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4、压码看电影学习法系列贴：（多语言入门）字母表汇总
sunyuting1
级别: 管理员
只看该作者 300 发表于: 2010-02-09
Futhark
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic > Greek
LocationEurope
Time200 CE to 1600 CE
DirectionLeft to Right
In popular culture, Runes have always been seen as possessing of mystical properties. Once in a while a fantasy computer game comes by with puzzles written in runes, and many modern Wiccan sects use Runes ceremonially and ritualistically. As runes dated from before the time Northern Europe became Christianized, it became associated with the "pagan" or non-Christian past, and hence a mystique is cast upon it. Even the supposed etymology of the word rune, the German word raunen which means "to whisper", helped in adding a secretive bend to Runes.
The Runic alphabet is also known as Futhark, a name composed from the first six letters of the alphabet, namely f, u, th, a, r, and k. In this way, "Futhark" is analogous to the word "alphabet", which is from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. And why were the letters ordered in such a way. Nobody knows the answer, but it might been some form of mneumonic function that was not preserved.
The first Runic inscriptions that have survived to the modern day dated from around 200 CE. The alphabet consists of 24 letters, 18 consonants and 6 vowels, as illustrated in the following chart:

Note: In the traditional transliteration of Runic inscriptions, the letter j stands for the semivowel /y/, and y stands for the vowel /ü/. The digraph th stands for /θ/, and ng stands for /ŋ/.
Traditionally, the 24 letters are divided into three groups of eight letters called ættir. In the previous chart, each row is an ætt (the singular of ættir). This means that f, u, th, a, r, k, g, and w belong to the first ætt; h, n, i, j, æ, p, z, and s belong to the second; and t, b, e, m, l, ng, d, and o belong to the third. Also, a rune has a position within each ætt, so for example, k would be the 6th rune in the 1st ætt, and t would be the 1st rune in the 3rd ætt.
What is interesting about these two numbers associated with every rune is that they can be used to write an alternate, "encoded", version of the rune. An encoded rune consists of a central vertical line, with short horizontal lines left of the vertical line determined by the rune's ætt number, and short horizontal lines on the right side determined by the rune's position within its ætt, as illustrated below:

Some scholars have theorized that this alternate system of representing letters with vertical and horizontal lines has some kind of connection to Ogham, but no solid links have been found yet.
Origin
Most Runic texts are found on hard surfaces such as rock, wood, and metal, and this might explain its angular shape. Because of the resemblance to Mediterranean scripts, it is very likely that Futhark was adapted from either the Greek or Etruscan alphabet. Even though the earliest Runic inscriptions are from the 3rd century CE, its origin may lie much deeper in the pre-history of Northern Europe. A few clues might shed light on this. The earliest Futhark inscriptions don't have a fixed writing direction, but instead can be written either left-to-right or right-to-left, which was a feature of very archaic Greek or Etruscan alphabets before the 3rd century BCE. Other clues to the age of Futhark come from the history of Germanic languages. The letter æ was extraneous in even the earliest texts because the sound /æ/ has disappeared from Germanic languages by the 3rd century CE, yet it existed in the alphabet (that is, it would always appear in a list of all the letters). However, from linguistic reconstruction it seems that Proto-Germanic, the ancestral language of subsequent Germanic languages, had the vowel /æ/. This means that the letter must have been created when there was a need for its sound, but due to tradition was kept in the alphabet even when there was no need for it anymore. Another internal clue comes from the spelling convention in Futhark which dictates that the sequence ai stands for the sound /e/. Once again, historical linguistics tells us that the Proto-Germanic sound /ai/ became the sound /e/ in later Germanic languages. This means that the original spellings of the words were standardized during Proto-Germanic times, and due to the conservative nature of the writing system, the original forms of the words were preserved even after their pronuncations had changed over time. All of these clues, both external and internal, suggest the time of Futhark's creation to the 1st millenium BCE.
Evolution and Variants of the Futhark
The Futhark of 24 letters is called "Elder Futhark", and was used mostly before the 9th century CE. But as languages changed and more Germanic groups adopted it, Futhark changed as well to suit the language that it came to write.
An early offshoot of Futhark was employed by Goths, and so it is known as Gothic Runes. It was used until 500 CE when it was replaced by the Greek-based Gothic alphabet. One theory concerning the origin of Futhark states that the Goths were the inventors of Futhark, but there is insufficient supporting evidence to prove this theory.

