# Which countries have have chosen a new alphabet? When and why?



## franknagy

I know that Romania changed from Cyrillic to Latin scrpit.
Turkey from Arabic to Latin script.
Middle-Asian countries and Azerbaijan did it twice: from Arabic to Cyrillic, then from Cyrillic to Latin.
Please continue my list.


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## ahvalj

franknagy said:


> Middle-Asian countries and Azerbaijan did it twice: from Arabic to Cyrillic, then from Cyrillic to Latin.


From Arabic to Latin, then from Latin to Cyrillic, then from Cyrillic to Latin. The Soviet authorities in the 1920's anticipated a global revolution and intended to switch all languages (including Russian — Русская латиница — Википедия) to the Latin script (Latinisation in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia). When in the early thirties it became clear that the socialist revolutions abroad were postponed for better times, those languages that had received a Latin script were mostly transferred to Cyrillic (Кириллизация — Википедия) so they would't look foreign (this is still valid today: e. g. the Tatar Latin script was prohibited not so long ago for this exact reason — Tatar alphabet - Wikipedia).


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## Dymn

Hangul (a phonemic writing system) was invented for *Korean *in the 15th century, and it has slowly been replacing Hanja (Chinese characters) ever since. Hanja is still used in some situations in South Korea.

*Vietnamese *went from Hán tự (Chinese characters) to the Latin alphabet with lots of diacritics based on Portuguese spelling, and imposed by the French I think.

During the 19th century the British made Urdu (written in the Arabic script) the official language of the British Raj, but Hindus preferred Devanagari script and this gave rise to *Hindi*. The main difference between Hindi and Urdu is the script.

Usually, languages spoken by Muslims were or still are written with the Arabic script. More examples of Arabic to Latin shift are *Swahili *and *Malay*. Even Romance dialects in the Iberian peninsula under Muslim rule (Mozarabic) used to be written in Arabic script.


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## ilocas2

Vietnam from own script to Latin.


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## ahvalj

After the Polish uprising of 1863–1864 (January Uprising - Wikipedia), the government decided to try to save Lithuanians from the corrupting Polish influence and ordered to transfer the Lithuanian language from the Latin script to Cyrillic (e. g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Auksa_altorius_cirillics.jpg). This attempt was canceled in 1904.


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## sound shift

*Albanian*: The 1908 Congress of Monastir (today's Bitola) decided that Albanian would henceforth be written in the Latin alphabet and the Ottoman Turkish (Arabic-derived) alphabet. At the time, "Albania" was part of the Ottoman Empire. Previously, Albanian had been written in the Latin, Greek and Ottoman alphabets (depending on region and religion). However, following the Congress the Ottoman alphabet fell into disfavour in the Albanian lands as relations between the Ottoman authorities and the Albanian nationalists deteriorated, and the Ottoman alphabet was abandoned altogether upon the creation of an independent Albania in 1912, leaving just the Latin alphabet.


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## fdb

Dymn said:


> *Vietnamese *went from Hán tự (Chinese characters) to the Latin alphabet with lots of diacritics based on Portuguese spelling, and imposed by the French I think.




Hán tự refers to texts in the Chinese language. You are probably thinking of chữ nôm, referring to texts in the Vietnamese language, written in a mixture of Chinese characters and specially invented Chinese-like characters.

The Latin based quốc ngữ script was invented by Portuguese and French missionaries in the 17th century. This is well before the French conquest of Indochina.




Dymn said:


> During the 19th century the British made Urdu (written in the Arabic script) the official language of the British Raj,



Urdu was the "official" language of the Mogul Empire (alongside Persian).


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## Lugubert

I suppose you could count assorted Nordic countries going from runes to modified Latin scripts.


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## fdb

How about Ossetic: first in Greek script; then in Church Slavonic script; then (in South Ossetia) Georgian script; then in amplified Cyrillic (Russian script with several newly invented characters); then Latin script; then simple Cyrillic script (Russian script with only one special sign: æ). Six alphabets, not bad for a still living language.


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## AndrasBP

Georgian: they have used three different scripts since the 5th century.


