Articles
Longer-form pieces on the history, structure, and use of writing systems around the world — covering how scripts spread, the difference between alphabets and syllabaries, direction and layout, and what Unicode standardization means for global text.
The Future of Minority Scripts in the Digital Age
Of the world's 7,000+ languages, roughly 4,000 have a writing tradition of some kind. Of these, only a few hundred are digitally supported in any meaningful way — with fonts, keyboard input methods, text rendering, and s...
Sinhala Script: The Island's Unique Writing System
Sri Lanka sits at the southern tip of India, separated from the mainland by a narrow strait. Its majority language, Sinhala, is an Indo-Aryan language closely related to Sanskrit, yet its script has evolved in isolation...
Bengali Script: A Billion Voices
Bengali is the seventh most spoken language in the world, with around 230 million native speakers and a literary tradition stretching back nearly a thousand years. The script used to write it — a Brahmic abugida closely...
Comparing Latin and Cyrillic: Shared Heritage, Different Paths
At a glance, Latin and Cyrillic look like cousins — because they are. Both descend from Greek. Both are true alphabets that write consonants and vowels with equal status. Both have been used for centuries to encode dozen...
The Thai Script and Its Tonal Markings
Thai is a tonal language — the same syllable spoken with different pitches carries different meanings. The Thai script, devised in the 13th century, addresses this challenge with an elegant if complex system: a combinati...
Linear B: Deciphering Bronze Age Greek
In 1952, a 30-year-old British architect named Michael Ventris announced on a BBC radio broadcast that he had deciphered Linear B — a script found on thousands of clay tablets excavated from Bronze Age sites in Greece an...
Khmer: The Largest Alphabet in the World
With 74 letters, the Khmer script has the largest character inventory of any alphabet in current use. This is not because Khmer has an unusual number of distinct sounds — it doesn't — but because Khmer writing distinguis...
Mongolian Script: Written Top to Bottom
Most of the world's scripts run horizontally — either left to right or right to left. A handful run vertically from top to bottom. Among those, the traditional Mongolian script is unique: it runs top to bottom in columns...
Tamil: One of the World's Oldest Continuous Scripts
Tamil is one of the few languages in the world whose literary tradition spans over two thousand years — and whose script has been in continuous use throughout that time. The oldest Tamil inscriptions, in Brahmi-derived l...
Ethiopic Script: Writing in the Horn of Africa
Ethiopia has one of the oldest and most continuous writing traditions in the world. The Ge'ez script — also called Ethiopic — has been used to write sacred texts, royal inscriptions, and legal documents since the fourth...
Unicode and the Challenge of Encoding All Scripts
Before Unicode, the digital world was a tower of Babel. Hundreds of competing character encodings — ASCII, ISO 8859, JIS, GB2312, KOI8 — made it nearly impossible to exchange text reliably between different systems, diff...
RTL Writing: Scripts That Read Right to Left
To a reader raised on left-to-right text, right-to-left writing can feel counterintuitive — but for the hundreds of millions of people who write Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, or Urdu, it is as natural as breathing. Right-to-l...