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My understanding is that writing was invented several times independently (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Americas, maybe Indus valley, maybe Easter island...). It
by FabHK 6y ago
My understanding is that writing was invented several times independently (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Americas, maybe Indus valley, maybe Easter island...).
It seems fully alphabetic writing was only invented once, and can be traced back the Mesopotamian one, which in turn might have been inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs as described in the article?
- wl 6y agoThe only "alphabets" (quotes because Ugaritic is an abjad) that can be traced back to Mesopotamia are the Ugaritic and old Persian alphabets. Both are independent simplifications of the syllabic cuneiform script into "alphabets." Both are linguistic dead ends, with no subsequent scripts arising from them. The Phoencian "alphabet" is unrelated to Mesopotamian cuneiform. It likely represents another independent invention, but this time deriving from Egyptian hieroglyphs rather than cuneiform.
- FabHK 6y agoWow, thanks for that insight/correction.
- akdor1154 6y agoSurely Korean Hangul is a counterexample? And I'm not even a linguist, there are probably more.
- bodhiandphysics 6y agoHangul and Indian scripts are both independent of Aramaic in that they don’t share letters, but presumably Indian scripts were influenced by the idea of alphabets (since the Aramaic karoshti script also was used in India) and Hangul was influenced by how Indic scripts work (though the letter forms are different)