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## rushalaim

ahvalj said:


> From Arabic to Latin, then from Latin to Cyrillic, then from Cyrillic to Latin. The Soviet authorities in the 1920's anticipated a global revolution and intended to switch all languages (including Russian — Русская латиница — Википедия) to the Latin script (Latinisation in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia). When in the early thirties it became clear that the socialist revolutions abroad were postponed for better times, those languages that had received a Latin script were mostly transferred to Cyrillic (Кириллизация — Википедия) so they would't look foreign (this is still valid today: e. g. the Tatar Latin script was prohibited not so long ago for this exact reason — Tatar alphabet - Wikipedia).


Was Esperanto planned to become the language of Global Project? ))
Заменгоф, Людвик Лазарь — Википедия
Esperanto - Wikipedia 

Kazakh language had Latin before, then Cyrillic, last year Latin again 
Kazakh language - Wikipedia


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## desi4life

Dymn said:


> During the 19th century the British made Urdu (written in the Arabic script) the official language of the British Raj, but Hindus preferred Devanagari script and this gave rise to *Hindi*. The main difference between Hindi and Urdu is the script.



Devanagari and Arabic scripts have been used for Hindi/Urdu for many centuries. The British initially gave official preference to Urdu in Arabic script in the 19th century, but demand for the Devanagari script led to increased recognition of Hindi for official purposes in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. If interested, you can read about about the early history of Hindi/Urdu in both scripts here: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/workshop2012/bangha_rekhta.pdf


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## franknagy

AndrasBP said:


> Georgian: they have used three different scripts since the 5th century.


Which one is used now?


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## Borin3

Turkish from Arabic to Latin after the breakdown of Ottoman Empire, and secularisation of modern Turkish republic. Introduced by creator of the modern Turkish republic- Ataturk. Moments when Turks were fighting for the "democracy", and wanted to become a part of modern European world thinking it's much nicer.

Serbian officially adopted Latin alphabet during kingdom of Yugoslavia, while the whole process of introducing Latin to our part of the world was during the so called "Illyrian/Yugoslavian" movement, whose main idea was to unite all south Slavs in one country. The process started around the beginning of the 19th century, ended at the beginning of 20th. Since the foundation of Yugoslavia in 1918 we use two alphabets Cyrrilic and Latinic. Since the Serbian population at that time wrote Cyrrilic but Croatian and Slovenian wrote Latin. I don't want to uncover everything though.

Romanian- from Cyrrilic to Latin, also at the beginning of 19th century. This was a major language reform not only concerning the alphabets. I guess Romanians would explain it the best, so i leave it to them.


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## rushalaim

http://www.ijors.net/issue2_2_2013/images/iliev_files/image036.jpg
If you'll see old Russian birchbark manuscripts, then you'll see Latin N-letter for n-sound, but today Russian uses H-letter for n-sound. And H-letter for i-sound (like Greek)


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## AndrasBP

franknagy said:


> Which one is used now?


It's all in the embedded link in my post. Just scroll down to the part called 'Modern Georgian alphabet'. This current alphabet is called 'Mkhedruli" and it looks like this:

უფრო დიდი დასახლებები ჩნდება გვიანბრინჯაო-ადრერკინის ხანაში. არქეოლოგიური გათხრების შედეგად დაფიქსირდა ამ პერიოდის რამდენიმე მსხვილი დასახლება. რკინისა და ბრინჯაოს ხანაში რუსთაველებს მოჰყავდათ ხორბალი, ქერი, ბოსტნეული, მისდევდნენ მევენახეობას, მესაქონლეობას, მიწათმოქმედებას. განვითარებული იყო მეთუნეობა.


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## danielstan

Mongol switched from its traditional alphabet to Cyrrilic in 1946 (of course, under Soviet influence): Mongolian script - Wikipedia
Inner Mongolia province in China did not.


