Concept
George Kiraz identifies two sociolinguistic conditions for garshunography: "the source language is associated with a script that is perceived to be its own" and "there exists readership which is either unfamiliar with the script of the source language or prefers ... to use the target script." The adoption and adaptation of an existing script designed for one language for use by another is not garshunographic if the source language lacks a script that can be considered its own. The use of Chinese characters to write Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese cannot be considered garshunography because the languages "had no indigenous writing system prior to contact with sinography".
Likewise, for Kiraz, writing can transition from garshunographic to nongarshunographic over time if the adopted script becomes dominant. Both transitions are apparent in the history of Anatolian Turkish, which first adopted a variety of Arabic script and then transitioned to a variety of Latin script. Other scholars may draw a distinction between allography in a broad sense, which excludes writing in "the usual script", and allography in a strict sense, which excludes only writing systems "created ad hoc" or "heavily evolved or reworked". Although in both senses, "allography is more common than might be assumed at first", in the strict sense it covers Old Nubian writing, which used only a lightly modified form of the Greek alphabet, and even modern English orthography, which makes use of the Latin alphabet.
Garshunography should be distinguished from alloglottography, which is the practice of writing text in one language and reading it in another, and transliteration, since garshunography need not involve approximate letter-for-letter conversion.
Examples
The term "Garshuni" has often been extended to refer to writing any language other than Syriac in the Syriac script and even to writing Syriac in other scripts. The Armenian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Malayalam, Persian, Sogdian and Turkish languages have all been written at some point in Syriac script. Other examples of garshunography include aljamiado , the use of Arabic script to write Romance languages; Judaeo-Spanish, which was originally written in the Hebrew alphabet; and Yiddish, a variety of High German originally written in Hebrew. In each of these cases, the practice is associated with a religious minority preserving its distinct identity through its choice of writing system. Since at least the 13th century, Samaritans have written Arabic texts in Samaritan script in order to mark them as sacred. Besides aljamiado, there are other examples of Arabic script used for languages with scripts of their own, including Belarusian Arabitsa, Serbo-Croatian Arebica and Chinese Xiao'erjing.
The Coptic alphabet originated as a case of garshunography, the use of the Greek alphabet to write the Egyptian language. William Worrell argues that the Coptic Egyptian went through three stages in its contact with Arabic. First, it borrowed the odd Arabic word. Second, while still a living language, some texts were written in Arabic but in the Coptic alphabet. Finally, after having been completely supplanted as the spoken and written language by Arabic, Coptic was rendered as needed in Arabic script. There are surviving examples of blockprinted amulets containing Arabic words in the Coptic alphabet, probably intended to be sold to Coptic Christians. In the case of the Arabic–Old French glossary from the period of the Crusades, French was written in the Coptic alphabet.
The ancient Aramaic alphabet was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes — a precursor to Arabization centuries later — including among the Assyrians and Babylonians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews, who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.
Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, Eastern Arabia and the Sinai Peninsula, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over three thousand years.
The Syriac language, also known as Syriac Aramaic and Classical Syriac ܠܫܢܐ ܥܬܝܩܐ, is an Aramaic language. The language is a dialect that emerged during the first century AD from a local Aramaic dialect that was spoken in the ancient region of Osroene, centered in the city of Edessa. During the Early Christian period, it became the main literary language of various Aramaic-speaking Christian communities in the historical region of Ancient Syria and throughout the Near East. As a liturgical language of Syriac Christianity, it gained a prominent role among Eastern Christian communities that used both Eastern Syriac and Western Syriac rites. Following the spread of Syriac Christianity, it also became a liturgical language of eastern Christian communities as far as India and China. It flourished from the 4th to the 8th century, and continued to have an important role during the next centuries, but by the end of the Middle Ages it was gradually reduced to liturgical use, since the role of vernacular language among its native speakers was overtaken by several emerging Neo-Aramaic dialects.
The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and Sogdian, the precursor and a direct ancestor of the traditional Mongolian scripts.
Aljamiado or Aljamía texts are manuscripts that use the Arabic script for transcribing European languages, especially Romance languages such as Medieval Spanish, Mozarabic and others from the Peninsular Romance Continuum.
