It's UN International Literacy Day!
This timeline shows a very compressed history of writing, organized into major groups of scripts.
While many writing systems have been invented over the millennia, very few of them were ever created completely from scratch by people who …
read more(Tegurala introduction: I have a D&D setting I have developed, which I call Tegurala. When I started working on it, I decided to use real world languages for the fantasy languages, for naming language consistency without having to create a bunch of new ConLangs. Giants use Uralic languages)
Proto-Indo-European has *gʷṓws: "cow, cattle" and possible *woḱéh₂: "(female) cow".
And some other likely descendants of (the same?) Central Asian substrate words for "cattle": Sino-Tibetan *ŋwa: "cattle, ox", West Semitic *baḳar-: "cattle, ox"
cow, butter, botany, beef, vaccine
Tying Minoan (Cretan) Phaistos and Greek Hephaestus in to this family is speculative, but not as wild a reach as it first looks like.
Hephaestus and Phaistos, Crete:
We usually represent the name as Hephaestus in the Roman alphabet, after Roman transliteration traditions, but (as …
read moreThis page describes a counter-factual in which the Tengwar writing system (from Tolkien's Middle-Earth) is instead developed by speakers of Polynesian languages and called Tuʻara.
I developed it primarily for use in my D&D game. I …
read moreSumerians and reeds were very influential! (Cuneiform was written with a sharpened reed stylus and was the first writing system, possibly tied with Egyptian hieroglyphs.)
I love that "canon" and "cannon" are related.
cane, cannon, channel, canister, canon