Open Questions

Open Edward Kelley

Why It Is Open The Enochian material rests entirely on Kelley's reports of what appeared in the showstone, recorded by John Dee. Dee's diaries are strong evidence of what Dee believed and weak evidence of what actually occurred. Frances Yates called Kelley a fraud outright; others treat him as a genuine visionary or as self-deceived. The question is central to how the whole Enochian corpus should be read and is not settled.

What Would Settle It It may be unresolvable in principle, which is worth recording as such. It would move on evidence of Kelley preparing material in advance, or on linguistic analysis of the Enochian corpus bearing on whether it was composed rather than received.

Expertise Needed Early modern history, palaeography, and historical linguistics for the Enochian corpus itself.

Question posed in John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature, Deborah E. Harkness, Pages 11 and 24.

Open Frank Podmore

Why It Is Open The 1910 inquest could not establish how Podmore entered the water and returned no verdict of intent. Suggestions of suicide, tied to the risk of a scandal over his private life, have circulated since among historians of the Society for Psychical Research but have never been substantiated, and no further inquiry has been undertaken.

What Would Settle It A search of the original coroner's inquest papers and the Malvern and Worcestershire newspaper coverage of August 1910, which may hold testimony not yet examined by SPR historians.

Expertise Needed Archival research, history of science

Question posed in The Founders of Psychical Research, Alan Gauld.

Open Florence Campbell

Why It Is Open No source checked for this entry gives a birth year or biographical detail beyond her authorship of Your Days Are Numbered (1931) and a reported death in late 1964; her public identity survives almost entirely through the one book.

What Would Settle It A period publisher archive, obituary or genealogical record establishing her birth date and life outside her published work.

Expertise Needed Archival research, history of American occultism

Question posed in Florence Campbell (publisher biographical note), Newcastle Publishing editorial staff.

Open Halqa ࡀ

Why It Is Open Most Mandaic letters are named by their own sound with a preceding a (ab, ag, ad...), and their own descriptions state plainly this is a pronunciation label rather than an inherited word with a sense, unlike the Northwest Semitic nouns Hebrew and Syriac kept for the same slots. Six letters break that regular pattern by their own descriptions' own account (Its own text names the set: ushenna, aksa, dushenna, kad and it itself; In and Ash are separately marked as built on a different vowel or sound), and Dushenna and Kad, two of the six, already carry attested senses because they are documented ligatures of a real Aramaic word. The other four, plus Halqa, the very first letter and one of the script's three true vowel signs, whose name is equally outside the regular pattern, have no sense offered by any source consulted, and none of their descriptions states this as a settled absence either.

What Would Settle It A study of Mandaic's own manuscript and liturgical tradition for these specific six names, checked against Mandaic vocabulary and against the older Aramaic sequence's inherited nouns for the same six slots (Aleph, Waw, Heth, Yod, Ayin, Shin), beyond what the general reference literature already surveys.

Expertise Needed Mandaic studies; comparative Aramaic philology

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium.

Open Djervi Ⰼ

Why It Is Open Djervi, the twelfth Glagolitic letter, sits well before the point in the alphabet recitation where letter names turn opaque or Greek-derived (that boundary falls at Tvrido, the twenty-first letter). Its own description states its sound, its regional history and its descendant the Serbian djerv, but gives no Slavonic word or sense behind the name itself, and no source consulted states whether this is a settled absence or simply unresearched.

What Would Settle It A study of the earliest Glagolitic abecedaria and of the South Slavic manuscript tradition that preserves djervi, checked against comparative Slavic dialect vocabulary for a word matching the form, beyond what the general reference literature already surveys.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open S2

Why It Is Open The sign appears at the tail of the longer Ugaritic school abecedaries, written a second time after the twenty-ninth sign, and its shape is conventionally described as samekh-like. No Ugaritic source names it, and specialists disagree on its basic function: some read it as an additional native sibilant the ordinary twenty-nine signs did not distinguish, others treat it chiefly as a device for spelling words of foreign origin. No other script modelled in this atlas offers even an approximate cognate to compare it against, unlike Ugaritic's other five signs unique among its Northwest Semitic peers, all five of which correspond cleanly to a preserved Arabic letter.

