The Todhri alphabet is an 18th-century Albanian

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

ical writing system invented for writing the

Albanian language Albanian (Endonym and exonym, endonym: , , or ) is an Indo-European languages, Indo-European language and the only surviving representative of the Albanoid, Albanoid branch, which belongs to the Paleo-Balkan languages, Paleo-Balkan group. It ...

by Theodhor Haxhifilipi, also known as Dhaskal Todhri.

History

It is a complex writing system of fifty-two characters which was used sporadically for written communication in and around

Elbasan Elbasan ( , ; sq-definite, Elbasani, ) is the fourth most populous city of Albania and seat of Elbasan County and Elbasan Municipality. It lies to the north of the river Shkumbin between the Skanderbeg Mountains and the Myzeqe Plain in centr ...

from the late eighteenth century on. The earliest dated text in Todhri's alphabet is ''Radhua Hesapesh'' ( daybook) of a local merchant partnership known as Jakov Popa i Vogël dhe Shokët (Jakov Popa Junior and Friends). The entries in Todhri's alphabet start on 10 August 1795 and continue until 1797. An even older text written in the Todhri alphabet was discovered recently in a family notebook in Elbasan, dated 1 January 1780. Other older texts possibly written by Todhri himself cannot be dated or confirmed. The Todhri alphabet was rediscovered in Elbasan by Johann Georg von Hahn (1811–1869) who published it in 1854 his work Albanesische Studien in

Jena Jena (; ) is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Germany and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 in ...

. He thought it was 'the original' Albanian alphabet and a derivative of the ancient

Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions fo ...

. Leopold Geitler (1847–1885) and Slovenian scholar Rajko Nahtigal (1877–1958) subsequently studied the alphabet, concluding that it was derived primarily from the

Roman cursive Roman cursive (or Latin cursive) is a form of handwriting (or a script) used in ancient Rome and to some extent into the Middle Ages. It is customarily divided into old (or ancient) cursive and new cursive. Old Roman cursive Old Roman cur ...

Unicode

The Todhri alphabet was added to the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard in September, 2024 with the release of version 16.0. The Unicode block for Todhri is U+105C0–U+105FF:

References

{{reflist Albanian scripts Alphabets Albanian inventions Obsolete writing systems Constructed scripts Writing systems introduced in the 18th century 18th century in Albania

History

Unicode

See also

References