Characters of the world

There are Latin^*1(or Roman), Russian (or Cyrillic), Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Devanagari (one of Indians ^*2), Thai, Laotian, Tibetan, and CJK characters^*3 here.

Other famous characters are Indian^*2, Georgian, Armenian, Burmese (in Myanmar), Khmer (in Cambodia), and Mongolian.

Language name		``Hello'' in the language	Remarks
in English	in the language
Amharic			*4
Arabic	العربية		*5Arabic*6
Czech		Dobrý den	-
Danish	Dansk	Hej, Goddag	-
Dutch	Nederlands	Hallo, Dag	-
Flemish	Vlaams		Dutch spoken in Belgium
English	English	Hello	-
Esperanto	Esperanto	Saluton	An artificial language
Estonian	Eesti	Tere, Tervist	-
FORTRAN	FORTRAN	PROGRAM	A programming language, not a natural language.
Finnish	Suomi	Hei	-
French	Français	Bonjour, Salut	-
German	Deutsch Nord	Guten Tag	Low German, Northern
	Deutsch Süd	Grüß Gott	High German, Southern, Standard
Greek			-
Hebrew	עברית		*5
Hindi	हिन्दी	,	Devanagari*2
Italian	Italiano	Ciao, Buon giorno	-
Lao		,	-
Maltese	Malti	Ciao	An island in the Mediterranean Sea
Norwegian	Norsk	Hei, God dag	-
Polish	Polski	Hej, ,Gen Dobré	-
Russian			-
Slovak			-
Spanish	Español	¡Hola!	-
Swedish	Svenska	Hej, Goddag	-
Thai		,	-
Tibetan			-
Tigrigna			*4
Turkish	Türkçe	Merhaba	-
Vietnamese			*7
Yugoslavian	-	Zdravo	not seem to be present Serbian.
Japanese		,	Chinese and Kana*3
Chinese	, ,		Simplified Chinese*3
Cantonese	,	,	Traditional Chinese*3
Korean		,	Hangul*3

