User:Vuara/Runes and the ancient alphabet

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Runes are characters in the ancient alphabet used by Anglo-Saxon peoples. Runic inscriptions have been found all over western Europe, on stone monuments and on such objects as metal spearpoints and amulets; the greatest concentrations are in England and Scandinavia. The runic alphabet, called futhark after the sounds of the initial letters, originally had 25 characters.

In English versions the number was eventually increased to 33, whereas in Scandinavia it was reduced to 16 and later expanded to 26. It is believed that runes are derived from a northern Etruscan alphabet used among Italic tribes in the eastern Alps, and that they were developed in the 2nd or 3rd century AD by a Germanic people living in the region of modern Bohemia. The earliest surviving inscription is from the mid-3rd century.

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Runes were in wide use from the 4th to the 12th century. A form of runes was used in Scandinavia throughout the Middle Ages as an alternative to the Latin alphabet used by the clergy, and runes survived in occasional use in rural Sweden at least until the 17th century. Runes were also used to augment the Latin alphabet for certain sounds, notably the thorn (þ, th) used in Anglo-Saxon England and modern Iceland.

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Wednesday, 19 January, 2000, 18:04 GMT Ancient alphabet enters cyber age

The alphabet used in Ethiopia and Eritrea is Africa's oldest. Laeke Mariam Demessie reports on the efforts to get the 276-letter script to work on computers.

Ethiopic script has been in use since 100 BC. It is the only indigenous African alphabet still in use today.

But it was only in 1991 that the Ethiopian Science and Technology Commission (ESTC) first displayed the Ethiopic alphabet on a computer.

The greatest breakthrough was to come up with the idea

Programmer Mesfin Belay

The reaction of one European was: "It is impossible - how did you do it?" recalls Dr Nega Alemayehu, a lecturer in information technology at Addis Ababa University.

But as Ethiopian computer programmer Mesfin Belay points out: "The greatest breakthrough was not in developing an Ethiopic alphabet programme or software, it was rather to come up with the idea.

"Just as you have software in Japanese, Korean or Arabic, there was no reason why one cannot develop Ethiopic script."

Quicker than handwriting

Daniel Admasse, an Ethiopian who studied in Sweden, claims to have been the first person to come up with the idea of computerising "fidel", as Ethiopians call their alphabet.

 Three challenges  
Designing the fonts 
Keyboard layout 
Printing

While studying in Sweden he helped produce materials for an Ethiopian studies conference. Some of the conference texts were in Ge'ez, the ancient language which is the ancestor of modern Ethiopian languages. But he found that in Sweden he had no means of printing Ethiopic script.

"So the burden of writing by hand in Ge'ez letters and reducing them using a camera fall on me," Mr Daniel recalls.

"My handwriting was bad. Because of that incident I said to myself why shouldn't I develop an Amharic computer programme?".

"I started working on it in 1982 and developed an Ethiopic WordPerfect version 2.01 in one year".

Programmes develop

By 1991, one could take computer courses in Amharic even if one didn't know English

Programmer Daniel Admasse Mr Daniel returned to Ethiopia in 1987, and set up a team of computer programmers at the ESTC. There they developed Ethiopic software ranging from a disc operating system to a desktop publishing programme. "So we had a complete set of Ethiopic computer programmes in Fidel and the Amharic language by 1991, which meant one could take computer courses in Amharic even if one didn't know English."

Mr Daniel has since developed an Ethiopic version of WordPerfect 6.0.

He says the first challenge was to design the fidel characters. This was done using a computer programme known as font manager.

Lots of letters

The second challenge was to put the 276 characters onto the English language keyboard designed to accommodate only 26 letters.

Each character in the Ethiopic alphabet represents a syllable: a combination of consonant plus vowel. There are 33 consonants and seven vowels.

So 33 of the keys are assigned to the different consonant sounds, which are used in combination with keys such as "control" and "alt" to create the vowel-consonant combinations.

"The English keyboard was made to recognise only 26 characters, but to make it recognise 276 Ethiopic characters the computer programmers have to override the rules in the computer," Mr Daniel explains.

"This was made possible by using the keyboard handler program."

Ethiopic characters also have to be attuned to American Standard Coding for Information Interchange (ASCII) which assigns letters to the numerical codes which the computer works with.

The third challenge was printing. The printing of Amharic characters was complicated in the earlier generations of printers, Mr Daniel says, but has become simpler with more recent laserjet printers.

Standardisation headaches

Therefore any Ethiopic alphabet software is a package which deals with the designing of characters, keyboard layout and printer set-up.

However efficient and fast a keyboard layout is, it is useless unless accepted as a standard

IT lecturer Dr Nega Alemayehu Some Ethiopian computer engineers in Canada have also been developing Ethiopic software independently, out of a sense of patriotism, Dr Nega says. But the enthusiastic rush to develop software led to a new problem: lack of standardisation. Today there are at least 35 Ethiopic software products available, each with its own character set, encoding system, typeface names, and keyboard layout.

"However efficient and fast a keyboard layout is, it is useless unless accepted as a standard by users," Dr Nega argues.

