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.
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...
The Phoenician Alphabet and Its Legacy
Few things in human history have been as consequential as a set of 22 letters devised by Semitic traders on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean around 1050 BCE. The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor — directly or in...
Japanese Writing: Four Scripts in One Language
Japanese is unique among major modern languages in its routine use of four distinct writing systems simultaneously — sometimes in a single sentence. This typographic complexity is not a historical accident waiting to be...
Tibetan Script: Writing on the Roof of the World
High on the Tibetan plateau, at altitudes where most of the world's populations would struggle to breathe, Buddhist monks have been writing, copying, and illuminating manuscripts for over 1,300 years. The Tibetan script...
Armenian Script: Designed for a Nation's Soul
In 405 CE, a monk named Mesrop Mashtots emerged from years of study and prayer with a new alphabet — 36 letters precisely fitted to the sounds of the Armenian language. The Armenian script, still used today with minimal...
Georgian: A Script That Defies Classification
Tucked between the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains, Georgia has maintained a writing tradition of extraordinary distinctiveness for over 1,500 years. The Georgian script looks like no other — its rounded, curling le...
The Brahmic Script Family of South and Southeast Asia
At first glance, Thai, Devanagari, Tibetan, and Sinhala look entirely different. But they share a common ancestor in the ancient Brahmi script of India, and a common structure: each is an abugida in which consonants carr...
Hebrew: A Script Reborn After Two Millennia
Hebrew is one of the very few languages in history to have been revived as a living vernacular after centuries of use only as a liturgical tongue. The script that encodes it — the square Hebrew alphabet developed during...