[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] bbonzz:
Historical notes

THE NAME

The Rosetta Stone is a Ptolemaic era stele with carved text made up of three translations of a single passage: two in Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in classical Greek. Created in 196 BC, it was discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta, and contributed to the deciphering of the principles of hieroglyph writing in 1822 by the British scientist Thomas Young and the French scholar Jean-François Champollion.

FEATURED SCRIPTS

---Hieroglyphic---

The one represented here is the uniconsonantal form of Egyptian hieroglyph. It means that what you write is translated as single letters, and not as a sentence. If you write "Lion", the app won't translate the word "lion" in hieroglyph but, instead, will translate each letter: "l"-"i"-"o"-"n". In other words, it's translated as if you spell the word.

Don't be surprised if the resulting word has less characters than the original one: like proto-sinaitic-derived scripts, Egyptians wrote only with consonants, adding some "semi-wowels" ("e" doesn't exists, while "a" does). So, for example, "egg" is written only as "gg".

---Cuneiform---

The cuneiform denotes several kinds of writing systems, including logosyllabic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts. the one represented in this app is alphabetic, the most simple kind. In this way, it is simply a transposition of latin letters, where every latin char is represented with the appropriate cuneiform one.

---Maya---

Mayan is a logophonetic aphabet; this means that it is very complex, with hundreds of signs (humans, animals, supernaturals, objects, and abstract designs). These signs are either logograms (to express meaning) or syllabograms (to denote sound values), and are used to write words, phrases, and sentences.

The one represented here is Bishop Diego de Landa's mayan alphabet. In some way, it's a "false" one:

I quote from ancientscripts:

So, as i said, in some way it is a "false" alphabet, but not so far away from the Hieroglyphic translation: it's, in practice, the phonetic translation of the word you insert with some variation ("ca" is a single glyph, for example; "cu" the same, while sounds as "d", "f", "g" and others don't exist in mayan).

---Runic---

The one represented here is the "Futhorc" variation of the runic alphabet. It is a modification introduced in 5th century in England to accommodate sound changes occurred in Old English. Here as well there are some syllabic signs, as for example "th", represented with a single glyph, as well as "ei", "ng", "oe", "ae", "ea", "st". there isn't, instead, the "x".

---Ogham---

Ogham inscriptions are found exclusively in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales: it was, in fact, the old Irish alphabet, disappeared in 6th century when it was replaced by latin alphabet. When inscribed on stones, Ogham is written vertically from bottom to top: so does this app.

---Klingon---

It is the alphabet used by Star Trek's extraterrestrial humanoids called Klingons. Klingon is an artistic language created by Marc Okrand for the Star Trek saga.

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References:

www.ancientscripts.com

http://www.thekeep.org/~kunoichi/kunoichi/themestream/glyphs_1.html