Writing questions

“CEO” is probably the most known acronym among the company bosses. There are another ones as well, such as CFO (Chief Financial Officer), CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), CTO (Chief Technology Officer).

“Exampli gratia” is Latin for "given example”. This abbreviation is commonly used in many European languages.

A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization.

Objects that can be identified unambiguously as quipus first appear in the archaeological record in the first millennium AD. They subsequently played a key part in the administration of the Kingdom of Cusco and later Tawantinsuyu, the empire controlled by the Inca ethnic group, flourishing across the Andes from c. 1100 to 1532 AD. As the region was subsumed under the invading Spanish Empire, the use of the quipu faded from use, to be replaced by European writing and numeral systems.

Kanji are adopted Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese writing system, first introduced to Japan in the 5th century. Before the introduction of Chinese characters, no Japanese writing system existed. Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. For grammatical endings and words without corresponding kanji, two additional, syllable based scripts are being used, hiragana and katakana.

Braille characters have rectangular blocks called cells that have tiny bumps called raised dots. A full Braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two columns, each having three dots. There are 64 different combinations possible (2 to sixth power) and all are used except the "blank" one - for letters, numbers, diacritical marks and mathematical symbols.

The Devanagari script is used for over 120 languages, making it one of the most used and adopted writing systems in the world. Among the languages using it are: Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Pali and Sanskrit.

Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired. His system remains virtually unchanged to this day, and is known worldwide simply as braille. Blinded in both eyes as a result of an early childhood accident, Braille mastered his disability while still a boy.

The names of the letters are acrophonic, and their names and shapes can be ultimately traced back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. For example, the name of the first letter, 'aleph, means ox and developed from a picture of an ox's head. Some of the letter names were changed by the Phoenicians, including gimel, which meant camel in Phoenician, but was originally a picture of a throwing stick.

The letter ß (Eszett ) is used in German to represent ss. The letter β (beta) is from the Greek alphabet. Ъ (yer) is used in some alphabets based on Cyrillic, while ჩ (Chini) is in the Georgian alphabet.