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What 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 t

What 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 ago
Interesting 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 ago
  Our 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 ago
    In 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 ago
      Stab has an English cognate in "staff", same meaning you wrote.
- trianglem 6y ago
  I 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.
jcranmer 6y ago
One of the key difficulties is crossing from Semitic languages to Indo-European languages. Semitic languages generally rely on a triconsonant root pattern, with the vowels in between those consonants effectively forming a kind of inflection. So abjads dropped the vowels entirely. Indo-European languages, by contrast, place a lot heavier emphasis on the importance of vowels (consider all the different words in English that have the sound /b/-vowel-/t/). So Greek adapted the consonant for 'aleph (which represents a glottal stop, something Greek did not have) into an alpha (representing one of the five main vowels). On the other side, Brahmi adopted it by adding mandatory vowel marks to the character, so that each letter effectively represents a consonant-vowel pair [1]. However, there's a second complication, which is that Indo-European languages also tend to have complex consonant clusters rather than simple CV or CVC syllables. For example, the English word "strengths" has a 4-consonant cluster. So Brahmi also solved this problem by making a consonant cluster stack the consonants onto the character. [1] It should be noted that the evolution of most scripts seems to follow a pattern of marking logograms, going through a rebus stage (using homophones to represent words), then simplifying the inventory to have each letter represent a syllable, or at least a CV pair, as most languages tend to follow a CV or CVC syllable pattern. It was a single Semitic language (Proto-Sinaitic) that went all the way down to a single phoneme, probably thanks to the underemphasis on vowels in Semitic languages--and almost all abigudas, abjads, and alphabets derive ultimately from that one invention.
DonaldFisk 6y ago
The green ones are abugidas, which like Japanese Kana usually represent consonant-vowel pairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida, instead of single sounds. Unlike in Japanese Kana, which originated from Chinese characters, in an abugida consonant symbols are modified by vowel diacritics.

ljf 6y ago

Interesting 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 ago
Our 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 ago
  In 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 ago
    Stab has an English cognate in "staff", same meaning you wrote.
trianglem 6y ago
I 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.

jcranmer 6y ago

One of the key difficulties is crossing from Semitic languages to Indo-European languages. Semitic languages generally rely on a triconsonant root pattern, with the vowels in between those consonants effectively forming a kind of inflection. So abjads dropped the vowels entirely. Indo-European languages, by contrast, place a lot heavier emphasis on the importance of vowels (consider all the different words in English that have the sound /b/-vowel-/t/). So Greek adapted the consonant for 'aleph (which represents a glottal stop, something Greek did not have) into an alpha (representing one of the five main vowels). On the other side, Brahmi adopted it by adding mandatory vowel marks to the character, so that each letter effectively represents a consonant-vowel pair [1]. However, there's a second complication, which is that Indo-European languages also tend to have complex consonant clusters rather than simple CV or CVC syllables. For example, the English word "strengths" has a 4-consonant cluster. So Brahmi also solved this problem by making a consonant cluster stack the consonants onto the character. [1] It should be noted that the evolution of most scripts seems to follow a pattern of marking logograms, going through a rebus stage (using homophones to represent words), then simplifying the inventory to have each letter represent a syllable, or at least a CV pair, as most languages tend to follow a CV or CVC syllable pattern. It was a single Semitic language (Proto-Sinaitic) that went all the way down to a single phoneme, probably thanks to the underemphasis on vowels in Semitic languages--and almost all abigudas, abjads, and alphabets derive ultimately from that one invention.

DonaldFisk 6y ago

The green ones are abugidas, which like Japanese Kana usually represent consonant-vowel pairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida, instead of single sounds. Unlike in Japanese Kana, which originated from Chinese characters, in an abugida consonant symbols are modified by vowel diacritics.