Open Questions

Open S2

Why It Is Open The sign appears at the tail of the longer Ugaritic school abecedaries, written a second time after the twenty-ninth sign, and its shape is conventionally described as samekh-like. No Ugaritic source names it, and specialists disagree on its basic function: some read it as an additional native sibilant the ordinary twenty-nine signs did not distinguish, others treat it chiefly as a device for spelling words of foreign origin. No other script modelled in this atlas offers even an approximate cognate to compare it against, unlike Ugaritic's other five signs unique among its Northwest Semitic peers, all five of which correspond cleanly to a preserved Arabic letter.

What Would Settle It A systematic survey of every attested occurrence of the sign in the Ugaritic textual corpus, not only the abecedaries, checked for whether it clusters in loanwords or foreign personal and place names, which would support the spelling-device reading, against whether it appears in ordinary native vocabulary in a way the standard twenty-nine signs could not otherwise write, which would support a distinct native phoneme.

Expertise Needed Ugaritology; Northwest Semitic historical phonology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Sappa (Tza) ፀ

Why It Is Open In the received reading tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches sappa is sounded exactly as saday is, so the classical value is not recoverable from how the script is read today, and it is reconstructed by comparison with the other Semitic languages rather than from any Ethiopian testimony.

What Would Settle It A transcription of Ge'ez words into a contemporary script that did distinguish the sounds, or an Aksumite-period bilingual or transcribed text in which the letter's value can be read off directly.

Expertise Needed Semitic historical linguistics; Ethiopian epigraphy

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open No manuscript survives from the Moravian mission itself. The oldest Glagolitic codices are tenth and eleventh century copies made a century or more after the alphabet was made, and they differ among themselves in which letters they carry and in what order they list them. Scholars do not hold opposing positions on the original inventory, because there is nothing to hold a position against: the question is left open for want of a ninth century witness rather than argued between camps. The letters this atlas records for Glagolitic follow the order and inventory of the surviving tradition as the Unicode Standard arranges it, which is the best available reconstruction and not the ninth century original.

What Would Settle It A ninth century Glagolitic witness, whether a codex, a fragment, a palimpsest under-text or a dated inscription, carrying an abecedary or enough continuous text to establish which letters were in use during the mission itself. Palimpsest recovery by multispectral imaging of the surviving early codices is the most likely route, since several of them are known to overlie earlier writing.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.

Open Fritu Ⱇ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

What Would Settle It A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Fert Ф

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.

What Would Settle It A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Avestan A 𐬀

Why It Is Open The script is placed in Sasanian Iran with reasonable confidence and its purpose is not in doubt, but no source names the person or the body that designed it. This is not a case of scholars holding rival candidates; there are no candidates. The work was begun and left without a conclusion.

What Would Settle It A Sasanian or early post-Sasanian text, a colophon in an early manuscript, or an inscription that names the deviser or the commissioning authority. Failing that, a comparative study of the earliest surviving Avestan hands against dated Pahlavi material, which might at least narrow the milieu.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology and Zoroastrian manuscript studies

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Alaf ࠀ

Why It Is Open The continuity between Paleo-Hebrew and the Samaritan script is not in doubt, but the intervening centuries are thinly attested, so the stages by which the monumental Iron Age forms became the manuscript hand the community writes today are known only in outline.

What Would Settle It Dated Samaritan inscriptions or manuscript fragments from the intervening period, of the kind the Mount Gerizim excavations produced for the earlier end of the sequence.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic palaeography; archaeology of Samaria

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Halqa ࡀ

Why It Is Open Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic all use their letters as figures, and Mandaic descends from the same Aramaic stock, so the practice would be unremarkable. No alphanumeric numeral system for Mandaic is described in the reference literature consulted, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits. Nothing states that the practice was absent either, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It A survey of numbering in dated Mandaean manuscripts and inscribed lead rolls, checking colophons, quire marks and folio numbers for letters standing as figures, together with a reading of the standard Mandaic grammars on how numbers are written out.

Expertise Needed Semitic palaeography and Mandaean manuscript studies

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium, Mandaic block, U+0840 to U+085F.

