Alternate Names for Old North Arabian

This script is commonly called “Ancient North Arabian” by Semiticists, but the name “Old North Arabian” is still current amongst students of writing systems. Since the Unicode Character Set tends to use OLD in character names, the script is proposed for encoding under the name OLD NORTH ARABIAN, parallel to the already-encoded OLD SOUTH ARABIAN. Some sources use the term “North Arabic” but this term is misleading; the Old North Arabian dialects and the Old South Arabian languages are not “Arabic” (which is a language not a language family).

Reference: Everson, Michael. “Proposal to encode the Old North Arabian script in the SMP of the UCS”, 2010.

This article formerly appeared on ScriptSource.