Computer Font Designed for Ancient Iranian Languages

News Category:

Cultural

An Iranian expert has designed a computer-generated orthography for ancient Iranian languages.

Maryam Hassan Khani, an expert with the national museum tablets hall said she set out to produce an orthography using computers since many books on ancient languages only had their transliteration and translation while only in rare cases texts were given in handwritten manuscripts. “I started work with producing the orthography for the bookish Pahlavi language, using Correl software,” she remarked.

Head of the national museum tablets hall described the main function of the font as an educational one, saying a computer generated font would disallow mistakes committed in manual copying, while preserving the characters’ original shape.

“A good part of the tablets has been lost in the passage of time. This font will make it possible to re-produce characters and words in books,” Dariush Akbarzadeh added. So far, the Parthian, inscription Pahlavi, Avestan and other ancient Iranian handwriting have been produced in the museum.