Open Nahas (Na) ነ

Why It Is Open A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schools

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Payt (Pha) ጰ

Why It Is Open Payt writes an ejective p, which has no Semitic ancestor. It is usually explained as a sign made by altering tayt, on the resemblance of the two forms and on the position of payt late in the order, but the explanation is an inference from shapes rather than a documented act, and it competes with an account deriving both Ge'ez p letters from Greek.

What Would Settle It A palaeographic sequence for both letters from dated Aksumite material, showing whether the earliest forms of payt resemble tayt more closely than the later ones do, would test the derivation directly.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeography

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Psa (Pa) ፐ

Why It Is Open Psa writes a plain p, a sound Ge'ez did not inherit, because the Semitic p had become f in this branch. The letter therefore has to be an addition to an order that was already fixed, and two explanations circulate: that it is the Greek pi, borrowed with the Greek names and vocabulary that made a p letter necessary, and that it is a modification of an existing fidel sign. Both are readings of the letterform and of its position at the end of the order. Neither rests on a document.

What Would Settle It Dated Aksumite and post-Aksumite inscriptions and manuscripts showing the earliest forms of psa and payt, read against the Ancient South Arabian signary and against Greek letterforms in use in Aksum, would show whether the sign entered the script from outside or was built inside it.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeography

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open Three explanations are held in the literature and none has carried the field. One derives the letters from the Greek minuscule cursive of the ninth century. One looks to Semitic and Caucasian models, among them Hebrew and Samaritan, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian. One holds that Constantine composed the signs from a small set of Christian figures, the cross, the circle and the triangle, so that the alphabet would belong to no existing script and would carry a Christian sense in its shapes. This is a genuine disagreement rather than a gap: camps exist and each can be read. What none of them has is a witness close in date to the alphabet, since the earliest Glagolitic manuscripts are a century or more later than the mission and were produced in a different country.

What Would Settle It A securely dated ninth century Glagolitic witness, or the recovery of one from the under-text of a palimpsest by multispectral imaging, would give the shapes a form early enough to be compared against the proposed models rather than against their tenth and eleventh century descendants. Failing that, a systematic morphological comparison of the whole Glagolitic repertoire against dated Greek minuscule hands and against the Semitic and Caucasian scripts proposed, published with the negative results as well as the positive ones, would establish how much of the resemblance survives measurement.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; Greek palaeography; comparative script studies; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Slovo Ⱄ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected clauses, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. That much is not in question. What is in question is what follows from it. One position holds that the names were chosen deliberately so that the recitation of the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. Another holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the sense of the sequence is a reading imposed later, and that the point is settled against composition by the fact that the names stop meaning anything at all from the twenty third letter onward. Both positions are held and both can be read.

What Would Settle It A ninth or tenth century source that gives the letter names in full as a continuous text, rather than as a list, would show the sequence being read as an utterance at a date close to the alphabet's making. The acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the letters in verse, are the most likely place for such evidence, and a study that separated what those poems inherit from what they compose would bear directly on the question.

Expertise Needed Old Church Slavonic philology; Slavic historical linguistics; medieval Slavonic literature

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Pe Ⱊ

Why It Is Open The letter is encoded in the Unicode Standard and appears in the abecedaria, the alphabet lists copied out as exercises or inscriptions, more often than in running text. The reference literature reads it as a form of p without establishing what distinguished it from the ordinary letter for that sound, and different sources place different numeral values in this part of the order. Nobody holds a position on the question, which is why the atlas records the letter with no numeral value rather than choosing among the values on offer. It is an unfilled gap and not an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An attestation of the sign in running text, in a context where the word it writes can be identified, would settle the sound. A survey of every surviving Glagolitic abecedary, recording where this sign falls in the order and whether it is ever given a numeral value in the list, would settle whether it was counted as a letter of the alphabet or carried as a variant.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium.

Open Mongolian A ᠠ

Why It Is Open The descent is agreed in outline and unavailable in detail here. Mongolian took its alphabet from Old Uyghur, Old Uyghur took its own from Sogdian, and Sogdian belongs to the family descended from the Aramaic abjad. Whether the Sogdian alphabet was taken from the Syriac hand or directly from Imperial Aramaic chancery writing is argued about, and neither Old Uyghur nor Sogdian is held in this atlas as an alphabet, so no per-letter descent can be asserted from a Mongolian letter to any letter the atlas does hold. The letters here therefore carry intra-alphabet relations only.

