3 ms·
The Latin alphabet, or rather Phoenician, from which Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts are descended, is more like 3500 years old.
by wheels 17y ago
The Latin alphabet, or rather Phoenician, from which Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts are descended, is more like 3500 years old.
- tokenadult 17y agoBut both the specific letter forms of the Roman alphabet and, more relevantly, the general spelling patterns of English are much more recent than that (as they would have to be). But, yes, writing is more ancient in the Near East than it is in China, for sure. It's just that it has gone through more language-specific adaptations, especially in the direction of exhaustively spelling all speech sounds with a minimal number of writing characters, than writing in China has.