Showing posts with label script. Show all posts
Showing posts with label script. Show all posts

May 24 - Day of Slavic Script, Education and Culture in Bulgaria

 Posted on May 24, 2021


This is an update of my post published on May 24, 2010:



On this day, people in Bulgaria pay tribute to Saints Cyril and Methodius, brothers who developed Cyrillic script (a.k.a. the Slavic alphabet) more than a thousand years ago.



The brothers created this alphabet in Bulgaria, but it spread, and today it is used widely, for languages such as Bulgarian (of course), Russian, Belarusian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and Mongolian.

If you've ever seen Russian, with its mixture of familiar letters, backwards-facing Rs, and unfamiliar letters, you've seen Cyrillic script.

This says "Bulgaria" in Cyrillic script.

Did you know...?

The word alphabet comes from the name of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. The Slavic alphabet is sometimes called azbuka, which comes from the old names of the first two letters.

Cyrillic script was the third alphabet used by the E.U. (European Union). The first two were the Latin alphabet (which I am using right now) and the Greek alphabet.

Since the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, several nations have switched from using Cyrillic script to either using the Latin alphabet only or using a mixture of the two. The nations making this change include Moldova, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan.





What do you think?

Some people think that the countries who use Cyrillic script—particularly the European nations that have joined or wish to join the E.U.—should switch to the Latin alphabet, which is the dominant alphabet in the world. To not switch, these people argue, is to hold the nation back.

However, others argue that, for reasons of historical tradition and cultural pride, they should keep the Slavic alphabet.



What do you think?

This kind of discussion happens all over the world, not just with alphabets, but also with languages and customs. Is it helpful and practical to give up a minority language? Or is it important to keep the “old ways” alive? Obviously, many people learn their native language (using its traditional alphabet, whatever it may be) and also a more widespread second language such as English. But in some cases, it can be hard to interest young people in a little-used language. (As a kid, would you rather learn two different languages and two different alphabets, or would you just want to learn the one that is used the most?) Should those kids be forced to learn the language of their heritage? Will they regret not learning it, later?

Here is regular Cyrillic script used in Bulgaria, and then the cursive version:




Learn about Bulgaria.

Here is a website with some facts and figures about Bulgaria.

Enjoy Bulgarian dancing.

Enjoy a tour of Bulgaria's beauty in just 4 minutes!




There are seven Rila Lakes, and
each one empties into the next.





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April 5 - An Archeological Treasure!

Posted on April 5, 2018

If you were an archeologist, it's really unlikely that you would ever dig up bejeweled and golden treasures, like the folks who discovered Ancient Egyptian King Tut's mostly-untouched tomb. And it's unlikely that you would ever dig up thousands of terra cotta warriors or an entire ancient city.

As a matter of fact, you'd probably find lots of broken pieces of pottery and some bones, maybe an arrowhead or stone hand tool. And you'd be thrilled!


Today is the anniversary of a very unlikely find. It's not as glamorous as glittering gold or as amazing as a life-sized ceramic army - but the clay tablets found by archeologists on this date in 1900 were thrilling because they were marked with ancient writing, and ancient writing can lead to learning lots of new stuff!

Before that discovery in Knossos, on the island of Crete, scientists had seen the script we now call Linear B on sealstones, "milkstones," and other artifacts found in Athens, Greece. The British archeologist Arthur Evans interviewed Athens shop owners to discover where these artifacts came from; the answer in every case was "from Crete." In the late 1800s, Evans found one of the signs from those stones on a palace wall in Knossos, and he was certain that he'd found the source of the ancient writing.


Evans had to buy some land and request permission to excavate the land...but finally, in the spring of 1900, he began his excavation. On April 5, he found a terra cotta bathtub; in the tub were the remains of a wooden box and a bunch of Linear B tablets.

 "A bunch of" turned out to be the largest number of Linear B tablets ever found in one spot.

 Evans hoped that finding a lot of samples of the script would help him to decipher (read and understand) it, but he never "cracked the code." As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to read an unknown script when you don't even know what language it refers to.
Michael Ventris at age 14
An unusual British teenager named Michael Ventris saw a presentation by Evans and, when he discovered that Linear B had never been deciphered, decided to tackle the problem. Ventris was good with languages - he knew English of course, but his mother was Polish and often spoke Polish to him; he lived in Switzerland as a child, and his school lessons were taught in French and German, and the kids he befriended spoke Swiss German; he studied Latin and Classical Greek as a teen. As a young adult, he learned Russian and Swedish. Actually, Ventris was SO good at languages, he seemed to be able to learn languages in weeks rather than years, and he was considered to know at least 12 languages!

 I said he was unusual, and this is what I meant: he spent a lot of his spare time trying to learn as much as he could about Linear B, and when he was supposed to be asleep in bed, even, he would study the marks under the covers, by the light of a flashlight!

 Ventris became an architect, married a popular and beautiful young woman, became a father, served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and still managed to find enough time to succeed in his adolescent goal of deciphering Linear B, with the help of a man named John Chadwick. Tragically, Ventris died in a car accident at age 34.

The main breakthrough on the decipherment of the language was Ventris's theory that the symbol combinations that only appeared on the tablets found in Crete (some tablets with the script had been found by this time on the Greek mainland) were the names of places. 

 Figuring that out gave Ventris enough symbol-sound correspondents to realize that Linear B was a written form of archaic Greek. Evans and other scholars had been sure that it was not Greek, and Ventris himself also explored other possible language connections before he made his breakthrough.

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January 23, 2013 - National Handwriting Day

 This “holiday” was started in 1977 by people who manufacture pens and pencils—people who don't want the enormous popularity of texting and e-mail to run them entirely out of business. They made a plea for people to write letters to one another on, you know, paper. They said that others would find notes of thanks and congratulations, wishes for birthdays and anniversaries, and newsy catch-ups all the more special if they were handwritten. Using pencils and pens.

Please keep buying our product, basically.

Are they right?

Actually, I have to admit that a handwritten note delivered in person or by mail is so darn UNUSUAL, these days, it does feel special to me. How about to you?

Legibility and Calligraphy

It is not, in my mind, “important” to learn to write cursive properly, legibly and quickly. Even in the past, when there weren't many alternatives to handwritten messages, and when people practiced their handwriting a lot, cursive writing is not super easy to read. Even when I was growing up (oh, soooo long ago), it was generally easier to read printing—and people can print just about as quickly as they can write in cursive.

(Of course, it IS important to develop one bit of cursive, and that is your signature. Some people even want others to be able to decipher their signature.)

But even though I don't think it is important to write cursive, it can be fun to learn and use it! I find it especially fun to get a good calligraphy pen—perhaps a felt-tipped marker with the right “chisel” shape—and try out a bunch of beautiful scripts. Check out this and this other articles for lessons and some inspiration.



Write to your grandma!

  • Or write a letter to some other special person today.

  • Learn about handwriting analysis here.

  • Get a small notebook and start collecting autographs—signatures—of everyone you meet. It might be interesting to analyze their handwriting (see above)--or you could just hang onto the book hoping one of your friends becomes famous!

  • Get a blank book and use your most special calligraphy to copy meaningful quotes or short poems on its pages.
Many different script fonts are available on the computer!


Also on this date:


Anniversary of the partitioning of Poland







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