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Morse code for non-Latin alphabets

This is a summary of the use of Morse code to represent alphabets other than Latin.

Greek[edit]

The Greek Morse code alphabet is very "similar" to the Latin alphabet. The "similarity" is based first on optical resemblance of each letter, a.k.a glyph, and then secondly on sound. Example, A both in Greek and English is the same glyph and sound (like a in word apple). The Greek B though, is identical to the English B as far as the glyph is concerned, even though the sound of Greek B is the same as the sound of English V (like the v in word victory). The B prevails to V. The Greek Morse code alphabet uses one extra letter for Greek letter Χ and no longer uses the codes for Latin letters "J", "U" and "V".

The tonos is not transmitted in Morse code; the receiver can simply infer which vowels require one. The Greek diphthongs presented in the bottom three rows of the table are specified in old Greek Morse-code tables but they are never used in actual communication, the two vowels being sent separately.

Cyrillic[edit]

Cyrillic letters are represented using the representation of similar-sounding Latin letters (e.g. Б ⇒ B, В ⇒ W [German pronunciation], Г ⇒ G, Д ⇒ D, etc.). Cyrillic letters with no such Latin correspondence are assigned to Latin letters with no Cyrillic correspondence (e.g. Щ⇒Q). The same correspondence was later used to create Russian national character sets KOI-7 and KOI-8.

The order and encoding shown uses the Russian national standard. The Bulgarian standard is the same except for the two letters (Ь, Ъ) given in parentheses: The Bulgarian language does not use Ы, while Ъ is frequent, but missing in Russian standard Morse.

The letter Ё (Yo) does not have an international Morse phonetic equivalent, with international Е used instead. Ukrainian Morse uses Є instead of Э, І instead of И, but also has И encoded as Ы, and has additional Ї (Yi).

Hebrew[edit]

Hebrew letters are mostly represented using the Morse representation of a similar-sounding Latin letter (e.g. "Bet" ב≡B); however the representation for several letters are from a Latin letter with a similar shape (e.g. "Tet" ט ≡U, while "Tav" ת≡T). Though Hebrew Morse code is transcribed from right to left, the table below is transcribed from left to right as per the Latin letters in the table.

Arabic[edit]

Kurdish[edit]

See ^[1]

Persian[edit]

See also fa:کد مورس

Devanagari[edit]

Devanagari is a left-to-right abugida (alphasyllabary) widely used in the Indian subcontinent. The following telegraph code table is adapted from one given by Ashok Kelkar,^[2] where the Latin letters are encoded as per the International Morse code standard. Some variations on this code exist,^[3] and there have been some attempts to introduce other telegraph codes either to improve efficiency or to apply to more Indian languages.^[2][4][5] Proposals for a telegraph code suitable for multiple Indian languages have been made as early as 1948, shortly after independence.^[6]

Chinese[edit]

See Chinese telegraph code.

Korean[edit]

See SKATS.

Japanese[edit]

See Wabun code.

Thai[edit]

See รหัสมอร์ส on the Thai Wikipedia

References[edit]

• Dik, T. Winter (c. 2007). "List of Morse codes". homepages.cwi.nl. Archived from the original on 2008-04-30.