S List of Famous Unsolved Codes and Ciphers. The guide to languages, alphabets and other writing systems. Runic alphabets / Runes / Futhark. Little is known about the origins of the Runic alphabet, which is traditionally known as futhark after the first six letters. In Old Norse the word rune means 'letter', 'text' or 'inscription'. The word also means 'mystery' or 'secret' in Old Germanic languages and runes had a important role in ritual and magic.
Here are some theories about the origins of runes: The alphabet was probably created independently rather than evolving from another alphabet. Runic writing was probably first used in southern Europe and was carried north by Germanic tribes. The Runic alphabet is thought to have been modelled on the Latin and/or Etruscan alphabet. The earliest known Runic inscriptions date from the 1st century AD, but the vast majority of Runic inscriptions date from the 11th century. Notable features The direction of writing in early Runic inscriptions is variable. Types of runic inscriptions include: There are a number of different Runic alphabets including: Elder Futhark Notes Younger Futhork. Jawi script. Jawi is one of the two official scripts in Brunei, and is used as an alternate script in Malaysia. Usage wise, it was the standard script for the Malay language but has since been replaced by a Latin alphabet called Rumi, and Jawi has since been relegated to a script used for religious and cultural purposes.
It can be typed with the Jawi keyboard. Day-to-day usage of Jawi is maintained in more conservative Malay-populated areas such as Kelantan in Malaysia and Pattani .[1] Etymology[edit] The word "Jawi" (جاوي) is an adjective for the Arabic noun Jawah (جاوة). Both terms may originated from the term "Javadwipa", the ancient name for Java.
Early history[edit] Prior to the onset of the Islamisation, when Hindu-Buddhist influences were still firmly established in the region, the Pallava script was primarily used in writing Malay language. The development of Jawi script was different from that of Pallava writing which was exclusively restricted to the nobility and monks in monasteries. Voynich manuscript. The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.[1][2] The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912.[3] Some of the pages are missing, but about 240 remain.
The text is written from left to right, and most of the pages have illustrations or diagrams. The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II.[4] No one has yet succeeded in deciphering the text, and it has become a famous case in the history of cryptography. The mystery of the meaning and origin of the manuscript has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript the subject of novels and speculation.
The Voynich manuscript was donated by Hans P. Arabic chat alphabet. History[edit] During the last decades of the 20th century and especially since the 1990s, Western text communication technologies became increasingly prevalent in the Arab world, such as personal computers, the World Wide Web, email, bulletin board systems, IRC, instant messaging and mobile phone text messaging. Most of these technologies originally had the ability to communicate using Latin script only, and some of them still do not have the Arabic alphabet as an optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking users communicated in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic text in to English using Latin script. To handle those Arabic letters that do not have an approximate phonetic equivalent in the Latin script, numerals and other characters were appropriated.
For example, the numeral "3" is used to represent the Arabic letter ⟨ع⟩ (ʿayn), note the usage of the mirroring technique to create a visual similarity between the Arabic letter and its numeral substitution. Usage[edit] Arabic alphabet. Alphabet for Arabic and other languages Countries that use the Arabic script: as the sole official script as a co-official script The Arabic alphabet (Arabic: أَلْأَبْجَدِيَّة ٱلْعَرَبِيَّة, al-ʾabjadīyaḧ l-ʿarabīyah or أَلْحُرُوف ٱلْعَرَبِيَّة, al-ḥurūf l-ʿarabīyaḧ) 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".[1] As with other impure abjads, such as the Hebrew alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel diacritics. Consonants[edit] Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word directly connected to the adjacent letters.
Alphabetical order[edit] There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet: abjad and hija. Abjadī[edit] Hijāʾī[edit] Notes.