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I enjoyed this visualization https://starkeycomics.com/2018/12/11/the-abcd-family-tree/ https://starkeycomics.com/2018/12/11/the-abcd-family-tree/ Not all conn
by lovecg 6y ago
I enjoyed this visualization https://starkeycomics.com/2018/12/11/the-abcd-family-tree/ https://starkeycomics.com/2018/12/11/the-abcd-family-tree/
Not all connections are super well established, but a lot of them are. It really drives home the point that writing was invented independently only a handful of times. The letters you’re currently reading are direct descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- breck 6y agoRelatedly, I made a little interactive vis a while back about the symbols on our keyboards: https://breckyunits.com/files/keyboard/ https://breckyunits.com/files/keyboard/ It's amazing to me that there are distinct, concentric rings on all of our keyboards that are very analogous to the concentric rings you find in trees revealing their age. The oldest keys are in the center, newest are along the edge. (I count about 5 rings: https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html) (Maybe someone could take this idea and make a nice tree ring visual of the keyboard?)
- GuB-42 6y agoYou can even extend the outer rings with keyboard that add stuff. For example, modern gaming keyboard often have macro keys on the side and multimedia buttons on top. And there is also this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard The macro and over-the-top keys of the space cadet keyboard are essentially just an extension of the other "computer" key but media keys can be considered an extra ring, one that goes beyond text.
- saberdancer 6y agoWhat was the cause of the increasing complexity of characters when crossing from Aramaic into the eastern group of scripts? To my untrained eye, characters in the green group are all more complex and hard to write than red (western) scripts. Did materials influence the style of script? If you need to write things in stone, you will struggle to do wavy characters.
- ljf 6y agoInteresting idea on materials. I guess Rune is shaped so as it was mainly carved in wood with a simple knife. Would the Eastern scripts have made the jump to paper or similar mediums sooner?
- jjtheblunt 6y agoOur Germanic linguistics professor (Elmer Antonsen in Urbana) had taught us the characters for runes were also optimized to consider the grain of the wood, for writing on wood.
- laszlokorte 6y agoIn german "letter" (the symbol) is "Buchstabe" which is based on "Buche"(beech, a kind of tree/wood) and "Stab" (stick). So "Buchstabe" means "wooden stick(s)".
- jjtheblunt 6y agoStab has an English cognate in "staff", same meaning you wrote.
- trianglem 6y agoI tried to come up with my own alphabet once. If you stick with the simplest possibilities you end up with an alphabet very similar to runes or the number system used by certain monasteries. A line with a cross line in various iterations etc.
- wl 6y ago> Did materials influence the style of script? Absolutely. Cuneiform arose because the Mesopotamians had clay. It started out as stuff scratched in clay. Someone realized it was easier and faster to press a triangular stylus into clay and write with wedges. You would have never got cuneiform if the Mesopotamians used papyrus and ink. But I think you're seeing something else. Look at Egyptian hieroglyphs and compare them to Egyptian hieratic. Both writing systems were invented more or less simultaneously. Hieroglyphs were usually used in monumental or formal contexts, being carved or painted on objects or walls. But it was also written on papyrus. There's tons of detail and it took a lot of time to write. Hieratic was a simplified form that could be quickly written on papyrus with a reed pen or brush. You've got a script writing/cursive writing distinction. When you're looking at the green group, I think you're mostly seeing a cursive/script writing distinction rather than something arising from a difference in materials. Some scripts lost one style or the other.
- ithkuil 6y agoNice visualizations. Nitpick: etruscan (like some early greek variants) was mostly written right-to-left (and other times in boustrophedon style)
- cptnapalm 6y agoI've long wondered if the direction of writing was due to the inventor's handedness.
- com 6y agoCarving in stone for right handlers may be easier for right-to-left scripts, which begs the question about what happened with the Greeks? What triggered left/to-right?
- lovecg 6y agoI don’t remember where I read this explanation, but it appears that originally the writing was in both directions: you would get to the edge, and then write the next row backwards under it (in a snakes-and-ladders fashion). Then over time some cultures dropped one or the other direction. The continuous style is probably more natural when carving or with tablets, etc. while a single direction makes more sense when writing with a pen.
- cptnapalm 6y agoI remember reading that hieroglyphs work that way with a neat idea of changing the facing of the characters depending on which way to read it.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago>> I don’t remember where I read this explanation, but it appears that originally the writing was in both directions: you would get to the edge, and then write the next row backwards under it (in a snakes-and-ladders fashion). That is "boustrophedon" as in ithkuil's comment. "Boustrophedon" means "as an ox turns" in Greek and it aludes to the way an ox is directed to walk while tilling a field, tilling one "row" in one direction, then turning around and tilling the next row in the opposite direction, etc. Like this (where the ">" and "<" show the ox starting a new row in a new direction): ->-----------. ,----------<-' `->---------- And so on. The alternative is to get to the end of one row and then walk without tilling to the start of the next row, but of course that wastes time.
- kibwen 6y ago"Abjads, like the Hebrew and Arabic scripts, use letters to show consonants, but often don’t display vowel sounds at all." Given that the link there is about tracing the lineage of "ABCD", how are those analogues of "A" pronounced, if not with a vowel sound? EDIT: looks like there's a Wikipedia page for the abjad version of "A": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph , which suggests its non-vowel pronunciation is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_consonant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_consonant
- lordofgibbons 6y agoI started writing a reply with an explanation for Arabic script when I found that wikipedia does a better and more complete job of it than I could: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Vowels https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Vowels
- canjobear 6y agoa is from the letter aleph (-> greek alpha) which represents a glottal stop o is from the letter `ayn which represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative (and also `ayn is the word for "eye" in Semitic languages, hence the shape of the letter o) e is from he, representing the sound h as in house (the letter h comes from the letter Ḥet, which spells an unvoiced pharyngeal fricative) i is from yod (-> greek iota), the consonant sound of y u is from waw, the consonant sound of w y is also descended from waw, via Semitic -> Greek -> Latin Basically, the Greeks and Romans wrote vowels using the letters that spelled consonants that were useless in their native language (not a lot of pharyngeal fricatives in Europe)
- shahar2k 6y agoas a hebrew speaker / reader it's super confusing to see אבגד presented in a reversed direction (in that diagram) the language is written from right to left which is the same as arabic and several other languages in that family, and showing the letters from left to right just looks... wrong