- "Ifranji" (ie Frank) letters, that is to say lower case Latin
- Greek (also "Sabi" and "Rumi") and Coptic
- Hieroglyphics (barbāwī) - see also "Suli" and "Qinani". Needless to say, none of the values given bear any discernible relation to their actual sound values.
- The "letters of India", rather reminiscent of the Maldivian thaana
- Syriac, listed as the language of Adam (putting it several generations back from Ibn Hazm's more conservative description of it as the language of Abraham...)
- "Jacobite", basically Hebrew, and the "letters of Aaron", basically Samaritan
- Armenian
- Kufic (early Arabic)
- A table of the directionality of various scripts
- A comparative table of magical alphabets
- A Hermetic alphabet (attributed to Hermes, that is) called "Secrets of the Stones"
Knowing my readers, I suspect I'll have identifications of several of the alphabets I didn't recognise coming soon - although many, perhaps most, of them are certainly made up. Extra points for anyone who can come up with a picture of a magic bowl or something actually using one of the made-up alphabets.
Two other Arabic manuscripts there of potential interest: The conquest of Africa, from Qayrawan to Zab; Book of the Roman months.
4 comments:
Hmmm... possibly the person who wrote the original had actually seen and understood some of the alphabets he was transcribing...
Yes - this is a bit like a written version of Chinese whispers.
What does "book of the Roman months" mean?
The "letters of India" are simply Arabic numerals — themselves originally derived from Indian numerals, and arranged according to the early 'abjad' alphabetic order that corresponds to Hebrew, where the Arabic letters in that order were used as numbers (' b j d h w z H T y k l m n s " f S th kh dh D Dh gh). Most of the numerals are identical to the modern forms as used in Arabic; a very few are obviously related to the forms used in Persian and Urdu. The Wikipedia article on Arabic numerals has a nice table of the evolution of the sumbols.
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