In England, the Anglo-Saxons brought Futhark from continental Europe in the 5th century CE and modified it into the 33-letter "Futhorc" to accommodate sound changes that were occurring in Old English, the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. Even the name "Futhorc" is evidence to a phonological change where the long /a/ vowel in Old English evolved into a later /o/ vowel.

The new letters compensated for sound changes in Old English. For example, the Elder Futhark letter k became the Futhorc letter c, which was pronounced as /k/ before mid and back vowels (/a/, /o/, /u/) and as /c/ before front vowels (/e/ and /i/), so a new Futhorc letter, k, was created to always represent the sound /k/ regardless of the following vowel. Similarly, the Elder Futhark letter g came to represent /g/, /y/, and /gh/, so a second g letter was invented to consistently represent the /g/ sound. And finally, many new vowels arose in Old English, so a lot of new vowel letters were created.
In Scandinavia, Futhark also evolved around the 9th century CE. Instead of 24 letters, the Scandinavian "Younger" Futhark had 16 letters. Nine of the original Elder Futhark letters were dropped (g, w, æ, p, z, e, ng, d, and o), and a new one was created (R). There were two major varieties of Younger Futhark, namely Danish and Swedish-Norwegian, as illustrated in the following chart:

The cause of this reduction of letters in Younger Futhark is tied to very complex phonological changes that occurred in the Old Nordic language. As many old letters were removed from the alphabet, several of the remaining letters were overloaded to represent multiple sounds: th was used for /þ/ and /ð/; u for /u/ and /o/; k for /k/, /g/, and /ng/; i for /i/ and /e/; t for /t/ and /d/; and b for /b/ and /p/. The new letter, R, was originally used for a /er/-like sound in Old Nordic but became /y/ in later Scandinavian languages.
Even though Futhark continued to thrive as a writing system, it started to decline with the spread of the Latin alphabet. In England, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc started to be replaced by the Latin alphabet by the 9th century CE, and did not survive much more past the Norman Conquest of 1066. Futhark continued to be used in Scandinavia for centuries longer, but by 1600 CE, it had become nothing more than curiosities among scholars and antiquarians.
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sunyuting1
级别: 管理员
只看该作者 301 发表于: 2010-02-09
Georgian
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic
LocationWest Asia > Georgia
Time5th century CE to Present
DirectionLeft to Right
Situated on the eastern shore of the Black Sea and nestled in the Caucasus mountains, Georgia has always been the crossroads of the ancient world. Greeks, Iranians, and local nations interacted to create a rich culture. One of these traits is the Georgian alphabet, which was influenced by Greek and Iranian scripts but shaped into something uniquely Georgian.
Like its neighbor Armenian, Georgian displays Greek influence in its letter ordering, which is essentially Greek (/a/, /b/, /g/, /d/, /e/, etc). On the other hand, Iranian influences are also visible, as the cursive shapes of the letters (especially the ancient forms) and the abundance of sibilants are reminiscent of Pahlavi, an ancient Iranian script.
The exact date of the creation of the Georgian alphabet is in much debate. The earliest example is an inscription found in a church in Palestine from the 5th century CE, written in a script called Asomtavruli or "capital letter" as its letters were of an uniform height due to the lack of ascenders and descenders. The Asomtavruli is also called Mrglovani which means "rounded" because of the rounded appearance of its letters. In fact, as the Asomtavruli script evolved, it became more angular and by the 9th century CE it lead to the Nuskha-Khutsuri script, also known as the Kutkhovani or "angular" script. Ironically, the letters became rounded again, and by the 13th century CE another script, the Mkhedruli, became more prominent and replaced the Nuskha-Khutsuri as the dominant script for secular writing. In fact, the name Mkhedruli stemmed the word mkhedari, which means "warrior" thus reflecting its secular origin. The older scripts continued to be used in religious media in a combined form called the Khutsuri or "priestly" script, but they eventually gave way to Mkhedruli as well.
Modern Georgian is essentially the Mkhedruli script, as illustrated in the table below. Note that Georgian does not in reality have "capital letters". Sometimes titles of texts and newspaper headlines are written with letters jammed into an uniform height for emphasis. In addition, the ancient Asomtavruli script has been used sporadically to denote names and start of sentences like capital letters in Latin and Greek alphabets, but such attempts have been successful and widespread.

