CODEX LINGUISTICA

Codex Linguistica is an interactive web application to explore the history, geography and genealogy of 42 ancient writing systems across 8 genetic families — from Proto-Sinaitic to living alphabets like Hebrew or Arabic. Interactive map (MapLibre GL), dynamic timeline and a table of authentic Unicode glyphs, with an interactive quiz and progression system.

PROJECT DETAILS

Objective

The goal was to make the complex genealogy of human writing systems explorable and accessible — 42 scripts across 8 genetic families, from the 3rd millennium BCE to today — by combining a map of their places of origin, a filterable timeline and an authentic Unicode rendering of each alphabet's glyphs.

Technologies used

The front end is semantic HTML5 and vanilla JavaScript in ES6 modules, styled with Tailwind CSS, with no framework. The mapping layer relies on MapLibre GL to locate each script's place of origin, paired with a dynamic timeline to filter by era. Google Noto Sans/Serif Historical fonts ensure authentic Unicode rendering for each writing system (Phoenician, Linear B, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and more). The back end is a dedicated Cloudflare Worker API, hosted on Netlify with Cloudflare DNS.

Challenges and solutions

The main challenge was structuring a genealogy of 42 scripts across 8 families with sometimes ambiguous lineages (bridges between families, scripts derived from several sources) while keeping navigation simple through the map and timeline. Faithfully rendering ancient glyphs also required loading specialized Unicode fonts per writing system rather than a single generic font, to preserve each alphabet's visual authenticity.