Another Celtic ABC

Here's another example of an "Celtic" ABC for you to study !

Aidan Meehan and Celtic Art

If you're looking ofr books on creating Celtic  style art and Calligraphy you should definitley be looking at boks by Aidan Meehan in your library bookshop or elsewhere!

My Xmas and New Year Card to followers and Visitors

I sadly suspect most of my visitors so far have been AI and searchbots rather than actual humans but whoevr you are enjoy this e-card and yes you can download it to share!

More Book of Kells images

Here's another Book of Kells image showing that , yes, it was readable!
The clerks and monks and scholaras and lay persons who viewed this were used to seeing and reading what moderern paleographers ( scholars of ancient scripts) call Insular Minuscule.

Celtic Uncial

Before we look at the Book of Kells and Celtic Uncials in further details here's teh Celtic Uncial version of the Roman ABC. There's no k as the Celts used the Roman C and hence no K and also no J or Q as Irish Gaelic had no need for those letters.

The Book of Kells 2

Hard as it may be to believe the Book of Kells was meant to be read and used!

This page is a table of "Canon" Books Books that are officialy part of the set of Christians Scriptures known as the Bible today. The use of ornament within a strong framework doesnt emphasize the list of texts!

It's hard to show you a full size version in a blog. If you have only ever seen closeups of detail find out if your library has a reproduction and if you ever get to go to Dublin do go and see the original!

The Book of Kells

There are many people who think the Book of Kells is about as legible as say a very abstract piece of Asian "crazy grass" script calligraphy? I'm going to start a sequence of blogs that show not just cover art like the image above but also some interior pages. The're's also be posts on the Uncial fonts used to write Latin in the Book of Kells and similar works.

Annoying nasals

IPA NASAL SYMBOLS

ñ ň

m ɱ n ñ ň ŋ ɲ ɳ ɴ

Unfortunately for linguists typographers writers teachers and others the Sinai alphabet had only two symbols for nasals. M and N. Many Indo-european and other languages have palatal and other nasals.

Nowadays I can imbed Unicode in a html file which I cut and pasted into this blogpost interface to show you the IPA symbols but what do people who don't have access to IPA fonts do?

There are many writing systems that have special extra signs added for "ng" and "ny" signs.

These are the three main methods that have been used over the centuries for languages written with a Roman abc system.

A Tilde  ~ over a vowel or consonant. Spanish Portugese Languages with nasalized vowels.

A h or y or g added to an N. Provencal Catalan Vietnamese

GN for the palatal nasal in Italian and French

NG is Velar the sixth symbol in the line. I have also shown the Retroflex and Palatal Nasal symbol.

The N that looks like an Upper capital N reduced in size is an UVULAR NASAL.

Wikipedia has a very useful article on IPA signs and you cna click on each symbol for more information.

To insert IPA symbols into ordinary text check your computer uses the full Western European encoding not just ANSI and use Insert Special Characters.

Do check you have used a font that has the IPA Extensions set as well as Latin Extended!

Try Lucida Sans Unicode or Palatino Linotype?

Maybe some day in the future most fonts will include a full IPA set of symbols?