The lack of standardisation also makes it difficult to transfer documents from one computer to another - including e-mail.

The problems of Ethiopic computing have resulted in the creation of the Ethiopian Computer Standard Association (ECOSA), of which Dr Nega is president, and the North American-based Committee for Ethiopian Computing (CEC).

The two groups are working on standardisation of the Ethiopic script on the computer.

"We have come together to face the challenge," says Dr Nega, who is optimistic about finding a solution.

"The sooner we standardise Ethiopic script computing, the faster we hop on the global information superhighway."

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Megaliths around the world built to the same geometric plan?

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Here are some of the notable intersections:

(1) Giza, the Great Pyramid

(3) Tyumen oil field, USSR

(4) Lake Baikal, USSR, many unique plants and animals

(9) Hudson Bay, present location of north magnetic pole

(11) Northern British Isles, Maes Howe, Ring of Brodgar, Callanish

(12) Mohenjo Daro-Rama Empire culture

(13) Pyramids in Xian, China, the largest in the world

(14) Southern Japan Dragon's Triangle, great seismic activity

(16) Hamakulta, nearby lies Hawaii, scene of high volcanic and earthquake activity

(17) The sophisticated canal civilization of Cibola

(18) Bimini, the site of huge man-made walls underwater, discovered in 1969, the date that Edgar Cayce had predicted that evidence of Atlantis would be discovered

(20) Algerian megalithic ruin

(21) Megaliths at Axum, the Coptic Christian center in Ethiopia

(25) Bangkok and Angkor Wat

(26) Sarawak, Borneo, site of ancient megalithic structures

(28) Pohnpei Island, Micronesia, site of the megalithic city of Nan Madol

(35) Lima, Peru, boundary of the Nazca Plate, Pisco, the Candlestick of the Andes & the Nazca Lines

(40) Gabon, West Africa, natural atomic reactor in operation about 1.7 million years ago

(41) Zimbabwe with its ancient mines & structures

(44) The Maralinga Atomic Test Site, which also has megalithic ruins

(47) Easter Island and its megaliths

(62) German underground Antarctic base?

Based on David D. Zink, Ancient Stones Speak: A Journey to the World's Most Mysterious Megalithic Sites (Dutton 1979).

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ARE THE ANCIENT ALPHABET SYMBOLS SCHEMATICS? PLANETARY GRID

The Morphogenetic Grid - The Builder of Planetary Destiny

The subject of who influences the Morphogenetic Grid is known as the science of Morphic Energy which has been the province and heritage of the "Ancient Wisdom and Mystery Schools". Protected and encrypted in the symbolism of Sacred Geometry, this knowledge has been reserved for the "Awakened" or "Initiated".

As these schools have always been dedicated to the study of consciousness and the nature of reality, it is their duty to make known the unknown and to pioneer and communicate other states of reality. Integrating the knowledge thus learned and turning it into an evolutionary educational program is an equally important part of their functions.

All of this would be fine except for one fact. Throughout history, the mystery schools have deviated into polarized groups at odds with each other in order to control the process of evolution. This has given rise to many different belief systems and religious constructs responsible for the guidance of moral conduct. The resulting conflict has generated war and indifference.

In such a context, belief systems are created with powerful events such as visions of the Virgin Mary, the resurrection and ascension of Christ, or visions of prophecy. Without even analyzing the exact nature of these miraculous occurrences, it is obvious that an incredible amount of dogma has been generated concerning them. What these miracles or prophecies imply for the future are substantiated only by faith with explicit doctrines designed to maintain them in our civilizations. People are not encouraged to discover and learn the truth but only to believe. "Good Deed Doers", swept away by their own convictions of faith, solicit others and whole generations are born into illusions of reality with fear and control buttons efficiently installed. Finally, prophecies are created to herd the many into subscribing to a particular creation of reality whatever it may be.

As there are many different mystery schools and religions, the numbers of people subscribing to each belief system or particular prophecy will have much to do with engineering the final outcome in the future. This is largely influenced by the power of thought feeding the grid. In such a manner, the greatest numbers that have invested into a prophecy will often prevail.

Based upon the above information, it should be clear that we are entirely capable of feeding the grid and determining the course of our own destiny. Therefore, evolution is in our own hands and our task becomes to take back that which we have lost. How do we do that. First, by opening what doors are available to us.

James, from Hall of Records Newsgroup

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In Australia, this alphabet is known as The Panaramitee Tradition

In Australia, this alphabet has been found on many locations and adheres to the grammar and structure of the other known petroglyphs on the other two continents. Ironically, instead of considering the similarity to other archaeological sites around the globe as evidence of a global culture, the scientific community in Australia has denied the possibility that this is any type of "system" at all, either writing or storyboard.

The concept that these odd shapes somehow formed a system of communication was first put forth by Lesley Maynard. Maynard received overwhelming resistance to his assertion and he finally discontinued his efforts. By the late 1980s, there was virtually no interest in these petroglyphs. In 1995, Bednarik reported the results of his experiment to see how readily the Panaramitee Tradition could be recognized. He sent drawings and pictures of several examples of petroglyphs to various rock art scholars around the globe. Ninety-eight (98%) percent wrongly identified petroglyphs from the United States, Africa and Europe as being Panaramitee Tradition. Bednarik summarized as follows,

"It is either not possible to identify the Panaramitee style, or... this is a world-wide style."

