Lesson of the day: Székely-Hungarian Rovás

Székely-Hungarian Rovás (Hungarian Runes)

Székely-Hungarian Rovás, which are also known as Hungarian Runes, are thought to have descended from the Turkic script (Kök Turki) used in Central Asia, though some scholars believe the Székely-Hungarian Rovás pre-date the Turkic script. They were used by the Székler Magyars in Hungary until the 11th century. In remote parts of Transylvania however, the runes were still used up until the 1850s. During the 20th century there was a revival of interest in the alphabet.

Notable features

Type of writing system: alphabet.
Usually written on sticks in boustrophedon style (alternating direction right to left then left to right), although the right to left direction was most common.
There are separate letters for all the phonemes of Hungarian and are in this respect better suited to written Hungarian than the Latin alphabet.
Words were separated by three vertical dots.
Ligatures were often used and sometimes an entire word was written with a single sign.
There are no lower or upper case letters, but the first letter of a proper name was often written a bit larger.
Vowels were sometimes not written, unless their omission would cause ambiguity.
The consonants with (a) next to them were used before a, á, o, ó, u and ú, while those with (e) next to them were used before e, ë, é, i, í, ö, ő, ü, ű
A number of separate symbols, known as capita dictionum or the head of the words, were also used, though their usage is uncertain.

Used to write

Hungarian (Magyar), a Uralic language with about 15 million speakers in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and Slovakia. There are also many people of Hungarian origin in the UK and other European countries, the USA, Canada and Australia.