Bibliographic control of foreign languages: the case of displaying Cyrillic characters in online catalog at the University of Florida

Libraries hold foreign language collections that include non-Roman alphabets (e.g., Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, etc.). Students are faced with challenges when they wish to access these publications due to transliteration schemes that have been used for many decades. While there are various different transliteration systems in the world, the American libraries use the Library of Congress system. The libraries’ integrated systems could only display the Romanized text in bibliographic records. This creates barriers for students to access, for example, Russian publications in online catalogs. Today, there is a new universal multi-script character set, International Standard ISO/IEC 10646 – the Unicode. The Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit organization that coordinates Unicode's development, has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments. This standard, if implemented in the library system, enables not only to convert Romanized bibliographic data into a linguistically accurate display in the original alphabet but also users would be able to search and print in non-Roman scripts. Libraries are slowly implementing systems based on this new standard. There are some crucial issues that involve Unicode implementation in the libraries. What are the solutions for multiple languages in library systems? The University of Florida holds collections in several non-Roman scripts. As Slavic Studies specialist, my attention has focused on integrating records for Russian into the main OPAC, which now includes over 10,000 bibliographic records for monographs in original Russian alphabet

The 'ideal square' of logographic scripts and the structural similarities of Khitan script and han'gul

A comparison of the Khitan Small Script and Korean han'gŭl shows a striking structural similarity of two essentially phonetic scripts that combine 'letters' into large blocks. These blocks in han'gŭl correspond to the syllable, whereas in Khitan they correspond to the word-level. I shall compare these two systems structurally with both the linear alphasyllabic principle of Brahmi-derived scripts and the principle of an 'ideal square' (or 'ideal oblong') that characterizes Chinese, Egyptian or Mayan logographic scripts in order to establish why the Khitan and Korean scripts share a rare structural principle

The Computer and the Classification of Script

In the 1970s Bernhard Bischoff famously predicted that, thanks to technology, palaeography was on the road to becoming an art of measurement. The journey down this road has not been smooth, however, for several reasons. Although the idea of measurement seems uncontroversial, E.A. Lowe's attempt to measure the number of manuscripts written in half-uncial script shows that the script names that lie at the heart of palaeographical descriptions pose an insuperable problem, whether to man or machine. The reasons for this unsatisfactory system lie in the historical development of the discipline from its invention in the late-17th century. From the first, the names of scripts were used to localise manuscripts in time and place, and the names palaeographers use today are the direct descendants of these early systems. In the mid-20th century palaeographers began to focus on a different way of looking at script by exploring the strokes used to create the letters (ductus). These two approaches have led to a discipline divided between Linnaeans who emphasize taxonomy and Darwinians who emphasize evolution. Most digital palaeography has focused on the first, while the second could offer a richer vein to mine

Introduction

The seminars entitled Palaeography Between East & West, which I convened at Sapienza University, aimed at offering a forum, a place of sharing knowledge and debate, to scholars who deal with manuscript materials in various languages and alphabets. Entitled “Paleografia, paleografie. Esperienze a confronto” (2 March 2011), “Tra lingue e scritture. Itinerari grafici nel Mediterraneo e oltre” (2 April 2012), “La Paleografia tra Oriente e Occidente” (5 April 2013), “La Paleografia tra Oriente e Occidente – Palaeography between East and West” (19 May 2014), these seminars (Figs. 1-4) gathered contributions about very different areas. The essays gathered in this volume contribute to the idea of a world pale- ography. I very much hope that the field of palaeography, and the related do- mains of book-history and manuscript-culture, will receive more attention in future, and scientific recognition as an autonomous domain of research with- in Islamic studies and as a proper field of research within palaeographical studies

Review of script displays of African languages by current software

All recorded African languages that have a writing system have orthographies which use the Roman or Arabic scripts, with a few exceptions. Whilst Unicode successfully handles the encoding of both these scripts, current software, in particular web browsers, take little account of users wishing to operate in a minority script. Their use for displaying African languages has been limited by the availability of facilities and the desire to communicate with the ‘world’ through major languages such as English and French. There is a need for more use of the indigenous languages to strengthen their language communities and the use of the local scripts in enhancing the learning, teaching and general use of their own languages by their speaking communities

The Articulatory Basis of the Alphabet

The origin of the alphabet has long been a subject for research, speculation and myths. How to explain its survival and effectiveness over thousands of years? One approach is in terms of the practical problems faced by the originator of the alphabet: another would examine the archaeological record; a third might focus on the perceptual process by which the alphabet makes rapid reading possible. It is proposed that the alphabet originated in an intellectual sequence similar to that followed by Alexander Bell and Henry Sweet in constructing their Visible and Organic Alphabets.The originator of the alphabet used the same kind of introspective analysis of his own speech sounds and of the manner in which they were articulated. This was the vital step. The next step was to represent the articulatory differences in terms of visual patterns. One way to understand what might have been involved is to attempt to replicate the process oneself

Claiming space outside dominant narratives: feminist strategies based upon freedom and diversity, alternative God-talk and criticizing structures of authority

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