Writing System
Old Nubian, considered ancestral to Nobiin, was written in an uncial variety of the Greek alphabet, extended with three Coptic letters — ϣ "sh", ϩ "h", and ϭ "j" — and three unique to Nubian: ⳡ "ny" and ⳣ "w", apparently derived from Meroitic; and ⳟ "ng", thought to be a ligature of two Greek gammas.
There are three currently active proposals for the script of Nobiin (Asmaa 2004, Hashim 2004): the Arabic script, the Latin script and the Old Nubian alphabet. Since the 1950s, Latin has been used by 4 authors, Arabic by 2, and Old Nubian by 1, in the publication of various books of proverbs, dictionaries, and textbooks. For Arabic, the extended ISESCO system may be used to indicate vowels and consonants not found in Arabic itself.
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