Re: Cyrillic history

Alec McAllister wrote:

>
> > Alphabets Necessary for Various Cyrillic Writing Systems
> > http://www.gutenberg.eu.org/pub/GUTenberg/publicationsPDF/28-2
> 9-berdnikovb.pdf
>
> This is very interesting, and contains information not easy to find
> elsewhere, but can anyone on the list comment on how reliable it is?
>
> I ask because it contains this: "... Old Mongolian writing ... was
> organized vertically from right to left and ... used symbols recalling
> runes". I don't speak Mongolian, but my university teaches it, and I
> have to make the Traditional Script work on computers: it is cursive
> (unlike runes) and the columns run from left to right.
>
> Presumably the expertise of the authors is in Cyrillic writing
> systems.

Maybe the "Old Mongolian" reference is a garbled reminiscence of Old
Turkic (Orkhon) "runes" -- which, however, run in horizontal lines right
to left but bottom to top.

The Mongolian near-alphabetic script doesn't go back all that far -- to
Genghis or Kublai Khan (whichever came later [the other one commissioned
hPags Pa, which unfortunately didn't catch on]). It's a modification of
the Uyghur modification of the ...
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...