Pantographia: 1799 specimen book of all the known alphabets | Hacker News Reader

Pantographia: 1799 specimen book of all the known alphabets

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132 pointsprismatic33 comments

Japanese is the only script I'm familiar with (other than Latin), and it's very clear to me that the person who drew the hiragana characters in this book wasn't familiar with them as they only vaguely resemble the actual characters. I wonder if there was a bit of a "game of telephone" effect going on too, as the book cites a French encyclopedia as its source, which may also have contained non-native renditions of those characters.

It's also interesting how they refer to the language as Japonese instead of Japanese, which makes sense if they their source was a French encyclopedia, but I wonder if Japan was being referred to as Japon in English too back then.

Not just that, but also the last row is probably 180° rotated. The last 5 entries (labelled as "no nu n'a n'e n'i") do read "na ne ni no nu" (なねにのぬ) after rotation. Remaining 3 entries also seem to be similarly transformed, compared to other letters that are at most missing some parts (e.g. "da" た).

The vocabulary section is also very iffy, assuming some common Japanese words haven't changed their vowels in the last two centuries!

The whole section is a reminder of how much we take for granted freely available and accurate information from the other side of the world, something that was absolutely not the case when this book was written, instead relying one presumes on sources based entirely on "travellers' tales".

The vocabulary clearly reflects Western Japanese, e.g. "Laughable" Okaski corresponds to modern Standard Japanese okasii while retaining the k that's also present in modern inflected forms like okasiku; and "Quick" Faijo corresponds to modern hayai but has the -o ending that's also present fossilized in ohayou gozaimasu. The choice of f instead of h for the first consonant likely also records a historical pronunciation of [ɸ].

That is quite a big assumption, given that the standard way to write 今日 in hiragana was けふ until 1900.

Imagine the tattoos

This was written at a time when the borders were closed to most of the outside world, so perhaps that is why.

on page 38 you can see a list of reference works.. there is no source for the Japanese.. "A Voyage Around the World" by Perouse is the only alternate there?

what is "Ecclemach" a language of North California on page 78 ?

What a wonderful publication Pantographia is.

I'd not seen it before but I've seen others printed around this time. What is amazing to see is how much care and effort went into top publications of the Enlightenment era, others come to mind such as the famous Encyclopédie by Diderot, d'Alembert et al. These people were truly proud of their work and the technology that went into reproducing it (this fact also came up today on another HN story about I.K. Brunel).

What is interesting to note is that Edmund Fry acknowledges the Patronage and Encouragement of Sir Joseph Banks, etc, of the Royal Society. This is significant as Banks was a perfectionist and he would have known the state of the art in printing at the time having essentially set the standard himself with his famous Florilegium engravings, and although I've no evidence I've little doubt that Fry would have been aware of Banks' extensive knowledge of same. Whilst Banks' Florilegium wasn't published in his lifetime, its preparation—study by Banks and Solander and drawings by Parkinson of the natural world originally gathered and prepared during their tour with James Cook on HMS Endeavour —would have made him expert in the field.

Incidentally, Banks' Florilegium is recognized as one of the great publishing efforts of all time. Despite the Florilegium copperplate engravings being done by engravers from Banks' time and being well over 200 years old, the drawings/prints are some of the best of kind ever produced (little wonder Fry attempts to match Banks' standard):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banks%27_Florilegium

https://www.alecto-historical-editions.com/collections/all-f...

The modern version would be https://www.omniglot.com/, which has tons of real and constructed writing systems. It’s a reminder of when the Web was a bunch of neat people sharing neat things.

No affiliation with it, just been happily reading and sharing it for years.

Does this collection include temporal sequences of glyphs between languages?

I love omniglot. I'd love to see the the diff, to see what's new since then.

What an absolutely fabulous resource: an effort to 'anti Bable' the languages of humanity. From the text...

...and mysterious and magical alphabets, such as the twenty variations of Chaldean, an occult writing system that has no extant original sources. (Fry reports that it may have been transmitted directly to Adam...

Is that "subscribers" section at the beginning basically a patreon shoutout?

Also the Bohemian looks quite badly transcribed from speech, words are improperly split and some letters are missing. Which is understandable because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_National_Revival was only just beginning at the time and grammar and orthography were in a bad shape.

The press that printed this book must have had to make or order the numerous sorts (metal type) you'd need to print it.

I came to wonder a similar thing - was this typeset or were perhaps entire pages engraved or similar?

I would guess they were made in 1 piece, like an image. (Or at least, the parts that are the different alphabets).

Car faulmans book is also worth a look https://books.google.de/books?id=0thRAAAAcAAJ (in German but with nice tables).

The alphabet they used for Etruscan is totally unrecognizable to me and not aligned with the current understanding of the actual alphabet. I wonder if it was totally made up or if anyone recognizes where he might have had some contemporary source for the letters he used.

