Ancient Egyptian scripts Origins of Egyptian Hieroglyphs The ancient Egyptians believed that writing was invented by the god Thoth and called their hieroglyphic script "mdwt ntr" (god’s words). The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek hieros (sacred) plus glypho (inscriptions) and was first used by Clement of Alexandria. The earliest known examples of writing in…
Ancient Egyptian scripts Hieratic script The Hieratic script was invented and developed more or less at the same time as the hieroglyphic script and was used in parallel with it for everyday purposes such as keeping records and accounts and writing letters. It was used until the 26th Dynasty, though by that time, it was…
Ancient Egyptian scripts Demotic script The Demotic or popular script, a name given to it by Herodotus, developed from a northern variant of the Hieratic script in around 660 BC. The Egyptians themselves called it ‘sekh shat’ (writing for documents). During the 26th Dynasty it became the preferred script at court, however during the 4th…
Eganes Eganes is the creation of Matt Cheetham, a writer and a student of Maths at Manchester University, England. It is the script for an invented language of the same name. Notable features Eganes is read left to right. The most curious aspect of the script is that all of the consonants represent two…
Efkolia The Efkolia script was invented by Rafael Machado, to be easier to read texts in Germanic, Romance and Uralic languages. It is a simpler style of alphabet, easy to write, and influenced by the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. Notable features Type of writing system: alphabet Writing direction: left to right in horizontal…
Ecta “Ecta” is the alphabetic representation of the Cadim language. Carl Buck invented Ecta and Cadim for use in a fictional nation that is under development. Notable features The Ecta alphabet is written from left to right in horizontal lines. It is named for the first two characters in the alphabet, ec and ta.…
Dzongkha Dzongkha or Bhutanese is spoken by about 130,000 people in Bhutan, where it is the national language, and also in Nepal and India. It is a Sino-Tibetan language which is closely related to Tibetan and distantly related to Chinese. Dzongkha is written with the Tibetan alphabet, which was introduced by Thonmi Sambhota, however…
Dutch (Nederlands) Dutch is a West Germanic language with about 20 million speakers mainly in the Netherlands and Belgium. There are small Dutch-speaking communities in northern France around Dunkerque and Dutch is also spoken in Aruba, the Netherlands Antilles, Suriname and in Indonesia. The official or standard form of Dutch is known as Algemeen Beschaafd…
Duala (Duálá) Duala, which is known as Douala in French, is a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon by about 87,700 people. Duala first appeared in writing in 1862 in a translation of the Bible. The orthography was reformed in 1932, and again in 1979 when a common alphabet for the languages of Cameroon (Alphabet Général…
Dscript Dscript is a new form of written script based on the Roman alphabet invented by Matthew DeBlock. It uses the standard 26 letter Roman alphabet also used for the English language. What makes Dscript unique is that unlike other forms of Roman alphabet script it makes very little effort to have its characters resemble…
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