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The map above shows the myriad locations of this style. It has been noted that this style is also accompanied by petroglyphs and pictographs of strange humanoid beings with large eyes. There are also reportedly collections of carved handprints, similar to those recorded in the canyons of Monument Valley and in Southeast Colorado. Dr. Harris has not reported these types of phenomenon in the Sinai.

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Ancient Alphabet Pronunciations

A

aa, ah, ae, a.

B

b.

G

g.

D

d.

W

w, oo.

U

v, u, ou, au.

Z

z.

H

h, ea, eh, e.

J

j.

Y

y, ee, ie, i.

K

k.

L

l.

M

m.

N

n.

X

zh, sh.

O

o, ao, 'o.

P

p, f.

C

ch.

Q

qh, qu.

R

S

s.

T

t, th, dh.

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ANCIENT HEBREW ARTICLES

Ancient Hebrew Compound Morphology
Deciphering the Ancient Phonetic
Vallue of the Hebrew Letter 'He'
English and Ancient Hebrew Morphology
Methods of Decipherment
Hebrew Nomenclature

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ARTICLES

Decipherment of Royal Cartouches
Hieroglyphs Deciphered
Derivation of the Word 'Hieroglyph'
Historical linguistic Approaches for Egyptian Decipherment
Methods in Egyptian Hieroglyphic Decipherment: Note: see article entitled 'Methods in Decipherment on the linguistics links page
Deciphered Cartouches

LINGUISTICS LINKS

Methods of Decipherment
Fundamental Principle of
the Comparative Method
Sound Laws and Dialect mixing
Table of Hebrew Alphabet Transliteration Compared With Ancient Alphabet Transliteration
Ancient Alphabet Pronunciation Table
Greek Letters Transliteration Table
Comparative Method in the Chadic Languages
Afrocentric Comparative and Historical Linguistic Methods (abstract)

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ANCIENT RUNE ALPHABET

Ancient rune alphabet resources including runes, alphabet, and other specialty rune items.

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Runes, Alphabet of Mystery The runes of the Elder Futhark, their uses in writing, divination, magic during the Norse Viking and Teutonic medieval world and today.

Runes Discover the ancient oracular alphabet of the Norse, the meanings of the Runic cjharacters, and learn how to do a basic divination with Runes.

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Ancient Egyptians and the Futhark Alphabet

The Futhark Alphabet, which is essentially a set of glyphs representing sounds and ideas, is derived from the Hieroglyphs of the remote Ancient Egyptians. The term "Hieroglyph" was coined by the Ancient Greeks to describe the "Sacred Writings" of the Ancient Egyptians. Hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt, which represented sounds and ideas, were considered "Sacred" not only in the religious sense, but also because they conveyed a "Secret Meaning".

Similarly the glyphs of the earliest Teutonic Futhark Alphabet, conveyed a "Secret Meaning". This is revealed in the term used to describe them ... "Runes".

The word "Rune" is derived from "Run" (pronounced roon), an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "Secret" or "Mystery".

Also, perhaps not surprisingly, the Latin word "Runa" translates as "Dart", which is descriptive of the Rune writing style, adapted from the Greek, to suit carving.

The Runes are referred to as the Futhark Alphabet because f-u-th-a-r-k are considered to be the first six glyphs of that alphabet. Interestingly however, these first six glyphs are also translated as f-ur-th-o-r-c.

The Futhark Alphabet

Thoth says "Click on a Rune"

The Origin of Futhark Runes: The Origin of Writing and the Alphabet

A chart interpreting the development of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, down through the Ages, to the Futhark Runes and our current alphabet.

Futhark Runes and the Precession of the Equinoxes

Futhark Alphabet and the Constellations

The Secret Meaning of the Futhark Runes

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Ogham- the Celtic oracular alphabet

Related Resources • Runes • Druidry • Celtic symbols • Druid symbols From Other Guides • Viking Runes and runestones • Runes and Rune Magic

The Celtic Ogham alphabet dates from the fourth century. The alphabet is named for Ogmos, the Celtic god of knowledge. Ogmos was associated with the Gaulish Ogmios and occasionally the Greek hermes.

The alphabet consists of twenty letters, each named for a different tree believed sacred to the Druids. Each letter is made up of one to five straight or angled lines incised on a straight base line. Because the number of letters, and the number of lines that make up each letter, some scholars have theorized that the ogham may have originated as a system of hand signs. Examples of Ogham writing have been found all over the British Isles, and even as far away as Spain and Portugal. All surviving examples exist as stone carvings, usually on tombstones and road markers.

Although it is commonly used by modern Druids and other NeoPagans as a divination system, there is no real relationship between modern and historical divination systems. When used as a divination method, the letters are usually notched into straight twigs and used much like runes. In this case, I've provided a print version (MS Word) you can print and cut into small cards if you wish to try a simpler way of divining with ogham: A B