This is an Old Turkic font that only covers the subset of characters used in the Irk Bitig 𐰃𐰺𐰴 𐰋𐰃𐱅𐰃𐰏 "Book of Omens" (British Library Or.8212/161). The font can be downloaded by clicking on the font name below :
- BabelStone Irk Bitig Version 1.00 [2011-02-14]
Irk Bitig Omen 1 rendered with BabelStone Irk Bitig at 24 points in BabelPad (right-to-left layout faked)
Coverage
BabelStone Irk Bitig only covers a subset of 37 of the 73 encoded characters in the Old Turkic block. It does not cover any of the characters encoded for use with Yenisei inscriptions (i.e. those characters named OLD TURKIC LETTER YENISEI ...). Nor does it cover any of the following Orkhon characters that are not used in the only extant manuscript copy of the Irk Bitig :
- U+10C21 𐰡 OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ELT
- U+10C31 𐰱 OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON IC
- U+10C36 𐰶 OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON IQ
- U+10C3F 𐰿 OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ASH
- U+10C48 𐱈 OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON BASH
| Code point | Character | Unicode Character Name |
|---|---|---|
| U+2680 | ⚀ | DIE FACE-1 |
| U+2681 | ⚁ | DIE FACE-2 |
| U+2682 | ⚂ | DIE FACE-3 |
| U+2683 | ⚃ | DIE FACE-4 |
| U+2E31 | ⸱ | WORD SEPARATOR MIDDLE DOT |
| U+10C00 | 𐰀 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON A |
| U+10C03 | 𐰃 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON I |
| U+10C06 | 𐰆 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON O |
| U+10C07 | 𐰇 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON OE |
| U+10C09 | 𐰉 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AB |
| U+10C0B | 𐰋 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AEB |
| U+10C0D | 𐰍 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AG |
| U+10C0F | 𐰏 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AEG |
| U+10C11 | 𐰑 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AD |
| U+10C13 | 𐰓 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AED |
| U+10C14 | 𐰔 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON EZ |
| U+10C16 | 𐰖 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AY |
| U+10C18 | 𐰘 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AEY |
| U+10C1A | 𐰚 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AEK |
| U+10C1C | 𐰜 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON OEK |
| U+10C1E | 𐰞 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AL |
| U+10C20 | 𐰠 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AEL |
| U+10C22 | 𐰢 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON EM |
| U+10C23 | 𐰣 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AN |
| U+10C24 | 𐰤 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AEN |
| U+10C26 | 𐰦 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ENT |
| U+10C28 | 𐰨 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ENC |
| U+10C2A | 𐰪 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ENY |
| U+10C2D | 𐰭 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ENG |
| U+10C2F | 𐰯 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON EP |
| U+10C30 | 𐰰 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON OP |
| U+10C32 | 𐰲 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON EC |
| U+10C34 | 𐰴 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AQ |
| U+10C38 | 𐰸 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON OQ |
| U+10C3A | 𐰺 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AR |
| U+10C3C | 𐰼 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AER |
| U+10C3D | 𐰽 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AS |
| U+10C3E | 𐰾 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AES |
| U+10C41 | 𐱁 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ESH |
| U+10C43 | 𐱃 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AT |
| U+10C45 | 𐱅 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AET |
| U+10C47 | 𐱇 | OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON OT |
Notes
1. Glyph Forms
The glyph forms of the letters used in the unique Irk Bitig manuscript differ in many respects from the representative glyph forms for the corresponding characters in the Unicode code charts; in particular OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON OT, which is not attested in any other manuscript text or inscription, is significantly different from the unsatisfactory representative glyph given in the code charts (which is itself based on the unsatisfactory glyph given in various modern sources). In some cases the Irk Bitig glyph form is closer to the corresponding Yenisei glyph form than the Orkhon glyph form given in the code charts, but as the Irk Bitig script is overall more closely related to the script form used in the Orkhon inscriptions than the script form used in the Yenisei inscriptions, all of the Irk Bitig letters are mapped to Orkhon characters rather Yenisei characters or a mixture of Orkhon and Yenisei characters.
2. Manuscript Idiosyncrasies
There are two orthographic peculiarities in the Irk Bitig manuscript. Firstly, all words in Irk Bitig where the letter š would be expected are written with either OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AS (s¹) or OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AES (s²), as appropriate, instead of OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ESH. Secondly, OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AER only occurs once in the entire manuscript of Irk Bitig (Omen 4 on folio 8a). In all other cases the front vocalic form of the letter r (r²) is represented using the graphically similar OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ESH. The author or scribe of the manuscript has probably accidentally used the wrong character for r² as OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ESH is not used for its original purpose. If it were not for the one instance of the correctly written OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AER I would have mapped the š-like glyph to OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AER, and left OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ESH unmapped, but as both glyph forms occur it seems best to map them separately to OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON AER and OLD TURKIC LETTER ORKHON ESH.
3. Word Separator
The Irk Bitig manuscript uses a word separation mark comprising two elongated black dots overlaid in almost all cases by a red circle. In the font this mark is represented by an unencircled glyph form as otherwise the glyph is too unclear. The mark is mapped to U+2E31 WORD SEPARATOR MIDDLE DOT, as although it is a double middle dot rather than a single middle dot, it is semantically the most appropriate character to use.
4. Writing Direction
Old Turkic was written right-to-left, and the Old Turkic characters encoded in Unicode all have the Right-to-Left bidirectional class, so conformant implementations of the Bidi algorithm for Unicode 5.2 or later should render Old Turkic text right-to-left. However, at present all operating systems (including Windows XP, Vista and 7) render Old Turkic text left-to-right. It should be possible to force right-to-left rendering by inserting a Right-to-Left Override code (U+202E) at the start of the Old Turkic text, but on XP and Vista (not yet tested on Windows 7) this has no effect on the rendering direction, but does cause the cursor positioning to go completely wrong when moving through the Old Turkic text (verified in Notepad and BabelPad, and therefore a bug in Uniscribe).
Nevertheless,on web pages it is possible to force RTL layout in a CSS3 stylesheet by setting direction: rtl and unicode-bidi: bidi-override.
The Unicode Standard version 5.2 states that "the Old Turkic script is written from right to left within a row, with rows running from bottom to top"; however, at least in Irk Bitig, which is by far the most important and extensive Old Turkic manuscript text, the text is actually written from right to left within a row, with rows running from top to bottom.
5. Old Turkic on Windows 7
The version of Uniscribe shipped with Windows 7 renders all characters from scripts added to the SMP in Unicode 5.2 or later as two undefined glyphs (see Why Windows 7 Sucks for details). This means that all Microsoft applications, and most 3rd party applications, running on Windows 7 will not display Unicode Old Turkic text correctly. Under Windows 7, BabelPad will display Old Turkic text if you select "Simple Rendering" mode (Ctrl-0), but as the name implies, this mode may not be ideal. If you have a Unicode Old Turkic font installed then Google Chrome running on Windows 7 will render Old Turkic text correctly.
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