One interesting feature of the Georgian language (and languages in the Caucasus region in general) is the existence of voiceless ejective or glottalized consonants. These sounds are marked by a "normal" consonant followed by the symbol ʔ (which looks like a question without the dot) or the number 7, such as /pʔ/ or /p7/. The way to pronounce an ejective sounds is to say the consonant and the glottal stop (you can visit Phonetics for explanation of the glottal stop) simultaneously, causing a little explosion to occur at the throat. Note that this is different from a voiceless aspirated consonant where the explosive sound comes from the back of the mouth. In fact, Georgian also has voiceless aspirated consonants as well as plain voiced consonants as the following table shows.

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sunyuting1
级别: 管理员
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Glagolitic
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic > Greek
LocationEurope
Time9th to 12th century CE
DirectionLeft to Right
While variants of the Cyrillic alphabet have been in use to write Slavic (and some Central Asian, non-Slavic) languages for more than a thousand years, there was another alphabet, so called Glagolitic (from Old Church Slavonic glagol meaning "word"), that was used side-by-side to Cyrillic in the early history of writing in Eastern Europe.
The oldest recorded form of a Slavic language is Old Church Slavonic, which used both Cyrillic (with 44 letters!) and its version of Glagolitic, which looks like this:

Ironically, it seems that it was St. Cyril who invented Glagolitic, not Cyrillic which was named after him. It is thought that students of St. Cyril created the Cyrillic to replace Glagolitic. Maybe a bit of monastic teacher-student competition? :)
Alternatively, Bernard Comrie (of University of Southern California) came up with a more realistic reason for the competition between Glagolitic and Cyrillic. He theorized that Glagolitic came from cursive Greek scripts, while Cyrillic derived from Byzantine Greek uncial scripts already used in manuscripts. The students of St. Cyril might have found Glagolitic "undignified and unsuitable for ecclesiastical use" (Hersey) because of its cursive shapes, and derived Cyrillic from an already liturgical script.
In most places Glagolitic gave way to Cyrillic after the 12th century. In Croatia, though, it continued to be in use until the 19th century in church. The Croatian Glagolitic is quite similar in to Old Church Slavonic Glagolitic, but it has less letters and the shape of its characters are much more rectangular.
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sunyuting1
级别: 管理员
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Gothic
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic > Greek
LocationEurope
Time4th to 8th century CE
DirectionLeft to Right
The Goths were one of the most important "barbarian" tribes responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire and the politics of early Medieval Europe. By the 4th century CE, the Goths were becoming Christianized. At this time, the Goths wrote their language using their version of the Futhark alphabet, but it was deemed to be a pagan invention. Instead, Bishop Wulfila (or Ulfilas), a Greek missionary responsible for the conversion of the Goths to Christianity, took the Greek alphabet, added letters from Latin and Futhark alphabets, and created a new alphabet to write the Gothic language.

Note that there are two letters that don't stand for any sounds. This is because they were adopted from Greek only for their numeric value. The Classical Greek alphabet doubled as a number system, and each letter had a number associated with it. The Gothic alphabet continued this tradition, and so in the case of Gothic, the first row of letters have numeric values of 1 to 9, the second row from 10 to 90, and the third row from 100 to 900.
The Goths spoke a Germanic language, and it is unique not only in that it is the earliest documented Germanic language, but also in that it is the only language in a completely separate branch of the Germanic family unrelated to any other surviving Germanic languages.
In most of Europe, the Gothic alphabet and language slowly faded into obscurity by the 9th century CE. The Gothic language survived in the Crimea but it too became extinct around the 17th century CE
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sunyuting1
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Greek
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic
LocationEurope
Time800 BCE to Present
DirectionVarious
The Greeks were the first Europeans to learn to write with an alphabet, and from them writing was brought to the rest of Europe, eventually leading down to all modern European alphabets.
From the shape of the letters, it is clear that the Greeks adopted the alphabet the Phoenician script, mostly like during the late 9th century BCE. In fact, Greek historian Herotodus (5th century BCE) called the Greek letters "phoinikeia grammata" (φοινικήια γράμματα), which means Phoenician letters. (You can see the comparision chart at the undefined page.) Unlike Greek, the Phoenician alphabet only had letters for consonants. When the Greeks adopted the alphabet, they found letters representing sounds not found in Greek. Instead of throwing them away, they modified the extraneous letters to represent vowels. For example, the Phoenician letter 'aleph (which stood for a glottal stop) became the Greek letter alpha (which stands for [a] sound).
There were many variants of the early Greek alphabet, each suited to a local dialect. Eventually the Ionian alphabet was adopted in all Greek-speaking states, but before that happened, the Euboean variant was carried to the Italic peninsula and adopted by Etruscan and eventually Latin. The following chart compare various early variants, the modern alphabet, and pronunciations.

