Schrift
9 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- A man who couldn't read invented a writing system.
Sequoyah, a Cherokee, knew neither English nor how to read. From around 1809 he nonetheless developed a syllabary for …
- ABC News counted 112 spellings of Gaddafi's name.
There is no universally accepted authority for transliterating Arabic names into Latin letters. So AP wrote "Moammar …
- How six dots make a whole alphabet.
A braille cell has six dots; each is raised or not, giving 64 combinations including the space. Letters a to j use only …
- How to type tens of thousands of Chinese characters with 26 keys.
You type the romanisation pinyin, say "ma", and the system lists every character with that pronunciation; you pick one …
- Thai writes whole sentences without a single space.
Thai script has 44 consonant symbols with vowels attached as marks, making it an abugida. There are no spaces between …
- The English alphabet once had 27 letters.
The & sign is a ligature of e and t, Latin "et", attested since the 1st century. In 19th-century America schoolchildren …
- The German letter that wasn't allowed a capital until 2017.
The ß emerged in the Middle Ages as a fusion of long s and z. No German word starts with it, so there was no capital …
- Vietnamese is written in Latin letters, thanks to Jesuits.
For centuries Vietnam wrote in Chinese characters and the derived chữ Nôm. From 1620 Portuguese and Italian Jesuits …
- Why Spanish starts questions with '¿'.
The Real Academia Española recommended the inverted question mark at the start of sentences in 1754. The reason …