From my perspective, there’s almost nothing more thrilling than learning to use a new writing system. You’re gaining access to a whole secret code that many others cannot penetrate. The romance of ...

How social media is pushing back against the still common idea that African societies never had a knowledge system.

Clay cylinders unearthed from a tomb in Syria and dated to 4,400 years ago are inscribed with traces of the earliest known alphabetic writing system, an analysis suggests. The tomb was discovered ...

These first two signs came to form the name of the system itself: alphabet. Some letters were borrowed from hieroglyphs, others drawn from life, until all the sounds of the language they spoke ...

The Korean alphabet is better than yours. Meet the king who invented it and watch him work his linguistic magic in this ...

Most of the world’s languages are written alphabetically; in an alphabetic writing system the basic components represent sounds only without any reference to meaning. For example, the letter “b” in ...

An investment banker has developed a new phonetic writing system to help language learners. But will it ever catch on, asks Anne Merritt. By Anne Merritt 20 March 2013 • 7:00am Language learning ...

Today, after spending two weeks on Punjabi and its writing system Gurmukhi, it’s time to have a little look at some of the terms I have thrown around in those blogs. Off There are many different ...

Foreign languages can be intimidating for the novice learner, especially those that employ a whole new writing system. Any English speaker who has scanned a Chinese menu or glimpsed an Arabic ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanized writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn Mandarin ...