Historic scripts for Albanian: Elsaban and Beitha Kukju

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Sep 16 2004 - 18:10:22 CDT

  • Next message: Kenneth Whistler: "Re: Historic scripts for Albanian: Elsaban and Beitha Kukju"

    This page:
    http://www.omniglot.com/writing/albanian.htm
    shows two historic scripts that have been used to write Albanian (Shqip):
    - the Elsaban script in the 18th century, which looks like Old Greek for the
    language Tosk variant. However there are lots of unique letter forms, and
    mapping to Old Greek is not straightforward.
    - the Beitha Kukju script invented in 1840 and named after its inventor.
    This second one looks very like a modified version of the Latin script (the
    scans reproduce handwriting), but with major changes in the letterforms and
    some unique letters for 'j, d-with-stroke, th, kj, ng, ks, tsj, and ts. It
    is quite hard to read for Latin readers, and some forms may cause confusion
    for Latin readers (notably the letters for e, d, d-with-stroke, h, y and ü;
    so I think it's a distinct script rather than a variant of the Latin script.

    Are these alphabets represented in Unicode?

    The page also gives the modern Latin alphabet (including Latin digraphs),
    based on Western European Latin letters.



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