Note: AP means Ancient Pronunciation. MP means Modern Pronunciation. These represent the phonetic values of the Greek letters in Classical and modern times.
While there are many differences between the many variants of the early Greek alphabet, enough similarities exist to suggest the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet once and splintered rapidly into local variants rather than adopting multiple times.
Early Greek was written right-to-left, just like Phoenician. However, eventually its direction changed to boustrophedon (which means "ox-turning"), where the direction of writing changes every line. For instance, you start on the right of the tablet and writes leftward, and when you reach the leftmost end, you reverse your direction and starting writing toward the right. Even more confusing is that the orientation of the letter themselves is dependent on the direction of writing as well. In the above chart, the letters are drawn as if they were being written from left-to-right. If I were to write right-to-left, I would horizontally flip the letters (like in a mirror).
Boustrophedon was an intermediate stage, and by the 5th century BCE, left-to-right became the de-facto direction of writing.
The Greek alphabet was also the basis for Glagolitic, Cyrillic, and Coptic, Gothic scripts among others.
Strangely, the Greeks tried writing once before. Between 1500 and 1200 BCE, the Mycenaeans, an early tribe of Greeks, has adapted the Minoan syllabary as Linear B to write an early form of Greek. However, the syllabary was not well suited to write Greek, and leaves many modern scholars scratching their heads trying to figure out the exact pronunciation of Mycenaean words. The alphabet, on the other hand, allowed more precise record of the sounds in the language.
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sunyuting1
级别: 管理员
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Latin
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic > Greek
LocationEurope
Time700 BCE to Present
DirectionLeft to Right
Rome was a little quiet town on the shores of the Tiber river when her Latin-speaking citizens learned writing from the Etruscans. A few hundred years later, the Romans brought their alphabet to wherever they went (more specifically, conquered). Because of the prestige of Roman culture, many non-Roman "barbarian" nations embraced Latin for court use, and adopted the Latin alphabet to write their own language. Consequently, Western European nations all wrote using the Latin alphabet, and with European imperialism in the last 500 years, the Latin alphabet (with local modifications) is probably the most ubiquitous writing system in the world.
Even though the Latin alphabet is essentially what you're seeing in front of you, the original version was quite different. As Latium (the region where Latin is spoken and Rome is located) and Etruria (the region where Etruscan is spoken) are adjacent to each other, the very first examples of the Latin alphabet resemble the undefined alphabet. Nearly all the letters were adopted with the same phonetic values and graphical shapes. Also, the direction of writing was like Etruscan, either right-to-left, boustrophedon, or even left-to-right for about a hundred years during the 6th century BCE (once again influenced by Etruscan fads). On the other hand, the Latins did modify the Etruscan alphabet to suit their language. They threw away the signs , , , , and ([š>], [z], [ph], [th], and [kh] respectively) because Latin didn't have those sounds. On the flip side, Latin also had sounds not present in Etruscan. One solution was to invent the letter G by adding a vertical stroke to the letter C. Similarly, the Latins "resurrected" the letters O and D, which were not used in Etruscan but kept for tradition. The letter F, which in Etruscan represented the sound [v], was eventually reused for [f]. Etruscan wrote the [f] sound with the digraph HF, a convention also used in the earliest Latin inscriptions. The Latins also took Q and used it for their [kw] sound most likely since it already appears in front of V in Etruscan.
Slowly the Latin alphabet became increasingly standardized. Writing direction settled on left-to-right toward the 5th or 4th century BCE, and letter shapes became more or less the same in Latium. And by Rome's Republican period (3rd century BCE), the Latin alphabet has evolved to the "modern" form:
The letters Y and Z were added for to write Greeks loan words during the early Imperial period (1st century BCE). With these two additions, the Latin alphabet at the late antiquity was nearly identical to most Western European alphabets. During the middle ages, new letters were created by slightly modifying an existing letter. The letter I was used for both and [y], and so J was created from to represent the [y] semi-vowel. Similarly, V doubles as and [w], and so U was created to denote while V stood for [v] only. Still later, the letter W was created in Germanic-speaking regions from doubling U to represent the [v] sound (while the letter V shifted to represent [f]). This doubling trick is also found in other places such as Spanish where the letter Ñ originated from the NN.
As you might have noticed, the classical Roman Latin alphabet only has what we called "upper case", or majuscule, letters. So where did "lower case", or minuscule, letters come from? By the 4th century CE, a semi-cursive style called uncial was being used for handwriting. Uncial is considered a majuscule style but with rounded letters. Eventually this evolved into the minuscule style by the 8th century CE. Originally the two styles were used separately, majuscules for monumental inscription, and minuscules for manuscripts. However, during the reign of Charles the Great (early 9th century CE) the Carolingian Reform forced the merging of the two styles and the creation of the "dual alphabet". With this, our modern Roman alphabet was born.
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sunyuting1
级别: 管理员
只看该作者 306 发表于: 2010-02-09
Lydian
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic
LocationWest Asia > Anatolia
Time800 BCE to 100 BCE
DirectionLeft to Right
The Lydians were one of the many nations of ancient Anatolia. After the collapse of the Hittite Empire, the Lydian people emerged as a local power in western Anatolia. They remained an independent state until absorption into the Persian Empire, and later into Alexander the Great's Empire. Firmly in the Hellenistic world, the Lydians slowly lost their culture and their language, and the last Lydian inscription was recorded in the 1st century BCE.
The language of the Lydians belonged to a branch of the Anatolian language family that also included older tongues such as Hittite and Luwian as well as contemporaneous languages such as Carian, Lycian and Phrygian. Unlike the older languages, which employed logophonetic scripts, Lydian adopted the early Greek alphabet for its writing system and modified it to suit its phonology.
The following is the Lydian alphabet:

