Old Hungarian alphabet
| Old Hungarian Székely-magyar rovás |
|
|---|---|
 |
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| Type | |
| Languages | Hungarian |
|
Time period
|
Attested from 12th century. Marginal use into the 17th century, revived in the 20th. |
|
Parent systems
|
Proto-Sinaitic
|
| Direction | Right-to-left |
| ISO 15924 | Hung, 176 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Old Hungarian |
| U+10C80–U+10CFF | |
The Old Hungarian script is an alphabetic writing system used for writing the Hungarian language. Today Hungarian is predominantly written using the Latin-based Hungarian alphabet, but the Old Hungarian script is still in use in some communities. The term old refers to the historical priority of the script compared to the Latin-based one.
The Hungarians settled the Carpathian Basin in 895. After the establishment of the Christian Hungarian kingdom, the old writing was partly forced out of use and the Latin alphabet was adopted. However, among some professions (e.g. shepherds used a "rovás-stick" to officially track the number of animals) and in Transylvania, the script has remained in use by the Székely Magyars, giving its Hungarian name székely rovásírás. The writing could also be found in churches like the one in Atid.
The Old Hungarian script has also been described as "runic" or "runiform" because it is superficially reminiscent of the Germanic runic alphabet. Its English name in the ISO 15924 standard is Old Hungarian (Hungarian Runic).
In modern Hungarian, the script is known formally as Székely rovásírás ('Szekler script'). The writing system is generally known as rovásírás, székely rovásírás, and székely-magyar írás (or simply rovás 'notch, score').
Scientists can not give an exact date nor an origin which is known for the script.
Proto-Rovas from 5300 BC can be seen at the Tărtăria tablets according to Klára Friedrich.
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Wikipedia