Verb Conjugation Blog

Ancient Alphabets Made Easy

I was developing years ago verb conjugation for Ancient Scandinavian, Runic Swedish, and Gothic languages.

All these ancient — now extinct — languages were written in a an ancient script more that a thousand years ago. Although the grammar books transliterated the texts to modern alphabet, I wanted to also write the verbs forms in the original script.

The Gothic alphabet as it appears in the Gothic Bible of Wulfila

Years ago that was hard. Either there was no font that supported Runic or Gothic scripts. Or there was no standard for encoding them.

Fortunately things have changed, and modern webbrowsers make use of such standards as webfonts and Unicode. Thanks to that I get the Runic and Gothic texts written as they should.

Read mode:

Is the Language Vanishing?

The ethnologue tells that the Awjila language is moribund, meaning that language will vanish sooner or later.

Town of Awjila, the place where this Berber language is spoken — Plan of Awjila from Scarin 1937 (insert between pp. 76 and 77).

Despite this fact found in Ethnologue, I found a blog about the language and that tells that this Berber language is used a lot in the Facebook. So perhaps the possibility to use their own language in written form is going to save the language — who knows?

Where Do They Speak, vol. 2

Almost three years ago I updated the a webpage that tells where a specific language is spoken.

This page ws called “Where on Earth Do They Speak…”. The page itself consists of a list of languages, and clicking the language name would show the location on map.

Now there’s a new page that lets the user zoom and pan the world and see what language(s) are spoken on an area of interest. This new Languages of the World page is available here: http://maps.verbix.com/languages.html

Links:

Extinct Languages

An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers.

Basically there are two ways that a language becomes extinct:

The speakers switch to another language.
The language evolves so much that it’s considered a different language.

Among the extinct or nearly extinct languages, the users of Verbix can conjugate Latin and Gothic verbs.

In WikiVerb there’s now also a page dedicated to extinct languages.

Links to go: