Many Buddhist, Manichaean, Nestorian, and Zoroastrian texts as well as all secular material such as letters, legal documents, coin legends, and inscriptions were written in this script.
Although Soghdian is an Eastern Iranian language it has many Turkic child systems such as Old Uyghur and other eastern Turkic languages. When used for the Sogdian language, this alphabet was usually written in horizontal lines from right to left. When this adopted for Uyghur which was not Iranian language, it was normally in vertical direction from top to bottom, but with the first vertical line starting from the left side, not from the right as in Chinese, most probably because the right-to-left direction was used in horizontal writing. The Mongolian alphabet proper, being an adaptation of the Old Uyghur alphabet, still uses this kind of vertical writing, as does its remoter descendant Manchu .
See also
References
Works cited
F.W. Mote (1999). Imperial China, 900-1800. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674012127.External links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Sunday September 28, 2008 at 16:33:45 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
Copyright © 2009, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.