Edit: his source is apparently Encyc. Franc, pi, VIII, which doesn’t appear to be around at least in the digital age.

I recommend The Languages of the World, by Kenneth Katzner:

https://www.amazon.com/Languages-World-Kenneth-Katzner/dp/04...

It has samples from ~200 languages (scripts) with English translation, and background information or classification of 400 more.

One thing I've never been able to figure out is if there is an existing taxonomy of glyphs not based on from where they originated, but purely based on the shape and appearance of the glyph. Like topology for two dimensions: this glyph has one hole in it, this glyph has two. Unfortunately, just listing holes is about the extent of my imagination.

I always find it fascinating that the alphabet was probably only invented once in human history: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/60001/was-the-al...

I love the origin a story of the alphabet. Ancient Egypt used hieroglyphics to write ideas and concepts but eventually created a more efficient script called demotic.

Traders or miners from Phoenicia visited Egyptian quarries and saw this squiggles on walls. They decided to just use some of the characters to represent sounds and not concepts as the Egyptians were doing.

Ancient Egyptian scripts before Coptic represented both sounds and concepts. But mostly sounds. You'll see 𓅓 used a lot in hieroglyphic texts. It's not because the ancient Egyptians loved to write about owls. It's mostly being used for its phonetic value, "m", which is usually a preposition, but can also be used to spell larger words.

The innovation of proto-Sinatic script, which was the ancestor of Phoenician script, was less going purely phonetic and more simplification. Ancient Egyptian scripts before Coptic used symbols that could represent a series of consonants. For example, 𓆣 represents the consonants "ḫpr" and 𓉐 represents the consonants "pr". There were symbols that represented single consonants, so you could potentially write just 𓐍𓊪𓂋 instead of 𓆣, although the Egyptians usually didn't do so. (They would sometimes write 𓆣𓐍𓊪𓂋 for "ḫpr" as a phonetic complement.) But that's what happened with Proto-Sinatic. The result was that instead of having to memorize hundreds of symbols, you had to memorize twenty or so. Much easier to learn, although you did jettison mechanisms to disambiguate homonyms.

Also, proto-Sinatic (and thus Phoenician) is derived not from Demotic, but from hieroglyphs. Compare hieroglyph 𓉐 and proto-Sinatic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-semiticB-01.svg with Hieratic and Demotic. https://imgur.com/gTr8UHF .

Hieroglyphs and Hieratic were the first forms of Egyptian writing, apparently developed simultaneously. Hieroglyphs were mostly used for monumental writing, but sometimes on papyrus. Hieratic was a cursive form of hieroglyphs that could be quickly written with a pen. Demotic is an evolution of a form of Hieratic used in the north.

If you lump abjads and alphabets together, the Ugaritic alphabet represents another invention of an alphabet. Instead of being derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, it's derived from cuneiform. Old Persian cuneiform, another invention, is also largely alphabetic, with only 9 of the 22 consonants being routinely written in forms that also include a vowel.

I do wonder where they got a lot of these alphabets from. To take one example I’m familiar with, of the eleven alphabets labelled ‘Hebrew’, only 7, 8 and 10 resemble anything I would call Hebrew; 11 is a weird romanisation, while the rest look like nothing else I’m aware of.

The book itself says for quite many of them so not sure I understand your question.

The first five are from here: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Zqd4CZH5wPAC/page/n177/mo... where the sourcing is less clear.

Isn't it great when an old book on archive.org cites another old book that turns out to also be available on archive.org?

Fascinating! But that just pushes the question back: where did they get them from?

So weird. Malabaric is Tamil in this book, which makes no sense. Malayalam with Tamil tinge was more common in southern Kerala but even there the Malayalam would be distinct from Tamil.

Well it’s the 1800s. He dismisses Africa languages as “savage jargon” and then moves on.

Malabaric seems to be both Malayalam and Tamil here.

Malabaric 2 is from Tranquebar -- the Danish factory in modern Tamil Nadu.

Malabaric 3 could read as Tamil, and I believe could read as Malayalam too, but I'll ask the Malayalam speakers here to comment.

Malabaric 4 looks like a strange form of either the Malayalam script or the Grantha script. (Modern Malayalam has a very curved ka -- this one looks more like the Tamil ka, but Tamil does not have the same repretoire of characters that Malayalam does. Grantha (traditionally used in Tamil Nadu to represent Sanskrit, and with a greater visual similarity to Tamil) does.

They also list Tamoulic (Tamil in French is "Tamoul") on page 293, which is somewhat like modern script but not really.

Talenga is listed right above Tamoulic (presumably a corruption of Telugu), but it also states that this language is also called Badega. Badaga is a minority Dravidian language in the area, but closer to Tamil and Kannada.

They made lots of mistakes.

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