The reference shelf, and a hieroglyph census
25 September 2026 · Nabu news
Two additions this week, one for the reader and one for the signs.
The reference shelf grew by forty-two works. The classic apparatus of pre-Roman Italy is now on the shelf in its original editions: Buck’s Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian, von Planta’s two-volume Grammatik der oskisch-umbrischen Dialekte, Conway’s Italic Dialects, Pauli’s Altitalische Forschungen (the north-Etruscan alphabets, the Lemnos stele, the Veneti), Bréal’s Tables Eugubines, Zvetaieff’s Sylloge inscriptionum Oscarum, and Fabretti’s Corpus inscriptionum italicarum — beside Bakkum’s open-access Latin Dialect of the Ager Faliscus, Cleasby-Vigfusson’s Icelandic-English Dictionary, the second volume of Thurneysen’s Handbuch des Alt-Irischen (completing the held first), and all twenty-six articles of Rasenna: Journal of the Center for Etruscan Studies. Public-domain scans, fetched from the Internet Archive and the UMass repository with full provenance per item.
Every Egyptian sign card now carries a third witness. The AED
corpus ships a per-text hieroglyphic transcription for nearly
fourteen thousand texts — token by token, in plain Unicode
hieroglyphs. The library now censuses them into a precompiled
per-sign table (794 distinct signs, 725,856 occurrences, damaged
readings honestly included), so nabu char 𓈖 answers instantly with
the sign’s reach across texts beside its existing counts across
annotated passages: three corpora, three counting shapes, one card.