Shahrzad,

Salaam,

I would like to help, but I have trouble understanding what you mean by
letters having meaning.

This list is usually polite, and what follows is the remarks of an
amateur. (There are many professionals here, and some of my comments might
be quite wrong! I won't mind being corrected, but I'm not asking for
corrections.)

At least in our Latin , Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, letters are
abstract, and do not usually have any meaning by themselves. You might
like to learn about the Kabalah (there are various spellings; "Qabbalah"
might be another), which is an ancient set of beliefs; I think individual
letters had meanings in Kabalah.

Some writing systems did not or do not have their own numerals; they used
their letters. Ancient Greek was one, I'm fairly sure; the Ethiopic script
(?), used for Amharic and other languages of that region, is another.
Then, the ancient Romans also used letters for numerals; we still use
their scheme now and then, today.

While Arabic has its own history of writing styles (I think Naskh and
Nastaliq are two of them), typography, as I think of it, for many
alphabets is more a matter of appearance and subtle cultural implications.
Arabic typography surely exists; you only need to see labels on food cans,
or read an Arabic (or Farsi) magazine or newspaper to see different modern
letter styles. I would not say that the traditional styles of written
Arabic are the same as typographic design; they seem similar, but I would
say that modern Arabic typography probably works mostly within a very few
of the traditional styles.

(I must mention that Arabic calligraphy is a remarkable field; there is
much great beauty and variety, and the Internet has many very fine
examples.)

The German Fraktur is one example of significantly-different letter forms;
ancient Gaelic was written with some different letter forms. Then, there
were ancient Roman capitals, which we adopted. Later, there was minuscule,
that as I remember became our small "lower case" letters.

While I do not think it would provide the information you hope to learn
about, there is a wonderful book, the best there is that is written in
English:
_The World's Writing Systems_, edited by Peter T. Daniels, who posts
messages here, and William Bright. who does not. It's published by Oxford
University Press, and is expensive. Its back cover says, "Clearly
explainsa nd demonstrate how vriting systems convey meaning."
ISBN is 0-19-507993-0.

I hope this helps, some. Do not be embarrassed by your English; we can
understand it. Your first language is probaby Farsi, and it's quite
different! If I tried to write Farsi, I probably would not do too well! :)

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. Micro-blog follows...
Six lessons:
<http://www.johntirman.com/Insight%20jump.html>