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## danielstan

Romanian history of switching alphabets:
- Romanian texts in Middle Ages were in Cyrrilic
- following the Austrian conquest of Transylvania in 1687, the Romanian Greek Catholic Church has been founded there, around 1698 - 1700: Romanian Greek Catholic Church - Wikipedia.
Around 50% of the Transylvania's Romanians followed this church and its intellectuals began to print in Latin alphabet, although Cyrrilic was used in parallel, especially by the Romanian Orthodox Church.
Example: _Lexiconul de la Buda, 1825_ (a quadrilingual dictionary of Romanian to Latin, Hungarian and German) was printed in Latin and Cyrrilic alphabets on 2 sections of the same page: Lesicon románescu-látinescu-ungurescu-nemtescu : quare de mai multi autori, in cursul' a trideci, si mai multoru ani s' au lucratu

- in Wallachia and Moldova the Cyrrilic alphabet was used before the national revolutions of 1848, then an 'transition alphabet' was used between 1848 - 1860 (Cyrrilic based, but with some Latin letters replacements).
In 1860, after Wallachian - Moldovan unification of 1859, the official alphabet was Latin, by law. In churches there were still printed books in Cyrrilic until the end of the XIX century, due to tradition.

The reasons of switching from Cyrrilic to Latin came from the Romanian nationalistic movement of 19th -20th centuries, with its ultimate purpose of unifying all the lands inhabited by Romanians.


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## franknagy

Let me add the case of Hungary.
*The Hungarian language had had an own runic script earlier the usage Roman alphabet was forced. *When king St. Stephen  the first called the Cristian priests to Hungary their number one activity was to kill all kinds of pagan cultures: including sagas, mythology, script by fire and sword. (Just like Spanish inquisitors did with the Maya culture 500 years later in Guatemala.)
In spite of their persecution, the runic script survived - as usual - on the frame of Hungarian territory that is the most Eastern cold valleys of Transylvania.
The oldest written trace of the runa is in Vinland (New Foundland, Canada) from AD 1000 because Red Eric had a Hungarian soldier.)
if you travel around Hungary you can see name plates of Villages written by runa, even ABC-books teaching runa in bookshops. Why? Their usage is bound to right wing extremists.

I can summarize. *Changing the alphabet takes place exclusively by political pressure. *The subdued nation has to apply the script of the conquerors.
Romania is slightly different. Their politicians began to search a far ally = France. The bordering allies (this case Russia) are dangerous. They tend to occupy the country under color of assistance.


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## Borin3

I guess you're right it's all about politics. 


sound shift said:


> Previously, Albanian had been written in the Latin, Greek and Ottoman alphabets


Can you show us a proof, some kind document written in Albanian before the date you gave us here?


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## sound shift

Borin3 said:


> I guess you're right it's all about politics.
> 
> Can you show us a proof, some kind document written in Albanian before the date you gave us here?


I can't at the moment, I'm afraid. I took my information from Albanian language - Wikipedia. I'll look for one, though.


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## Borin3

Don't bother, you'll not find it.


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## sound shift

Are you saying that nothing was written in Albanian before 1908?


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## Borin3

Yes, before 20th century nothing was.


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## berndf

Borin3 said:


> Yes, before 20th century nothing was.


That is nonsense. The modern standard register of Albanian is a product of the 20th century but that doesn't mean there are no older texts written in Albanian dialects and you know that very well.


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## Borin3

Where are they?


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## danielstan

A friendly help, after a quick search on google for 'oldest Albanian text':
Oldest book in Albanian was printed in 1555, using Latin alphabet: Meshari - Wikipedia


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## AndrasBP

danielstan said:


> Oldest book in Albanian was printed in 1555


Our Serbian friend can always claim it's a forgery.


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## sotos

Borin3 said:


> Where are they?


New Testament in Albanian, in greek script (1827)  translated by the greek priest Gregorios Argyrokastrites. Γρηγόριος Αργυροκαστρίτης - Βικιπαίδεια

But there are not many albanian texts before late 19th century.


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## sotos

Greeks are a curiosity, then. Did not change alphabet for about 28 centuries.


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## ahvalj

sotos said:


> Greeks are a curiosity, then. Did not change alphabet for about 28 centuries.


And Italians for 27 — Praeneste fibula - Wikipedia


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## AndrasBP

During the period of Soviet "Cyrillicization" in the 1930s, were there any plans to introduce Cyrillic in Georgia and Armenia, too? Or was the regime only hostile to the Arabic script?


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## ahvalj

AndrasBP said:


> During the period of Soviet "Cyrillicization" in the 1930s, were there any plans to introduce Cyrillic in Georgia and Armenia, too? Or was the regime only hostile to the Arabic script?