Garshuni or Karshuni are Arabic writings using the Syriac alphabet. The word "Garshuni", derived from the word "grasha" which literally translates as "pulling", was used by George Kiraz to coin the term "garshunography", denoting the writing of one language in the script of another.
Turoyo, also referred to as Surayt, or modern Suryoyo, is a Central Neo-Aramaic language traditionally spoken in the Tur Abdin region in southeastern Turkey and in northern Syria. Turoyo speakers are mostly adherents of the Syriac Orthodox Church, but there are also some Turoyo-speaking adherents of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church, especially from the towns of Midyat and Qamishli. The language is also spoken throughout diaspora, among modern Assyrians/Syriacs. It is classified as a vulnerable language. Most speakers use the Classical Syriac language for literature and worship. Turoyo is not mutually intelligible with Western Neo-Aramaic, having been separated for over a thousand years; its closest relatives are Mlaḥsô and western varieties of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic like Suret.
It is thought that the Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which among others also gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek alphabet, the latter one being in turn the base for the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
Syriac literature is literature in the Syriac language. It is a tradition going back to the Late Antiquity. It is strongly associated with Syriac Christianity.
Ibn Waḥshiyya, died c. 930, was a Nabataean agriculturalist, toxicologist, and alchemist born in Qussīn, near Kufa in Iraq. He is the author of the Nabataean Agriculture, an influential Arabic work on agriculture, astrology, and magic.
In a right-to-left, top-to-bottom script, writing starts from the right of the page and continues to the left, proceeding from top to bottom for new lines. Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian are the most widespread RTL writing systems in modern times.
Central Neo-Aramaic languages represent a specific group of Neo-Aramaic languages, that is designated as Central in reference to its geographical position between Western Neo-Aramaic and other Eastern Aramaic groups. Its linguistic homeland is located in northern parts of the historical region of Syria. The group includes the Turoyo language as a spoken language of the Tur Abdin region and various groups in diaspora, and Mlahsô language that is recently extinct as a spoken language.
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it, and the third-most by number of users.
Ajami or Ajamiyya, which comes from the Arabic root for 'foreign' or 'stranger', is an Arabic-derived script used for writing African languages, particularly Songhai, Mandé, Hausa and Swahili, although many other languages are also written using the script, including Mooré, Pulaar, Wolof, and Yoruba. It is an adaptation of the Arabic script to write sounds not found in Standard Arabic. Rather than adding new letters, modifications usually consist of additional dots or lines added to pre-existing letters.
The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced.
The Armenian alphabet, or more broadly the Armenian script, is an alphabetic writing system developed for Armenian and occasionally used to write other languages. It was developed around 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader. The script originally had 36 letters. Eventually, two more were adopted in the 13th century. In reformed Armenian orthography (1920s), the ligature ևev is also treated as a letter, bringing the total number of letters to 39.
George Anton Kiraz is a Syriac scholar, best known for his contribution to modern Syriac studies.
Suriyani Malayalam, also known as Karshoni, Syro-Malabarica or Syriac Malayalam, is a dialect of Malayalam written in a variant form of the Syriac alphabet which was popular among the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala in India. It uses Malayalam grammar, the Maḏnḥāyā or "Eastern" Syriac script with special orthographic features, and vocabulary from Malayalam and East Syriac. This originated in the South Indian region of the Malabar Coast. Until the 19th century, the script was widely used by Syrian Christians in Kerala.
An alphabetic numeral system is a type of numeral system. Developed in classical antiquity, it flourished during the early Middle Ages. In alphabetic numeral systems, numbers are written using the characters of an alphabet, syllabary, or another writing system. Unlike acrophonic numeral systems, where a numeral is represented by the first letter of the lexical name of the numeral, alphabetic numeral systems can arbitrarily assign letters to numerical values. Some systems, including the Arabic, Georgian and Hebrew systems, use an already established alphabetical order. Alphabetic numeral systems originated with Greek numerals around 600 BC and became largely extinct by the 16th century. After the development of positional numeral systems like Hindu–Arabic numerals, the use of alphabetic numeral systems dwindled to predominantly ordered lists, pagination, religious functions, and divinatory magic.
Copto-Arabic literature is the literature of the Copts written in Arabic. It is distinct from Coptic literature, which is literature written in the Coptic language.