What Would Settle It Seeding Old Uyghur and Sogdian as alphabets in their own right, with their letters, so that the chain can be recorded one step at a time rather than jumped in a single relation. Alongside that, a letter by letter comparison of dated Sogdian, Old Uyghur and early Mongolian documents against Imperial Aramaic and Syriac letterforms, taken from published palaeographic work rather than inferred.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and Central Asian philology

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Khai ϧ

Why It Is Open Six of the seven Egyptian additions to the Coptic alphabet are taken from Demotic and their sources are not in dispute. Khai is the exception. It appears in Bohairic and not in Sahidic, which has thirty-one letters where Bohairic has thirty-two, and accounts of where its shape came from differ. This atlas states the letter, its dialect distribution and its sound, and does not state a derivation.

What Would Settle It Forms collected from dated Old Coptic and early Bohairic manuscripts and compared against the Demotic sign repertoire, with the dialect distribution of the letter mapped alongside. A published palaeographic study of that comparison would settle it or would establish that the evidence does not.

Expertise Needed Coptology and Egyptian palaeography

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Janja ϫ

Why It Is Open Both were taken from Demotic to write affricates that Greek could not, and both carry no numeral value, which is settled. Their phonetic values are not. Reconstructions differ between scholars and between the Coptic dialects, and the evidence is indirect, resting on transcriptions of Coptic words into other scripts and on comparison with earlier stages of Egyptian.

What Would Settle It A systematic collection of Coptic words transcribed into Greek and into Arabic, set against the dialect distribution of the two letters and against the Demotic signs they descend from. Camps exist on this question, so what would resolve it is evidence that discriminates between them rather than a further reading of the same material.

Expertise Needed Coptic phonology and Egyptian historical linguistics

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Brahmi Old Tamil Llla 𑀵

Why It Is Open The conventional account places the earliest Tamil-Brahmi cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu several centuries before the common era, on palaeographic grounds and by comparison with the Ashokan material. Excavations at sites in the region have since been read as supporting a considerably earlier beginning, on the basis of stratigraphy and of radiocarbon determinations from associated deposits rather than from the inscribed objects themselves. The two accounts rest on different kinds of evidence and there is no agreed method for weighing one against the other, so this is not a case of two camps reading one body of evidence in opposite ways; it is a case in which the date has not been established.

What Would Settle It Direct dating of the inscribed objects rather than of the deposits around them, together with a published stratigraphic account that ties an inscribed sherd securely to a dated layer, and an independent palaeographic sequence for the southern letters built from the southern material itself rather than calibrated against the northern hands.

Expertise Needed South Asian archaeology, radiocarbon dating and Tamil epigraphy

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Uk Ѹ

Why It Is Open The manuscript tradition gives 400 to uk. The printed Church Slavonic tables give it to izhitsa. Both usages are attested and they cannot both be right for any one book, so a number in the four hundreds cannot be read without knowing which tradition the source follows. The atlas records the value on both letters for that reason, which is a compromise rather than an answer.

What Would Settle It A survey of dated Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books recording which letter carries 400 in each, by region and by period, which would establish whether the printed usage is an innovation of the printers, an inheritance from one recension, or a correction toward the Greek series.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography and the history of Slavonic printing

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Sha Ш

Why It Is Open Roughly a dozen Early Cyrillic letters have no Greek model. The majority reading derives them from Glagolitic, which is older and already fitted to Slavonic. A second reading compares sha, tsy and zhivete with Hebrew or Samaritan letters, an argument made since the nineteenth century. A third holds that shapes this simple cannot support either claim. No exemplar of either alphabet survives from the ninth century, when the choices were made, so every argument runs on shape comparison against later manuscripts.

What Would Settle It A dated exemplar of either alphabet from the period of composition, or a decisive argument from the internal structure of the two letter sets rather than from resemblance between individual shapes. Failing either, a rigorous statistical treatment of shape similarity that establishes what level of resemblance would count as evidence at all.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography, with Semitic epigraphy for the comparative claims

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.