weeKeNd leArnIngs...

This weekend, I bumped into an interesting book- 'The History of Writing'. What's interesting, is that this subject is something, so taken for granted, that to read about its history and development was something I'd never imagined!

It started with the same history book infomation - Papyrus etc etc, but for the first time I saw what Papyrus looked like - quite like the 'chinese umbrella' plant! You can have your own glimpse of it here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus. Learnt that Egyptian writing comprised not only of Heiroglphy but also two more derived scripts - Heiratic and Demotic! If you're interested in furthering your own knowledge on the same you can have a crash course at - http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/writing.htm. Also, I must say, that heirarchy reflected in their scripts also, as in Heiroglphy, the names of kings and queens were surrounded by an oval inscription (called Cartouche)!Lol!

And oh, finally got the name for the 'Russian alphabet' - it's called the Cyrillic script. It represents five (or more?) Slavic languages! Cool eh? It's creation and development is interesting still - but I won't go into those details here...

Closer home, how many of us knew that the Times New Roman font was created specifically for the 'London Times' in 1930? Hmmm... good fun eh?!

But, the one thing that struck me as highly unsual and really surprising, after going through it all, was that almost all ancient scripts - Egytpian, Urdu, Chinese etc., were written from right to left (vertical or horizontal) - then how did the English (greek) language develop as something so radically different?

Food for thought?