Version 1.2, 6 October 2021
Version history:
1.0, 22 July 2016
- 1.1, 28 July 2016
- 1.2, 6 October 2021
The Old South Arabian Languages
Old South Arabian is a South Semitic group of languages related only indirectly to (classical and modern) Arabic.
The Old South Arabian Script
This is a script entirely distinct from the Arabic script. It is the ancestor of the Ethiopic script, which is still in use today. The Old South Arabian script only contains consonant signs and no vowel signs, as well as a word divider and a few numerals. It was often written in a boustrophedon manner, i.e., with the writing direction alternating between right-to-left and left-to-right, and asymmetric character shapes mirroring from line to line. But it seems that the writing direction settled at one point to right-to-left. In modern running text, Old South Arabian is normally only rendered from right to left; only epigraphical publications, which regularly preserve many aspects of the original inscriptions, may sometimes try to render boustrophedon text as such. For the curious: boustrophedon is the Greek βουστροφηδόν, meaning ‘as the ox turns’ [i.e., the plough at each end of the field].
Old South Arabian Fonts
Modern, Unicode-encoded, Old South Arabian fonts (or fonts containing the Old South Arabian characters as well as others) are few in number. At the time of this writing, only three seem to be readily available:
Noto Sans Old South Arabian (search for ‘Noto Sans Old South Arabian’)
Of these, Quivira shows very awkward character shapes, which precludes its use in Brill publications.
Qataban is a serif typeface which rather closely mimics a certain inscriptional style and as such, it is a good effort.
But at the time of this writing (July of 2016), Noto Sans Old South Arabian (a sans-serif typeface, as the name already suggests) most closely resembles a typeface which was already available in the hot-metal era of type, which will be familiar to many scholars. For this reason, Noto Sans Old South Arabian is the font of choice at this time for Brill publications.
Boustrophedon Support, or Only Right-To-Left Writing Direction?
None of the above-mentioned fonts contains the mirrored glyphs or the OpenType intelligence needed for boustrophedon display of text. Therefore, for the time being all Old South Arabian text will have to be rendered from right to left exclusively. Not many computer operating systems or computer programs currently support even right-to-left display of Old South Arabian text (only Mac OS X does, in TextEdit, it seems; browser support unknown).
This means that typesetters must be alerted to the fact that they should instruct their software to force right-to-left Old South Arabian text rendering.
Forcing Right-To-Left Text Rendering
In Adobe InDesign CC2014 (the complex-script-ready version), the typesetter has the option to insert so-called directional formatting characters, such as U+202E RIGHT-TO-LEFT-OVERRIDE (commonly abbreviated RLO) and U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING (commonly abbreviated PDF). These characters are normally invisible to the reader but they have the described effect on the text. In InDesign these characters are accessed from the Type menu: Type → Insert Special ME Character → Unicode Markers → [Right To Left Override | Pop Directional Formatting].
The syntax is (assuming regular writing direction is left-to-right), with [bold monospaced bracketed type] indicating invisible characters:
Normal English text
[RLO]OLD SOUTH ARABIAN TEXT[PDF]and resume English text from left to right.
This will be rendered as:
Normal English text TXET NAIBARA HTUOS DLO and resume English text from left to right.
At the time of writing (October 2021), InDesign should not be used for typesetting Old South Arabian script. Only TeX can be tweaked to render Old South Arabian script correctly, and therefore, Old South Arabian text can and must only be typeset by TAT, who use an installation of LuaTeX.
Noto Sans Old South Arabian Type Sizes
main text, block quotes (~ Brill 11 pt): Noto Sans Old South Arabian 9 pt
appendices, bibliographies (~ Brill 10 pt): Noto Sans Old South Arabian 8 pt
footnote text, indexes (~ Brill 9 pt): Noto Sans Old South Arabian 7½ pt
Other values compared with standard Brill type:
Brill 16 pt – Noto Sans Old South Arabian 13 pt
Brill 14 pt – Noto Sans Old South Arabian 11½ pt
