[HN Gopher] Pantographia: 1799 specimen book of all the known al...
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Pantographia: 1799 specimen book of all the known alphabets
Author : prismatic
Score : 117 points
Date : 2023-10-11 03:17 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
| Daub wrote:
| What an absolutely fabulous resource: an effort to 'anti Bable'
| the languages of humanity. From the text...
|
| ...and mysterious and magical alphabets, such as the twenty
| variations of Chaldean, an occult writing system that has no
| extant original sources. (Fry reports that it may have been
| transmitted directly to Adam...
| wirrbel wrote:
| Car faulmans book is also worth a look
| https://books.google.de/books?id=0thRAAAAcAAJ (in German but with
| nice tables).
| chupchap wrote:
| So weird. Malabaric is Tamil in this book, which makes no sense.
| Malayalam with Tamil tinge was more common in southern Kerala but
| even there the Malayalam would be distinct from Tamil.
| huytersd wrote:
| Well it's the 1800s. He dismisses Africa languages as "savage
| jargon" and then moves on.
| bradrn wrote:
| I do wonder where they got a lot of these alphabets from. To take
| one example I'm familiar with, of the eleven alphabets labelled
| 'Hebrew', only 7, 8 and 10 resemble anything I would call Hebrew;
| 11 is a weird romanisation, while the rest look like nothing else
| I'm aware of.
| yorwba wrote:
| The first five are from here:
| https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Zqd4CZH5wPAC/page/n177/mo...
| where the sourcing is less clear.
|
| Isn't it great when an old book on archive.org cites another
| old book that turns out to _also_ be available on archive.org?
| bradrn wrote:
| Fascinating! But that just pushes the question back: where
| did _they_ get them from?
| jeltz wrote:
| The book itself says for quite many of them so not sure I
| understand your question.
| kqr2 wrote:
| I always find it fascinating that the alphabet was probably only
| invented once in human history:
| https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60001/was-the-al...
| wl wrote:
| If you lump abjads and alphabets together, the Ugaritic
| alphabet represents another invention of an alphabet. Instead
| of being derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, it's derived from
| cuneiform. Old Persian cuneiform, another invention, is also
| largely alphabetic, with only 9 of the 22 consonants being
| routinely written in forms that also include a vowel.
| dghughes wrote:
| I love the origin a story of the alphabet. Ancient Egypt used
| hieroglyphics to write ideas and concepts but eventually
| created a more efficient script called demotic.
|
| Traders or miners from Phoenicia visited Egyptian quarries and
| saw this squiggles on walls. They decided to just use some of
| the characters to represent sounds and not concepts as the
| Egyptians were doing.
| wl wrote:
| Ancient Egyptian scripts before Coptic represented both
| sounds and concepts. But mostly sounds. You'll see used a
| lot in hieroglyphic texts. It's not because the ancient
| Egyptians loved to write about owls. It's mostly being used
| for its phonetic value, "m", which is usually a preposition,
| but can also be used to spell larger words.
|
| The innovation of proto-Sinatic script, which was the
| ancestor of Phoenician script, was less going purely phonetic
| and more simplification. Ancient Egyptian scripts before
| Coptic used symbols that could represent a series of
| consonants. For example, represents the consonants "hpr" and
| represents the consonants "pr". There were symbols that
| represented single consonants, so you could potentially write
| just instead of , although the Egyptians usually didn't do
| so. But that's what happened with Proto-Sinatic. The result
| was that instead of having to memorize hundreds of symbols,
| you had to memorize twenty or so. Much easier to learn,
| although you did jettison mechanisms to disambiguate
| homonyms.
|
| Also, proto-Sinatic (and thus Phoenician) is derived not from
| Demotic, but from hieroglyphs. Compare hieroglyph and proto-
| Sinatic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-
| semiticB-01.svg with Hieratic and Demotic.
| https://imgur.com/gTr8UHF .
|
| Hieroglyphs and Hieratic were the first forms of Egyptian
| writing, apparently developed simultaneously. Hieroglyphs
| were mostly used for monumental writing, but sometimes on
| papyrus. Hieratic was a cursive form of hieroglyphs that
| could be quickly written with a pen. Demotic is an evolution
| of a form of Hieratic used in the north.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| I recommend _The Languages of the World,_ by Kenneth Katzner:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Languages-World-Kenneth-Katzner/dp/04...
|
| It has samples from ~200 languages (scripts) with English
| translation, and background information or classification of 400
| more.
| rauhl wrote:
| The modern version would be https://www.omniglot.com/, which has
| tons of real and constructed writing systems. It's a reminder of
| when the Web was a bunch of neat people sharing neat things.
|
| No affiliation with it, just been happily reading and sharing it
| for years.
| mycall wrote:
| Does this collection include temporal sequences of glyphs
| between languages?
| hoseja wrote:
| Is that "subscribers" section at the beginning basically a
| patreon shoutout?
