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Correct, the Phoenicians gave it to the Greeks who used vowel letters for the first time... though the Romans mostly inherited theirs from the Etruscans (who go

Correct, the Phoenicians gave it to the Greeks who used vowel letters for the first time... though the Romans mostly inherited theirs from the Etruscans (who got it from the Phoenicians too). That led to some oddities when the Romans conquered the Greeks and started merging the diverged alphabets. Nevertheless... some letters like aleph/alpha/A survive with and nearly identical orthography. The Phoenicians wrote it sideways compared to Latin - IIRC it was the horns of a bull and represented the first sound of the Phoenician word for cattle. I find it quite interesting that a writing system having that higher level of abstraction was invented so early. Most early systems were pictograph/ideograph or syllabic AFAIK. Taking the leap to breaking words into syllables then syllables into sounds reduces the orthography to a compact set of symbols with relatively simple rules that is still capable of expressing an entire language.

adastra22 3y ago
Alphabetic scripts are arguably not better than syllabic or ideographic scripts. They take less time to learn and are better able to capture the sounds of foreign words, but they are less efficient to mentally process. An already literate scribe working on one language only gets no advantage from an alphabet. My own theory (as an amateur interested in both linguistics and the history of this time period) is that the late Bronze Age collapse resulted in the decline of Akkadian and the accompanying cuneiform writing system as a diplomatic language, meaning that (1) records started being recorded in the local language only, and (2) what trade and diplomacy did happen had to be multilingual. In this contex, the alphabet does win out. And this is precisely when we saw the alphabet spread across the ancient near east and Mediterranean.
- xenadu02 3y ago
  Fair enough. I guess it depends on what the goal for writing systems is: a system that is easy to teach helps increase literacy but that hardly mattered to many empires throughout history who would rather the rabble not be able to read. The fact that alphabets are easier to use for technology like the printing press, telegraph, typewriters, and computers is purely a historical accident. I'm sure you could (if people didn't already) come up with an encoding scheme based on stroke order/position to transmit traditional Chinese over the telegraph so it's not like that was an insurmountable problem. FWIW l I'm a fairly fast reader and I recognize word shapes for regularly used words. Pretty sure that's a common technique regardless of the writing system in use.

adastra22 3y ago

Alphabetic scripts are arguably not better than syllabic or ideographic scripts. They take less time to learn and are better able to capture the sounds of foreign words, but they are less efficient to mentally process. An already literate scribe working on one language only gets no advantage from an alphabet. My own theory (as an amateur interested in both linguistics and the history of this time period) is that the late Bronze Age collapse resulted in the decline of Akkadian and the accompanying cuneiform writing system as a diplomatic language, meaning that (1) records started being recorded in the local language only, and (2) what trade and diplomacy did happen had to be multilingual. In this contex, the alphabet does win out. And this is precisely when we saw the alphabet spread across the ancient near east and Mediterranean.

xenadu02 3y ago
Fair enough. I guess it depends on what the goal for writing systems is: a system that is easy to teach helps increase literacy but that hardly mattered to many empires throughout history who would rather the rabble not be able to read. The fact that alphabets are easier to use for technology like the printing press, telegraph, typewriters, and computers is purely a historical accident. I'm sure you could (if people didn't already) come up with an encoding scheme based on stroke order/position to transmit traditional Chinese over the telegraph so it's not like that was an insurmountable problem. FWIW l I'm a fairly fast reader and I recognize word shapes for regularly used words. Pretty sure that's a common technique regardless of the writing system in use.