Old North Arabian script

Old North Arabian script; Ancient North Arabian
Type	Abjad
Languages	Old North Arabian, Old Arabic
Time period	8th century BC to 6th century AD
Parent systems	Proto-Sinaitic Epigraphic South Arabian Old North Arabian script; ;
Direction	Right-to-left
ISO 15924	Narb, 106
Unicode alias	Old North Arabian
Unicode range	U+10A80– U+10A9F ; Final Accepted Script Proposal

Last updated April 29, 2019

The Ancient North Arabian alphabets are a group of related alphabets used to write all of the Ancient North Arabian dialects except Hasaitic, which used the Ancient South Arabian alphabet.^[1] The names of the alphabets match the names of the dialects they represent.

Letters

Taymanitic had twenty-six or twenty-seven letters while the other alphabets generally used twenty-eight letters. All the letters represent consonants. Vowels were not indicated although some Dadanitic texts make limited use of matres lectionis to mark long vowels.

In the spelling of Hebrew and some other Semitic languages, matres lectionis refers to the use of certain consonants to indicate a vowel. The letters that do this in Hebrew are alephא, heה, wawו and yodי. The yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.

There also appears to be a simultaneous use of a monumental form of the letters and more everyday cursive form of the letters that occupied different uses in society, as can be evidenced by their appearances on inscriptions in the region from the era.

Direction

Dumaitic and Dadanitic were typically written right-to-left. Taymanitic was written right-to-left, left-to-right, or boustrophedon (changing direction from right-to-left to left-to-right with each new line). Thamudic C and D were usually written vertically downwards. Safaitic, Hismaic, and Thamudic B were written in any direction: right-to-left, left-to-right, vertically downwards or upwards, even in circles, coils, and zig-zags. Letter shapes may be reversed in lines running left-to-right but not always in Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions.

Boustrophedon is a type of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern European languages, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in boustrophedon must be read in opposite directions. Also, the individual characters are reversed, or mirrored. It was a common way of writing in stone in Ancient Greece.

Punctuation

Most dialects were written continuously without spaces between words. Dadanitic monumental texts normally used a word divider which looked like "|". Dumaitic, Taymanitic, and Dadanitic graffiti commonly but inconsistently used a word divider.

Numbers

Numbers were formed using combinations of three characters: one, ten, and twenty. For example, nine was represented by the character for one repeated nine times. Thirty was represented by the character for twenty followed by the character for ten. They were written right-to-left.

Unicode

The Ancient North Arabian alphabets were added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2014 with the release of version 7.0.

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and as of March 2019 the most recent version, Unicode 12.0, contains a repertoire of 137,993 characters covering 150 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets and emoji. The character repertoire of the Unicode Standard is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, and both are code-for-code identical.

The Unicode block, called Old North Arabian, is U+10A80–U+10A9F.

Note that U+10A9D OLD NORTH ARABIAN NUMBER ONE (𐪝) represents both the numeral one and a word divider.^[1]

Old North Arabian ^[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A	B	C	D	E	F
U+10A8x	𐪀	𐪁	𐪂	𐪃	𐪄	𐪅	𐪆	𐪇	𐪈	𐪉	𐪊	𐪋	𐪌	𐪍	𐪎	𐪏
U+10A9x	𐪐	𐪑	𐪒	𐪓	𐪔	𐪕	𐪖	𐪗	𐪘	𐪙	𐪚	𐪛	𐪜	𐪝	𐪞	𐪟
Notes 1. ^ As of Unicode version 10.0

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References

1 2 Everson, Michael; Macdonald, M. C. A. "N3937: Proposal to encode the Old North Arabian script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Retrieved 20 August 2016.

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[N3937-1] 1 2 Everson, Michael; Macdonald, M. C. A. "N3937: Proposal to encode the Old North Arabian script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Retrieved 20 August 2016.

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