Hard to tell if there were such plans. Pontic Greek was switched to Cyrillic though — Pontic Greek - Wikipedia Overall, I don’t see any difference between any script change made for political or cultural reasons: the modern shift to the Latin script in Central Asia is made in exactly the same way and with the same motivation. There will always be those who welcome it and those who remain discordant.


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## ahvalj

What seems strange in all this is how stable, or better stagnant, the Latin alphabet has become. It doesn’t fit the phonetics of most languages that use it, yet, unlike e. g. in the ancient times, the idea to add new letters or to change the shape of the existing ones has somehow become a taboo (in contrast, Soviet creators of the new Cyrillic alphabets in the 30’s introduced dozens of new letters).


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## franknagy

sound shift said:


> I can't at the moment, I'm afraid. I took my information from Albanian language - Wikipedia. I'll look for one, though.


I think there are cases when a certain alphabet is better suited to a language than an other.

The Japanese language is agglutinating. It requires phonetic letters at the end of the word.
Cyrillic is a better choice for Slavic languages than Latin.
Latin is a better choice for the Turkish language than Arabic alphabet.
There were some isolated trials of creation of a brand new alphabet: Cherokee .


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## danielstan

Well, when a new alphabet is invented it is usually intended for a certain target language and tends to cover all the sounds in that language.
Latin alphabet covered quite well the phonetics of Classic Latin.
Cyrrilic covered the sounds in medio-Bulgarian.

Then in few centuries the target language evolves and some sounds may disappear form it (example: aspirated *H* disappeared from Late Latin and Romance languages).
No wonder that the letter *H* was used in various Romance languages in combination with other letters for sounds without correspondent letter in Latin alphabet:
French *ch* etc.

Other sounds may appear:
Cyrrilic has a letter for the palatal [g] (example: *Г*ео́р*г*ий = *Gh*eor*gh*i)
but the sound [d͡ʒ] (which developed in Serbo-Croatian) did not have a letter and later they invented one for it: Џ џ (example: Кара*џ*ић = Kara*dž*ić)

As one may see in the conventional IPA alphabet, there are a pletora of sounds in all languages and it is not practical for an alphabet to cover all of them, while a target language to use only a fraction.


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## franknagy

danielstan said:


> No wonder that the letter *H* was used in various Romance languages in combination with other letters for sounds without correspondent letter in Latin alphabet:
> French *ch* etc.


I do not know when the sound *"h"* disappeared from the vulgar Latin. Surely it had disappeared before the Western provinces of the Roman Empire were romanized.
On the other hand this sound climbed back to the Brazilian Portuguese throught the window. The letter _"agá" was occupied so the -r-|-rr- denotes this sound.
_


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## apmoy70

Coptic, from Demotic Egyptian to an adapted Greek script


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## sound shift

franknagy said:


> Latin is a better choice for the Turkish language than Arabic alphabet.


I agree, but there were also some political/cultural reasons behind the change of alphabet in Turkey.


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## Hulalessar

ahvalj said:


> What seems strange in all this is how stable, or better stagnant, the Latin alphabet has become. It doesn’t fit the phonetics of most languages that use it, yet, unlike e. g. in the ancient times, the idea to add new letters or to change the shape of the existing ones has somehow become a taboo (in contrast, Soviet creators of the new Cyrillic alphabets in the 30’s introduced dozens of new letters).



The Latin alphabet, evolved from Greek via Estruscan, originally had 21 letters. Y and Z were later borrowed from Greek to write Greek words - note they still come at the end of the alphabet. J and U (variations of I and V) and W (a ligature of two U/Vs) were added later. This amended alphabet is the one widely used today. It is ideally referred as the roman alphabet to distinguish it from the alphabet used to write Latin in classical times and give a lower-case _r_ to emphasise its universality. As stated, with a few exceptions, there has been a remarkable reluctance to add new new letters. Instead orthographies rely on one or more of polyvalence, digraphs/trigraphs and diacritics. A result of that is that many graphemes are polyvalent not only within but across languages. <j> has completely different values in English, German, French and Spanish. It is a pity that Latin did not have a larger inventory of phonemes.