In the table above, each row contains three subrows. The first subrow is the Lydian letter. The second subrow (in blue) is the traditional transliteration of Lydian. The third subrow (in red) is the phonetic transcription of Lydian. Note: [ã] and [ẽ] are nasalized vowels, meaning that the vowels are pronounced with a resonance in the sinus cavity. Of interest also are the consonants [ty], [dy], and [ly], which are palatalized versions of the consonants [t], [d], and [l]. They are like the original consonants simultaneously pronounced with the [y] sound.
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sunyuting1
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Ogham
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyUnrelated
LocationEurope > Ireland and Britain
Time3rd to 6th Century CE
DirectionBottom to Top
The Ogham script recorded the earliest Old Irish texts dating between the 3rd and the 6th century CE. Ogham inscriptions are found exclusively in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Mostly they are genealogical inscriptions in the form of "X son of Y" on corners of large stone slabs. After the 6th century CE, Old Irish was written with the Roman alphabet, and Ogham disappeared from general but the knowledge must have been preserved in some form because our knowledge of Ogham comes from the chapter Auraicept na n-Éces in the 15th-century work The Book of Ballymote (Leabhar Bhaile an Mhóta), which also contains geneologies, mythologies, and histories of Ireland.
Various opinions exist on the exact origin of ogham. Some claim that it stemmed from a cryptic way of writing runes, some say that it was inspired from the Roman alphabet, and yet others hold that it was independently invented.
The Ogham letters are divided into four groups, each containing five letters. This yields a total of 20 Ogham letters.
When inscribed on stones, Ogham is written vertically from bottom to top. The following chart lists all Ogham letters in their vertical forms, along with their Old Irish names and meanings.

Sometimes the vowels use dots rather than lines intersecting the vertical axis.

In some cases, mostly in manuscripts, Ogham is written horizontally from right to left.

The ordering of the letters is a mystery, as it does not correspond to neither Roman nor runic letter orders. It appears to have some phonetic basis. For instance, the fourth group contains all vowels, and the vowels are arranged according to their position in the mouth. The vowel /a/ is a central vowel, /o/ and /u/ are back vowels, and /e/ and /i/ are front vowels. Another possible phonetic layout is the second group, which contains all stop consonants except for the consonant /h/.
In Auraicept na n-Éces, a fifth group of letters called forfeda is also listed. These extra letters did not appear in stone inscriptions before the 6th century CE, and most likely were added to represent new sounds introduced by natural changes in the Irish language after the 6th century CE.

The following is an Ogham inscription from County Kerry, Ireland. It is fairly typical in that its text is genealogical information.

