The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdia. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, a descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the Syriac alphabet. As in the Aramaic alphabet, long vowels were commonly written with matres lectionis, the consonants aleph, yodh and waw. The alphabet also includes several diacritics, which were used inconsistently. It is written from right to left, but by the time it had evolved into its child system, the Old Uyghur alphabet, it had been rotated 90 degrees, written vertically in columns from left to right. These logograms are used mainly for functional words such as pronouns, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.
! rowspan="2" | Later letters
! rowspan="2" | Phoneme
! rowspan="2" | IPA
! colspan="8" | Corresponding letter in
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Varieties
Three main varieties of the Sogdian alphabet developed over time: Early Sogdian, a Hindu-Buddhist archaic non-cursive type; the sutra script, a calligraphic script used in Sogdian Buddhist scriptures; and the so-called "Uyghur" cursive script (not to be confused with the Old Uyghur alphabet). These letters date to approximately 312–313 C.E. and are written in Early Sogdian.
Encoding
There are fonts encoding Sogdian alphabets in Unicode – Noto Sans Old Sogdian and Noto Sans Sogdian.
In Syriac script, three additional characters were used to represent sounds of Sogdian that were not present in the Syriac language. These were included in Unicode in 2002.
- 074D ݍ Syriac Letter Sogdian Zhain (compare 0719 ܙ Syriac Letter Zain)
- 074E ݎ Syriac Letter Sogdian Khaph (versus 071F ܟ Syriac Letter Kaph) – compare initial forms ݎ and ܟ <!-- codes are RLE - K(H)APH - ZWJ - PDF; I haven't had any luck getting ZWJ to work via keyboard, other characters here are copypasta -- Pelagic -->
- 074F ݏ Syriac Letter Sogdian Fe (compare 0726 ܦ Syriac Letter Pe)
Old Sogdian and Sogdian were added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2018 with the release of version 11.0.
Blocks
The Unicode block for Old Sogdian is U+10F00–U+10F2F and contains 40 characters:
The Unicode block for Sogdian is U+10F30–U+10F6F and contains 42 characters:
See also
- Sogdian language
- Manichaean alphabet
- Syriac alphabet