What's your favorite written language to look at (not necessarily read)?

I love to look at Thai.

It makes me feel introspective and peaceful.

Hebrew and Finnish.

Devanagari does it for me. Also partial to southeast Asian writing systems.

Georgian (Georgian calligraphy), and one from Asia that I’m totally blanking on now but looks sort of like Georgian but is fatter horizontally.

Edit: It might be Telugu.

Rongorongo

The traditional Mongolian script. Unfortunately, it’s not used much any more, as it’s been replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet.

  1. Chinese
  2. Mayan
  3. Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Alphabets are OK, but I like pretty pictures. :slight_smile:

Farsi.

Finnish, definitely. I have a Finnish friend on Facebook, and her status updates always make me laugh. It looks almost, but not entirely unlike a language.

Arabic calligraphy. Not only do I think it’s stunningly beautiful, but it’s written right to left, so my lefthanded self might have a chance of writing it without smearing the ink.

Wow, I’ve never seen that before. That’s spectacular.

This. Wish I had the time to learn to read/write it.

I was looking for that earlier, couldn’t come up with the name. Another favorite.

Wow, I’ve never seen this before. Wonderful!

Very cool

It certainly is striking. Spent a little time on Google images looking at other examples as well.

This is cool :slight_smile:

I can write Arabic calligraphy, and I love it. But my favorite of all is Javanese. It’s the most elegant. Looking at it, I feel every line of Javanese is a work of art. The only other thing approaching Javanese in beauty, besides Arabic, is the Tengwar.

I love Arabic calligraphy, but I’m with Johanna: Javanese looks simultaneously like art, Escher and a believable alien language. Nothing else like it.

…now. If Windows didn’t feel that every single one of us needs 47 obscure Asian alphabets on our systems… I mean, rah rah for multiculturalism but I will NEVER need to write or display anything in Uighur. And it’s next to impossible to remove the fonts; they’re embedded at a system level.

End of rant apologies for any hijack exit stage left

This! :slight_smile:

Indeed. I am very fond of Tengwar. :slight_smile:

Another vote for Devanagari. I like the way the upper lines create a sense of unity in the words.

An as-yet unsolved mystery: The Voynich Manuscript.

Telugu script looks to me like a plate of scrambled eggs. I’ve been to Andhra Pradesh and formed that impression while surrounded by Telugu script every day. When I made up a curry scrambled eggs recipe, I gave it a Telugu name for that reason: కూర కోడి గుడ్డు kūra kōḍi guḍḍu. Incidentally, Kannada script is very closely related to Telugu. If you know one, you can mostly read the other.