Many thanks to Prof Curtis Clark of Cal Poly Pomona for his Ogham font, which was used to create the images on this page.
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sunyuting1
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Oscan
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic > Greek
LocationEurope > Italy
Time500 BCE to 100 CE
DirectionRight to Left
Before Rome became the dominant state of the Italic Peninsula and imposed its culture and language on the non-Roman Italic population, there were a bewildering number of ethnic and linguistic groups that thrived in the Peninsula. One of these groups is the Oscans, who occupied the southern part of the Peninsula that were not settled by Greeks.
The Oscan speakers adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write their language. This event probably occurred around the 7th century BCE but the first evidence of the Oscan alphabet did not appear until the 5th century BCE in the form of inscriptions on coins. Because the Oscan language is Indo-European, its phonology is different from that of Etruscan. As a result, many letters not used in Etruscan but inherited from Greek were revived to denote Oscan sounds such as , [g], and [d]. Sometimes the u letter is used to denote the [o] sound (which did not exist in Etruscan and therefore there was no letter for it). Also, two new letters were invented during the 4th century BCE, namely í and ú, for the long vowels of [i:] and [u:]. The total tally of letters in the Oscan alphabet is therefore 21.

A note about the previous chart of the Oscan alphabet: The black letter is the Oscan letter, the blue is the traditional Roman transcription of the corresponding Oscan letter, and the red in brackets is the phonetic pronunciation of the Oscan letter.
The Oscan alphabet is written from right to left, a feature preserved in Etruscan but not in Latin. Also, to mark separation between words, a dot is used, as in the following example from Pompeii:

As Rome conquered territory occupied by Oscans, it assimilated the Oscan people into the Roman world. As a consequence, the Oscan ethnic identity and culture disappeared, and the Oscan language ceased to be spoken and written by the end of the 1st century CE.
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sunyuting1
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Umbrian
Quick Facts
TypeC&V Alphabetic
GenealogyProto-Sinaitic > Greek
LocationEurope
Time350 BCE to 50 BCE
DirectionRight to Left
The Umbrians were one of the many nations that inhabited the Italic Peninsula before being absorbed into the growing Roman state. Their language, Umbrian, belonged to the Italic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It was most closely related to Oscan and more distantly to Latin and Faliscan.
Like other ancient people of the Italic Peninsula, the Umbrians adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write their own language. This meant that Umbrian inherited the right-to-left writing direction. It also meant that certain pecularities of Etruscan was adopted as well. For one, the Etruscan language did not have the sounds , [g], [d], and [o], and as such they never used the letters for these sounds. With the exception of , the Umbrian script did not use these letters either, but surely the language had these sounds because comparisons with Latin and other Indo-European languages expect the existence of these sounds. In other words, some level of ambiguity might have existed in the reading of words.
The following is the Umbrian alphabet.

In addition, a colon-like symbol (:) was used to separate words. However, breaks in sentence or paragraph were not represented by any special signs or punctuation.
Umbrian is known primarily from seven bronze tablets called the Iguvine Tablets, so named because they were from the town of Iguvium (modern Gubbio). They date to about the 2nd century BCE, and describe Umbrian religious rituals. The length of their texts helped linguists to understand the Umbrian language greatly.
The following is an excerpt from an Iguvine Tablet.

Note that the direction of reading of Umbrian words is from right to left. Transliterated Umbrian words and English translations are spelled from left to right, but words are read from right to left. I apologize for this somewhat confusing reading order, but once you get accustomed to it, it works fairly well to convey Umbrian's original reading order without sacrificing clarity.
The prose translation would be:
Begin this ceremony by observing birds,
those in front and those behind. Before the Trebulam Gates
sacrifice three oxens. Offer grains,
put ribs on a tray, with wine and with mead
sacrifice for Mount Fisian, for nation of Iguvium.
You may recognize some words that are similar to Latin or even English. For example, Umbrian aves is very close to Latin avis, meaning "bird", although the equivalent declension should be avibus, the plural dative declension. Other similar words include: Umbrian vinu, Latin vinō ("wine", singular dative); Umbrian tre, Latin tres ("three"); and Umbrian buf, Latin bovēs ("oxen", plural accusative).
Like other pre-Roman Italic nations, the Umbrian were assimilated into the Roman state, and lost their identity, language, and script. No trace of Umbrian inscriptions after 50 BCE has been found. Most likely, the Umbrian people have disappeared in history by that time, leaving us only scant evidence of their way of life.
You can also find a copy of the Umbrian script I used to create this page in the Downloads section.
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