What Would Settle It A systematic survey of every attested occurrence of the sign in the Ugaritic textual corpus, not only the abecedaries, checked for whether it clusters in loanwords or foreign personal and place names, which would support the spelling-device reading, against whether it appears in ordinary native vocabulary in a way the standard twenty-nine signs could not otherwise write, which would support a distinct native phoneme.

Expertise Needed Ugaritology; Northwest Semitic historical phonology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Sappa (Tza) ፀ

Why It Is Open In the received reading tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches sappa is sounded exactly as saday is, so the classical value is not recoverable from how the script is read today, and it is reconstructed by comparison with the other Semitic languages rather than from any Ethiopian testimony.

What Would Settle It A transcription of Ge'ez words into a contemporary script that did distinguish the sounds, or an Aksumite-period bilingual or transcribed text in which the letter's value can be read off directly.

Expertise Needed Semitic historical linguistics; Ethiopian epigraphy

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open No manuscript survives from the Moravian mission itself. The oldest Glagolitic codices are tenth and eleventh century copies made a century or more after the alphabet was made, and they differ among themselves in which letters they carry and in what order they list them. Scholars do not hold opposing positions on the original inventory, because there is nothing to hold a position against: the question is left open for want of a ninth century witness rather than argued between camps. The letters this atlas records for Glagolitic follow the order and inventory of the surviving tradition as the Unicode Standard arranges it, which is the best available reconstruction and not the ninth century original.

What Would Settle It A ninth century Glagolitic witness, whether a codex, a fragment, a palimpsest under-text or a dated inscription, carrying an abecedary or enough continuous text to establish which letters were in use during the mission itself. Palimpsest recovery by multispectral imaging of the surviving early codices is the most likely route, since several of them are known to overlie earlier writing.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.

Open Fritu Ⱇ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

What Would Settle It A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Fert Ф

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.

What Would Settle It A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Avestan A 𐬀

Why It Is Open The script is placed in Sasanian Iran with reasonable confidence and its purpose is not in doubt, but no source names the person or the body that designed it. This is not a case of scholars holding rival candidates; there are no candidates. The work was begun and left without a conclusion.

What Would Settle It A Sasanian or early post-Sasanian text, a colophon in an early manuscript, or an inscription that names the deviser or the commissioning authority. Failing that, a comparative study of the earliest surviving Avestan hands against dated Pahlavi material, which might at least narrow the milieu.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology and Zoroastrian manuscript studies

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Alaf ࠀ

Why It Is Open The continuity between Paleo-Hebrew and the Samaritan script is not in doubt, but the intervening centuries are thinly attested, so the stages by which the monumental Iron Age forms became the manuscript hand the community writes today are known only in outline.

What Would Settle It Dated Samaritan inscriptions or manuscript fragments from the intervening period, of the kind the Mount Gerizim excavations produced for the earlier end of the sequence.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic palaeography; archaeology of Samaria

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Halqa ࡀ

Why It Is Open Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic all use their letters as figures, and Mandaic descends from the same Aramaic stock, so the practice would be unremarkable. No alphanumeric numeral system for Mandaic is described in the reference literature consulted, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits. Nothing states that the practice was absent either, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It A survey of numbering in dated Mandaean manuscripts and inscribed lead rolls, checking colophons, quire marks and folio numbers for letters standing as figures, together with a reading of the standard Mandaic grammars on how numbers are written out.

Expertise Needed Semitic palaeography and Mandaean manuscript studies

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium, Mandaic block, U+0840 to U+085F.

Open Nahas (Na) ነ

Why It Is Open A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schools

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Payt (Pha) ጰ

Why It Is Open Payt writes an ejective p, which has no Semitic ancestor. It is usually explained as a sign made by altering tayt, on the resemblance of the two forms and on the position of payt late in the order, but the explanation is an inference from shapes rather than a documented act, and it competes with an account deriving both Ge'ez p letters from Greek.

