Interesting article. The history of the various scripts actually does have at least a limited parallel in the world - Ancient Egypt. >Although many people thin

Interesting article. The history of the various scripts actually does have at least a limited parallel in the world - Ancient Egypt. >Although many people think of Egyptian hieroglyphs as logographic or pictographic, it actually combines symbols for entire words with symbols for individual sounds. That is, it is a system that is partly logographic and partly alphabetic. It can be called logophonetic. [0] This evolution continued for a while yet! The monumental hieroglyphs into a more easy to write cursive called "hieratic". The hieratic script further evolved into "demotic" - this was closer to a real alphabet, with directionality and ease of writing driving this change. The hieroglyphic roots are essentially lost at this point. Demotic then mixed with the greek alphabet by the Coptic community into the Coptic script! > Generally, Hieroglyphics were used for monumental inscriptions and decorative texts, and Hieratic was used for administrative texts which placed more importance in content than appearance, which were written by hand, and which needed to be written quickly. Demotic writing developed around 600 BC. It was derived from Hieratic writing, but developed into a highly cursive form so that the pictographic element of some symbols was lost. Although many single symbols were still used to write whole words or concepts, the symbol did not necessarily visually resemble the concept it represented. [1] Script comparison (see page 5): https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A_Very_Brief_Introduction_to_Hieratic.pdf https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A... Hieratic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic Demotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian) Coptic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script [0] https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~:text=Although%20many%20people%20think%20of,It%20can%20be%20called%20logophonetic https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~.... [1] https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_detail&uid=yhvayd2uk7 https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_...