Caucasian Albanic – cast into type for the very first time

Andreas Stötzner

The font Kaukasia-Albanisch is now available for general licencing.

The Albanian alphabet is one of the ancient writing systems of the Caucasus region. It is said that is was created by Mesrop who is known to have also invented the Armenian alphabet. It was almost forgotten for centuries but rediscovered in the 20th century, namely on palimpsest manuscripts kept in the St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai.
In 2007 I had the honour and the pleasure to make the inauguration font for the edition of that source. This font was also used for the recently launched new Albanian block (10530) of Unicode. The new font now released is based on that encoding.

John Savard

It is interesting that the Udi, the 8,000 people speaking the last surviving language descended from Caucasian Albanian (or Aghuan) currently use a script based on the Latin alphabet, and formerly used one based on the Cyrillic alphabet.

Given that it appears to be closely related to the Armenian script and to the Georgian Khutsuri script, for which the Nuskhuri script can be considered to be the matching lower-case, I wonder if a lower-case can be constructed for the Caucasian Albanian script, and if that script is applicable to Udi (the modern Udi script does not have 52 letters, so it would not need to use the whole Caucasian Albanian sript).

Tural Alisoy

Hi, @Andreas Stötzner

I included this script in my font in 2020. I am currently updating the font and have some questions. Any chance I can look at the source you're using while you do this? I don't know how to make some letters more correct. For example, the version you did (image 1) I did the same as image 2 when I first made it. I'm thinking of one of the ones in version 3 right now. In version 3, the second option will be like the shape you made. I have like this some obscure questions.