(*0)	GNU Emacs 20.7.2 (i386-vine-linux-gnu, X toolkit) of Wed Jan 17 2001 on apollo.athome After downloading the fonts from the ftp server of Mule Projects' site, choosing "Mule - Show Script Examples" from the menu bar of the editer, the characters will appear below the following message. This is a list of ways to say hello in various languages. Its purpose is to illustrate a number of scripts.
(*1)	Latin spreads over much of Europe & Africa and the almost whole Americas & Oceania. And there are various character sets, because each Latin language adds or omits a few letters, or attaches small marks (acute /circumflex /grave /macron accent, cedilla, dieresis /umlaut, etc.) to some of letters. Since character encoding is required to express them on a computer, an international agency (iso-8859 of ISO), nations ( ASCII of US, KOI8-R of Russia, JIS of Japan, etc.) or enterprises (Windows of Microsoft and Macintosh of Apple) declare their standards for some languages. Now Unicode (ISO 10646) is developing to cover any of the world's writing systems. The following table classifies languages according to iso-8859. (See also Numerical notations of the world.) Character sets and languages Identification code Name of charset Year Comment of ISO Reserch of Web pages by W3C Comment of Roman Czyborra iso-8859-1 Latin1 1987 Western Europe Languages Afrikaans (af), Albanian (sq), Basque (eu), Catalan (ca), Danish (da), Dutch (nl), English (en), Faroese (fo), Finnish (fi), French (fr), Galician (gl), German (de), Icelandic (is), Irish (ga), Italian (it), Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt), Scottish (gd), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv). and Guarani (gn), Rhaeto-Romanic (rm), Arabic in North Africa, Swahili (sw), Zulu (zu) and other Bantu languages using Latin Extended-B letters. iso-8859-2 Latin2 1987 Eastern Europe Languages Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Hungarian (hu), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Serbian1 (sr), Slovak (sk), Slovenian (sl). and Sorbian (wen). iso-8859-3 Latin3 1988 Other Latin Script Languages Esperanto (eo), Maltese (mt). and covered Turkish before the introduction of Latin5 in 1988. iso-8859-4 Latin4 1988 North Europe Languages - was followed by Latin6. Estonian (et), the Baltic languages Latvian (lv, Lettish) and Lithuanian (lt), Greenlandic (kl) and Lappish. iso-8859-5 Non-Latin 1988 Cyrillic Bulgarian (bg), Byelorussian (be), Ukrainian (uk), Serbian2 (sr), Macedonian (mk), Russian (ru). pre-1990 (no ghe with upturn, Ґ, ґ) Ukrainian (uk). iso-8859-6 1987 Arabic Arabic (ar). is unfortunately the basic alphabet for the Arabic (ar) language only and not containing the four extra letters for Persian (fa) nor the eight extra letters for Pakistani Urdu (ur). This fixed font is not well-suited for text display. iso-8859-7 1987 Greek Greek (el). ... iso-8859-8 1988 Hebrew Hebrew (he ← iw). and Yiddish (yi ← ji). iso-8859-9 Latin5 1989 Turkish Turkish (tr). ... iso-8859-10 Latin6 1992 - Inuit (Eskimo) languages (kl, iu), Lapp (se). rearranged the Latin4 to cover the entire Nordic area. The last missing Inuit (Greenlandic Eskimo) and non-Skolt Sami (Lappish). (cf. Skolt Saami) iso-8859-11 Non-Latin Not yet - Thai (th). ... iso-8859-12 Reserved - - - ... iso-8859-13 Latin7 Not yet - Latvian (lv), Lithuanian (lt). is going to cover the Baltic Rim and re-establish the Latvian (lv) support lost in Latin6. iso-8859-14 Latin8 Not yet - - adds the last Gaelic (gd) and Welsh (cy) letters to Latin1 to cover all Celtic languages. iso-8859-15 Latin9 Not yet - Estonian (et). ...
(*2)	There are many kinds of characters in India. (See Indian bank note) Location Language family Feature Character name North Indo-European angular Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmuki, Gujarati, Oriya South Dravidian roundish Tamil, Telugu, Kannada (Kanarese), Malayalam Oriya used in Orissa of middle India faced the bay of Bengal is roundish exceptionally. Sinhala spoken by more than 70% Sri Lankan is isolated Indo-European, and Sinhalese belongs to Dravidian series.
(*3)	Chinese, Japanese and Korean are called CJK characters in a pack. In comparison with other alphabetical languages, these have more than 102~103 times kinds of characters. In computers a character takes 2 bytes, so that they are also called double byte characters. China uses only Chinese, Japan Chinese and Kana, Korea Hangul only in principle. Chinese is ideographic, Kana phonetic, Hangul both at the same time. Chinese has long history, about 3500 years, are propagated to neighboring countries and its shape was changed according to the circumstances. Now China and Japan usually use Chinese, Vietnam and Korea gave up Chinese and have changed for Latin and Hangul respectively. Difference among Chinese characters in GB, JIS, KSC, BIG5: Name of standard Sample of characters Country Number of characters Breakdowns Remarks GB China about 7500 Simplified Chinese the characters of standard Chinese spoken in Beijing JIS Japan about 7000 mostly Chinese, some Kanas etc. several standards are added (see below) KSC South Korea about 8300 about 2300 Hangles, 5000 Chinese etc. Chinese are used as prefix etc. (ex. ex-) BIG5 Taiwan about 13500 Traditional Chinese used in Cantonese area (Hong Kong, Macau etc.) too. Taiwan has another standard called CNS. Chinese character in Japan is called Kanji. In general, JIS ( Japanese Industrial Standard) of Kanji is JIS X 0208, but this does not cover all Kanji, the following standards exist. JIS X 0212(supplementary Japanese graphic character set for information interchange, about 6000 characters which are not included in JIS X 0208) JIS X 0213(extended Kanji sets for information interchange, JIS X 0208 and another about 4300 characters) JIS X 0221(based on the international standard Unicode, about 34000 characters regardless of JIS X 0208)
(*4)	Amharic characters are used in Amharic spoken in Ethiopia and Tigrigna spoken in Eritrea etc. Similarly to Japanese Kana, a character is assigned to each pair of a consonant and a vowel, as a result Amharic has about 250 kinds of characters which is the most in the world except CJK characters.
(*5)	Arabic, accurately speaking the languages that use Arabic characters, and Hebrew are written and read from right to left. Mule supports almost all of input methods and coding systems of computer-processable languages. In my installation of Emacs Right-to-left writing is not yet supported. So I reversed the strings and made it image on the editer. For printing the text file that the editer output, the tool that convert it to PostScript format is prepared. The strings seem to be reversed if necessary in the conversion process. But figures are written and read from left to right in these languages. Arabic has own figures which are different from Arabic figures spread all over the world. (See Figures of the world) Opening arabic.el supplied from the Mule project by Emacs, following mapping is obtained. There are other unique writing systems in the worlds. Mongolian system by not Russian but Mongolian characters is vertical. Japanese system has both horizontal and vertical ones, the latter is traditional style, adopted in papers or literary books today. The order of vertical lines is left to right in Mongolian, opposite in Japanese. average languages <- turning over -> Arabic, Hebrew | rotating 90° clockwise | v | | rotating 90° counterclockwise v Japanese vertical writing <- turning over -> Mongolian
(*6)	Arabic is written and read from right to left, and the word is consists of concatenated consonant letters. On their top or bottom, some vowels are, if necessary, attached. The sound of a vowel is any of a, i, u and the letter looks like an accent. Instead of lower or upper, each consonant letter has 4 cases, top, middle, tail and independent which make possible to write a well-balanced word with a stroke. Mongolian has 3 cases, and each word seems to have a vertical lead. The number of Arabic characters differs among the languages that adopted Arabic. Arabic 28 =28 Recently new characters are created in the magazines that introduce Western technical information. Persian +4 =32 Iran Urdu +3 =35 part of India and Pakistan Pashto +4 =39 Afghanistan Sindhi +17 =52 part of India and Pakistan There are two popular fonts in Arabic, the one in this page is Naskh, and the other is Nastaliq: Font name Style Remarks Naskh, Naqsh print diffused in Arabic area broadly. Nastaliq, Nastaleeq, Nastaliquw script used in Urdu language, Iran(papers are printed in Naskh), Afghanistan
(*7)	Present Vietnamese adopts Latin characters. Mainly vowel letters are extended by 3 symbols (Hacek, circumflex and apostrophe), and another 5 accents (acute, grave, tilde etc.) for 6 tones can be attached over or under them, so there are max 18 patterns for a each vowel. Vietnamese in this page includes acute accented ê, under-dotted ê and a, the dot is an accent not a scratch nor a blur.

Updated on 2003.7.10

First edition : 2001.12.25