Do you have any info on that? I’m not too familiar with Eastern languages, but all of the examples that I can think of have phonetic alphabets less than a millennium old.
Oh, yup, these are not derived from Phoenecian, but considering how recent they are they were developed after the concept of a phonetic alphabet had already been widely circulated
Japanese Manyogana does not count as a true alphabet because each character represents a mora (several sounds together), not an individual consonant or vowel.
Hangul is a bit debatable as to whether or not it is a true alphabet because. Although individual components within each jamo (the characters in hangul) do indeed represent individual consonants and vowels, they cannot exist alone and must always be part of a set of 2, 3, or 4 components. So in a sense it works more like a syllabary (the same as hiragana in Japanese) rather than an alphabet. Opinions are varied on this. Though Hangul was also very much artificially created (it wasn’t an evolution of an existing system, it was made from scratch), as Korea used Chinese characters up until then, so if we go by naturally evolving Latin/Greek is still the only one.
This is why in linguistics we typically say that Greek (and by extension the Latin that derived from it) is literally the only time humanity naturally invented a true alphabet, ie a system where consonants and vowels are represented individually and separately. All other alphabets before then were what we call either abjad (alphabet systems with no vowel indicators, like Arabic) or abugida (systems where vowels are only represented with diacritic marks, like Thai).
This chart does show different stages of alphabet in the lineage of the Modern Latin Alphabet. But these changes happened due to parallel interactions with other languages and alphabets not shown, so it is a little obscuring to call it an ‘evolution’. Probably being overly pedantic but that’s kind of the realm of linguistics.
I was a little disappointed they didn’t show letters that were removed from the modern Latin alphabet but existed in the 2000 years since Rome, like thorn.
Fun fact, in the Arabic alphabet it starts out Alif and Ba just like alpha and beta here, and then veers way away from this chart into its own awesomely weird territory (thought German was “guttural”? try this nonvowel nonconsonant so far back in the throat you need consent and a physician’s referral) but JUST when you think you’ve lost your way, RIGHT the alphabet nears its end, you stop and stare because right there are four letters, in this same exact order, so familiar it might be a song you learned as a child: the letters K L M N.
The Phoencians took this invention to other places too, and this cluster of familiarity crystallised in the Arabic alphabet in the same order. Almost like a gene we could point to that says we had a common ancestor centuries ago, we were once so close that we learned the same thing from the same people.
“Almost like a gene we could point to that says we had a common ancestor centuries ago, we were once so close that we learned the same thing from the same people.“
Cultural genes are called memes. It’s kind of unfortunate that we usually only think of memes as jokes.
The Phoenician Q and H are way better than todays. And they got the X-Men belt buckle, that’s fucking rad. They can keep it tho; I don’t want to give Disney anymore free publicity.
I think it’s a miracle that people 2000 years ago were using the same alphabet as us. I guess it just goes to show how important the longevity of recorded information is.
Love, death, tears. Eternal damnation is caused by human emotion. The correct path is in the stars. Humanity laughs gayly as they salute their fellow man and idolize him. Prayer is the answer, we watch lovingly as god watches us. We film the bumbling nerd as he falls to the ground, we celebrate the ancient athlete.
Add comment