While political or other considerations may apply, the notable cases where the Arabic alphabet has been replaced by the roman can be explained by the simple fact that the roman script is better suited to the phonology of the languages. The Arabic script is perfectly adequate for writing Arabic and other Semitic languages because the missing vowels are readily supplied by a reader familiar with the language. It is reported (with what degree of truth I cannot say) that children in Turkey learned to read much quicker when the roman alphabet was introduced. While that does not necessarily achieve anything, I think it shows the roman alphabet is more suited to writing Turkish than the Arabic. There is of course nothing inherently superior about the roman alphabet compared to, say, the Greek or Cyrillic. We should also be wary about insisting that "full" alphabets represent perfection in writing systems - apart from anything else orthographies such as those used for French and English can be considered a backward step compared to that used for Latin.


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## Dymn

I think political/cultural factors always play a major role in script changes, with practicality issues coming to the fore when the system itself changes too (like, from an abugida to an alphabet, or a logographic system to an alphabet). For example, I guess Korean shift to Hangul is mainly about practicality, Turkish to Latin alphabet a mix of both factors, and Turkic languages fluctuations to and fro Latin and Cyrillic all about politics/culture.



fdb said:


> Hán tự refers to texts in the Chinese language. You are probably thinking of chữ nôm, referring to texts in the Vietnamese language, written in a mixture of Chinese characters and specially invented Chinese-like characters.
> 
> The Latin based quốc ngữ script was invented by Portuguese and French missionaries in the 17th century. This is well before the French conquest of Indochina.


 I thought hán tự was the Vietnamese name for Chinese characters in general, regardless of what language they represented. As for the second paragraph, I said that the Europeans invented it before the conquest and imposed it afterwards. But I'm reading it was directly Classical Chinese the language used for literature back then...



desi4life said:


> Devanagari and Arabic scripts have been used for Hindi/Urdu for many centuries. The British initially gave official preference to Urdu in Arabic script in the 19th century, but demand for the Devanagari script led to increased recognition of Hindi for official purposes in the late 19th-early 20th centuries


Were the languages considered different though? In the sense that they had their own lexicon like nowadays, or at least that they were felt as separate languages with their own name by the people?


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## franknagy

I have read that Emperor Claudius adder a letter to the Roman alphabet: Which one?


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## berndf

franknagy said:


> I have read that Emperor Claudius adder a letter to the Roman alphabet: Which one?


The letter Z.


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## ahvalj

franknagy said:


> I have read that Emperor Claudius adder a letter to the Roman alphabet: Which one?


Ⅎ, Ↄ and Ⱶ — Claudian letters - Wikipedia


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## sotos

Philippinos. Baybayin, The Ancient Script of the Philippines


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## desi4life

Dymn said:


> Were the languages considered different though? In the sense that they had their own lexicon like nowadays, or at least that they were felt as separate languages with their own name by the people?



They weren't considered separate languages with distinct names and lexicons until the 19th century. Before then different styles existed, but the contrast wasn't as marked. I recommend reading the article I posted if you get the chance. It covers the topic well.


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## Borin3

danielstan said:


> A friendly help, after a quick search on google for 'oldest Albanian text':
> Oldest book in Albanian was printed in 1555, using Latin alphabet: Meshari - Wikipedia


I hoped you would answer the question concerning the change of both Romanian language and alphabet, but well.


AndrasBP said:


> Our Serbian friend can always claim it's a forgery.


The book was "rediscovered" in 1909, only one year after the congress. Why would anyone think it's a forgery? Furthermore it misses first 16 pages, so we have no clue where it was printed or what it's title was. Most likely knowing first sixteen pages would be lost, the writer writes introduction on the last page, so we can at least know a bit about it, most importantly when did he write it, and that he Gjon Buzuku wrote it. Comedy


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## AndrasBP

Borin3 said:


> The book was "rediscovered" in 1909, only one year after the congress. Why would anyone think it's a forgery? Furthermore it misses first 16 pages, so we have no clue where it was printed or what it's title was. Most likely knowing first sixteen pages would be lost, the writer writes introduction on the last page, so we can at least know a bit about it, most importantly when did he write it, and that he Gjon Buzuku wrote it. Comedy


Let's suppose that the 1555 book is indeed a forgery. Are you saying that all the other texts whose references are available on the net, the Bible translations (post #29), the Elbasan script, etc., are all fake?


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