian), Dari Persian (officially known as Dari since 1964) and Tajiki Persian (officially known as Tajik since 1999).
AlephAleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician 𐤀, Hebrew א, Aramaic 𐡀, Syriac ܐ, Arabic ʾ ا, and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez አ. These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of *ʾalp, the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew ʾelef, "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (Α), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А.
Achaemenid EmpireThe Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire (əˈkiːmənᵻd; 𐎧𐏁𐏂, Xšāça, ) was the ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC, also known as the First Persian Empire. Based in Western Asia, it was the largest empire the world had ever seen at its time, spanning a total of from the Balkans and Egypt in the west to Central Asia and the Indus Valley in the east. Around the 7th century BC, the region of Persis in the southwestern portion of the Iranian plateau was settled by the Persians.
CuneiformCuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions (Latin: cuneus) which form its signs. Cuneiform was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system. Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian.
Arabic scriptThe Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin alphabet), the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the third-most by number of users (after the Latin and Chinese scripts). The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Quran, the holy book of Islam.
Brahmi scriptBrahmi (ˈbrɑːmi; ; ISO: Brāhmī; Sometimes also known as dhamma lipi) is a writing system of ancient South Asia that appeared as a fully developed script in the third century BCE. Its descendants, the Brahmic scripts, continue to be used today across South and Southeast Asia. Brahmi is an abugida which uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols.
Brahmic scriptsThe Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used by various languages in several language families in South, East and Southeast Asia: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, and Tai. They were also the source of the dictionary order (gojūon) of Japanese kana.
DevanagariDevanāgarī or Devanagari (ˌdeɪvəˈnɑːɡəri ; देवनागरी, , Sanskrit pronunciation: deːʋɐˈnaːɡɐriː), also called Nāgarī (), is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ancient Brāhmī script, used in the northern Indian subcontinent. It is one of the official scripts of the Republic of India and Nepal. It was developed and in regular use by the 7th century CE. The Devanāgarī script, composed of 48 primary characters, including 14 vowels and 34 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages.
AA, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is a (pronounced 'eɪ), plural aes. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ.
Waw (letter)Waw ( "hook") is the sixth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician wāw , Aramaic waw , Hebrew vav ו, Syriac waw ܘ and Arabic wāw و (sixth in abjadi order; 27th in modern Arabic order). It represents the consonant w in classical Hebrew, and v in modern Hebrew, as well as the vowels u and o. In text with niqqud, a dot is added to the left or on top of the letter to indicate, respectively, the two vowel pronunciations. It is the origin of Greek Ϝ (digamma) and Υ (upsilon), Cyrillic У, Latin F and V and later Y, and the derived Latin- or Roman-alphabet letters U, and W.
LogogramIn a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph (from Greek logo, "word", and gramma "that which is drawn or written") is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced Hànzì in Mandarin Chinese, Kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Hán tự in Vietnamese and Sawgun in Standard Zhuang) are generally logograms, as are many hieroglyphic and cuneiform characters. The use of logograms in writing is called logography, and a writing system that is based on logograms is called a logography or logographic system.