|
| Also the Bohemian looks quite badly transcribed from speech,
| words are improperly split and some letters are missing. Which is
| understandable because
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_National_Revival was only
| just beginning at the time and grammar and orthography were in a
| bad shape.
| pilaf wrote:
| Japanese is the only script I'm familiar with (other than Latin),
| and it's very clear to me that the person who drew the hiragana
| characters in this book wasn't familiar with them as they only
| vaguely resemble the actual characters. I wonder if there was a
| bit of a "game of telephone" effect going on too, as the book
| cites a French encyclopedia as its source, which may also have
| contained non-native renditions of those characters.
|
| It's also interesting how they refer to the language as Japonese
| instead of Japanese, which makes sense if they their source was a
| French encyclopedia, but I wonder if Japan was being referred to
| as Japon in English too back then.
| samirillian wrote:
| Imagine the tattoos
| coopierez wrote:
| This was written at a time when the borders were closed to most
| of the outside world, so perhaps that is why.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Not just that, but also the last row is probably 180deg
| rotated. The last 5 entries (labelled as "no nu n'a n'e n'i")
| do read "na ne ni no nu" (naneninonu) after rotation. Remaining
| 3 entries also seem to be similarly transformed, compared to
| other letters that are at most missing some parts (e.g. "da"
| ta).
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| The vocabulary section is also very iffy, assuming some common
| Japanese words haven't changed their vowels in the last two
| centuries!
|
| The whole section is a reminder of how much we take for granted
| freely available and accurate information from the other side
| of the world, something that was absolutely not the case when
| this book was written, instead relying one presumes on sources
| based entirely on "travellers' tales".
| yorwba wrote:
| The vocabulary clearly reflects Western Japanese, e.g.
| "Laughable" _Okaski_ corresponds to modern Standard Japanese
| _okasii_ while retaining the _k_ that 's also present in
| modern inflected forms like _okasiku_ ; and "Quick" _Faijo_
| corresponds to modern _hayai_ but has the _-o_ ending that 's
| also present fossilized in _ohayou gozaimasu_. The choice of
| _f_ instead of _h_ for the first consonant likely also
| records a historical pronunciation of [F].
| fhars wrote:
| That is quite a big assumption, given that the standard way
| to write Jin Ri in hiragana was kehu until 1900.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| on page 38 you can see a list of reference works.. there is no
| source for the Japanese.. "A Voyage Around the World" by
| Perouse is the only alternate there?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| One thing I've never been able to figure out is if there is an
| existing taxonomy of glyphs not based on from where they
| originated, but purely based on the shape and appearance of the
| glyph. Like topology for two dimensions: this glyph has one hole
| in it, this glyph has two. Unfortunately, just listing holes is
| about the extent of my imagination.
| esafak wrote:
| The press that printed this book must have had to make or order
| the numerous sorts (metal type) you'd need to print it.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| I came to wonder a similar thing - was this typeset or were
| perhaps entire pages engraved or similar?
| mcphage wrote:
| I would guess they were made in 1 piece, like an image. (Or
| at least, the parts that are the different alphabets).
| codezero wrote:
| The alphabet they used for Etruscan is totally unrecognizable to
| me and not aligned with the current understanding of the actual
| alphabet. I wonder if it was totally made up or if anyone
| recognizes where he might have had some contemporary source for
| the letters he used.
|
| Edit: his source is apparently Encyc. Franc, pi, VIII, which
| doesn't appear to be around at least in the digital age.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| What a wonderful publication _Pantographia_ is.
|
| I'd not seen it before but I've seen others printed around this
| time. What is amazing to see is how much care and effort went
| into top publications of the _Enlightenment_ era, others come to
| mind such as the famous _Encyclopedie_ by Diderot, d 'Alembert
| _et al._ These people were truly proud of their work and the
| technology that went into reproducing it (this fact also came up
| today on another HN story about I.K. Brunel).
|
| What is interesting to note is that Edmund Fry acknowledges the
| _Patronage and Encouragement_ of Sir Joseph Banks, etc, of the
| Royal Society. This is significant as Banks was a perfectionist
| and he would have known the state of the art in printing at the
| time having essentially set the standard himself with his famous
| _Florilegium_ engravings, and although I 've no evidence I've
| little doubt that Fry would have been aware of Banks' extensive
| knowledge of same. Whilst Banks' _Florilegium_ wasn 't published
| in his lifetime, its preparation--study by Banks and Solander and
| drawings by Parkinson of the natural world originally gathered
| and prepared during their tour with James Cook on _HMS Endeavour_
| --would have made him expert in the field.
|
| Incidentally, _Banks ' Florilegium_ is recognized as one of the
| great publishing efforts of all time. Despite the _Florilegium_
| copperplate engravings being done by engravers from Banks ' time
| and being well over 200 years old, the drawings/prints are some
| of the best of kind ever produced (little wonder Fry attempts to
| match Banks' standard):
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banks%27_Florilegium
|
| https://www.alecto-historical-editions.com/collections/all-f...
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(page generated 2023-10-11 16:01 UTC)