What Would Settle It A palaeographic sequence for both letters from dated Aksumite material, showing whether the earliest forms of payt resemble tayt more closely than the later ones do, would test the derivation directly.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeography

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Psa (Pa) ፐ

Why It Is Open Psa writes a plain p, a sound Ge'ez did not inherit, because the Semitic p had become f in this branch. The letter therefore has to be an addition to an order that was already fixed, and two explanations circulate: that it is the Greek pi, borrowed with the Greek names and vocabulary that made a p letter necessary, and that it is a modification of an existing fidel sign. Both are readings of the letterform and of its position at the end of the order. Neither rests on a document.

What Would Settle It Dated Aksumite and post-Aksumite inscriptions and manuscripts showing the earliest forms of psa and payt, read against the Ancient South Arabian signary and against Greek letterforms in use in Aksum, would show whether the sign entered the script from outside or was built inside it.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeography

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open Three explanations are held in the literature and none has carried the field. One derives the letters from the Greek minuscule cursive of the ninth century. One looks to Semitic and Caucasian models, among them Hebrew and Samaritan, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian. One holds that Constantine composed the signs from a small set of Christian figures, the cross, the circle and the triangle, so that the alphabet would belong to no existing script and would carry a Christian sense in its shapes. This is a genuine disagreement rather than a gap: camps exist and each can be read. What none of them has is a witness close in date to the alphabet, since the earliest Glagolitic manuscripts are a century or more later than the mission and were produced in a different country.

What Would Settle It A securely dated ninth century Glagolitic witness, or the recovery of one from the under-text of a palimpsest by multispectral imaging, would give the shapes a form early enough to be compared against the proposed models rather than against their tenth and eleventh century descendants. Failing that, a systematic morphological comparison of the whole Glagolitic repertoire against dated Greek minuscule hands and against the Semitic and Caucasian scripts proposed, published with the negative results as well as the positive ones, would establish how much of the resemblance survives measurement.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; Greek palaeography; comparative script studies; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Slovo Ⱄ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected clauses, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. That much is not in question. What is in question is what follows from it. One position holds that the names were chosen deliberately so that the recitation of the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. Another holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the sense of the sequence is a reading imposed later, and that the point is settled against composition by the fact that the names stop meaning anything at all from the twenty third letter onward. Both positions are held and both can be read.

What Would Settle It A ninth or tenth century source that gives the letter names in full as a continuous text, rather than as a list, would show the sequence being read as an utterance at a date close to the alphabet's making. The acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the letters in verse, are the most likely place for such evidence, and a study that separated what those poems inherit from what they compose would bear directly on the question.

Expertise Needed Old Church Slavonic philology; Slavic historical linguistics; medieval Slavonic literature

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Pe Ⱊ

Why It Is Open The letter is encoded in the Unicode Standard and appears in the abecedaria, the alphabet lists copied out as exercises or inscriptions, more often than in running text. The reference literature reads it as a form of p without establishing what distinguished it from the ordinary letter for that sound, and different sources place different numeral values in this part of the order. Nobody holds a position on the question, which is why the atlas records the letter with no numeral value rather than choosing among the values on offer. It is an unfilled gap and not an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An attestation of the sign in running text, in a context where the word it writes can be identified, would settle the sound. A survey of every surviving Glagolitic abecedary, recording where this sign falls in the order and whether it is ever given a numeral value in the list, would settle whether it was counted as a letter of the alphabet or carried as a variant.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium.

Open Mongolian A ᠠ

Why It Is Open The descent is agreed in outline and unavailable in detail here. Mongolian took its alphabet from Old Uyghur, Old Uyghur took its own from Sogdian, and Sogdian belongs to the family descended from the Aramaic abjad. Whether the Sogdian alphabet was taken from the Syriac hand or directly from Imperial Aramaic chancery writing is argued about, and neither Old Uyghur nor Sogdian is held in this atlas as an alphabet, so no per-letter descent can be asserted from a Mongolian letter to any letter the atlas does hold. The letters here therefore carry intra-alphabet relations only.

What Would Settle It Seeding Old Uyghur and Sogdian as alphabets in their own right, with their letters, so that the chain can be recorded one step at a time rather than jumped in a single relation. Alongside that, a letter by letter comparison of dated Sogdian, Old Uyghur and early Mongolian documents against Imperial Aramaic and Syriac letterforms, taken from published palaeographic work rather than inferred.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and Central Asian philology

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.