writing system

There are now only 4 types of writing system in the world. Those originating in Mesopotamia including Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew. Those originating in north Asia including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Those originating in India including Devanagari, Hindi, Thai. A 4th was once used in Mongolia

Sorry Pseudo. I was only considering modern scripts.

There is evidence that both the north Asian and Indian writing systems were inspired, if not directly adapted, through trade with the Mesopotamians.

(... or vice versa...)

Besides, ya wank, you forgot Mayan glyphs, the most eminently provable case of parallel evolution of a writing system which clearly wasn't inspired through trade with other cultures. True, it is no longer in use and is mainly unknown, but that's not to say it doesn't exist.

See also writing system.

Many of the links here do not work any more, because naming conventions have changed and writeups have been renamed. It shows two things: 1) editors work a lot; 2) metanodes are useless because E2 is a moving target and links should be made to concepts, not to specific nodes.

I have tried to evaluate most of these nodes, so every link should point to actual content. This writeup includes information from a writeup by stepnwolf.

General information

Syllabary.
Conscript.
cenemic, pleremic: linguistic jargon.
glyph, ideograph, ideogram, grapheme: more linguistic jargon.
Alphabet: general information about alphabets, with many write-ups.
abugida: a special kind of alphabet.
The supremacy of the alphabet: an opinion.
How The Alphabet Began: a strange story.
origin of alphabet letters: a long story.
Punctuation: everything about punctuation.

Ancient writing systems

Cuneiform: includes a lengthy write-up about the origins of writing.
Hieroglyphs, Hieroglyphics, Hieratic, Demotic. See also Writing Systems of Egypt.
The Alphabet, Episode One: an epic presentation of the beginnings of the alphabet, from Egypt to Greece.
Greek alphabet: each greek letter has its own node.
Latin alphabet.
ogham: the Celtic writing system.
runes: the Norse writing system.
Glagolitic alphabet.
Writing Systems of Proto-Canaanite, and its Descendants, Pt. 1, Writing Systems of Proto-Canaanite, and its Descendants, Pt. 2.
Writing Systems of Egypt.

Writing systems around the world

European writing systems
Cyrillic alphabet. See also Cyrillic and Russian Alphabet (CP1251 encoded).
Norwegian letters.
Swedish characters.

Mediterranean writing systems
Hebrew alphabet.
Arabic script.

Asian writing systems
Devanagari. See also Brahmi Script.
Khmer.
Chinese characters; see also Pinyin and Systems for Romanizing Chinese.
Chu nom.
Hangul: the Korean alphabet.
Japanese writing system: the basics. Many nodes are available: you will find most of them from the Japanese Language Meta Node.

Special writing systems

International Phonetic Alphabet.
Braille. See also Alphabets for the blind and the Braille alphabet.

Oddities

Enochian Alphabet.
E2 ASCII Art.
How the alphabet was made: Rudyard Kipling's version.
Python Adventure Writing System (PAWS).

Computers and writing systems

Character lists
Special Alt key characters & accents: a large list of special characters, with MAC, PC and HTML codes, but remember not to use anything but E2 HTML tags in E2!
Table of ASCII Characters.
Table of ISO 8859-1 Characters.

Character sets
Character set: a good starting point, with links to specific character sets and encodings: ECBDIC, Unicode, Latin-1, UTF-8, etc...

Cryptology
Check the Cryptology Meta-Node.

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