Floor 5 — Hall of Tongues · written.institute

Hall of Tongues

A script is not a language. English, Turkish and Vietnamese share the Latin alphabet yet are related to nothing in one another; a single Japanese sentence runs four systems at once; a language like Azerbaijani has worn three alphabets in a century. Most people think in languages — they say ‘Japanese,’ not ‘four scripts.’ This floor turns the collection inside out and exhibits it by tongue.

One script, many tongues

one alphabet, unrelated families

A single script routinely serves languages that share nothing else. The script is a vessel; the languages are strangers who happen to travel in it.

AaLatinEnglish · Turkish · Vietnamese · Finnish · Yorùbá · Indonesian ا بArabicArabic · Persian · Urdu · Pashto · Uyghur — Semitic to Turkic АаCyrillicRussian · Serbian · Bulgarian · Kazakh · Mongolian 文字HanChinese · Japanese · Korean · Vietnamese (historically) देवDevanagariHindi · Marathi · Nepali · Sanskrit ግዕዝEthiopicAmharic · Tigrinya · Tigre · Geʽez

One tongue, many scripts

the same words, different letters

Run it the other way: a single language, written in two or more scripts — sometimes by era, sometimes by border, sometimes at the very same time. Script becomes identity.

अ · اHindustaniHindi in Devanagari, Urdu in the Arabic script — one spoken language, two scripts, two national identities.

A · А · اAzerbaijaniArabic → Latin (1929) → Cyrillic (1939) → Latin (1991): four alphabets in one century.

С · SSerbianCyrillic and Latin in perfect parallel — the textbook case of digraphia.

ਗ · گPunjabiGurmukhi in India, Shahmukhi (Arabic) in Pakistan.

Aa · اMalayRumi (Latin) and Jawi (Arabic script), side by side.

ᠮ · МMongolianThe vertical script in Inner Mongolia, Cyrillic in Mongolia — split by a border.

Many scripts, one line

And often it is not one script at a time but several at once.

A single line of Japanese draws on four systems together — kanji for roots, hiragana for grammar, katakana for loanwords, plus Latin letters and Arabic numerals for the modern world. Korean threads hangul with the occasional hanja and Latin; Hindi peppers Devanagari with English. No writing system truly works alone. 2026年、AIと漢字とひらがなとカタカナ one sentence, five systems: kanji · hiragana · katakana · Latin · numerals See also Han — one character, many tongues.

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