There are nearly 300 writing systems out there in the world.
Some work like building blocks while others are the words themselves, some have vowels
and others do not, some are squiggly some are boxy, and some are long extinct while
others are everywhere in the modern world.
But writing systems, much like the languages they encode, don’t always spring up out
of nowhere, but descend from another similar script, maybe adding and changing a few letters
here and there.
Writing arose independently multiple times, but what if I told you that most of the scripts
used today and in the past all descend from one script?
on the merch store!
These shirts have guides on how to read different scripts, and printed upside-down so you, the
wearer can easily use them on your travels.
We’re starting this off with Cyrillic and Arabic, but if enough people buy these, we’ll
be launching even more designs with more scripts!]
Sumerian1: So, what do you think of my invention?
Sumerian2: Oh my gods that is an amazing idea, write that down!
Sumerian1: Wait what is “write”?
Sumerian2: That… is a good question.
Let’s start in Ancient Egypt, where you may almost certainly recognize ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs.
And if you don’t…
well here they are.
These symbols were mostly used as what is called a logography.
What is a logography?
Chinese characters are a logography, a type of script where the different characters represent
not sounds but concepts, like house or water or person.
However, if you look at the 700+ hieroglyphs there were and are thinking “ain’t nobody
got time for that”, congratulations, you are in sync with the ancient Egyptians, as
a sort of cursive form called hieratic would also come into use shortly after.
You might also be in sync with the Phoenicians.
By the mid-2nd millennium BC, Egypt version 3.0 started to expand, conquering their neighbors
in Nubia to the south and the land of Canaan to the northeast.
While the Phoenicians in the area started out using cuneiform, they would adopt a sort
of simplified version of Egyptian hieroglyphs, evolving from Proto-Sinaitic, also a common
ancestor of the Ge’ez script used across East Africa in languages like Amharic.
You see, while each symbol was supposed to represent a thing not a sound, that thing
still had a particular set of sounds attached to it (or in linguistics terminology: a word),
so you could also use hieroglyphs as an abjad (basically an alphabet without the vowels).
For instance this was the symbol for house, for which the word in Phoenician (and other
Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew) would’ve been ‘bet’, and thus this symbol
adopted the name ‘bet’, and represented the sound ‘B’ instead of the concept of
a house.
String a few together and oh baby you can spell words for all the brand new foreign
concepts you want!
A lot of the time, a script might be adopted by a language that it was not designed for,
like say Greek, which is an Indo-European Hellenic language whereas Phoenician was an
Afro-Asiatic Semitic language.
If that just sounded like a bunch of nerd jargon to you, that just means Greek and Phoenician
are extremely different from one-another.
Case in point, vowels matter a lot more in Greek than Phoenician, but no two languages
share the same sounds either, so they could just repurpose letters for sounds they didn’t
need as the vowels they did need.
[AD]
It was their Old Italic script that begat the Latin script used by the Romans, and later
the kingdoms of Europe, and later the empires of Europe, and later Vietnam.
However it was likely also from the Etruscans that Northern Europe got their system of runes.
There was also another script that branched off from Greek in the 9th century AD, invented
by Saints Cyril and Methodius to write Slavic languages.
Can you guess which one?
That’s right, Glagolitic!
Glagolitic was developed by the two brothers to transcribe the language of Old Church Slavonic.
However some of their disciples would make their way to Bulgaria, where Glagolitic would
be turned into the Cyrillic we all know and love today.
Greek also branched off in the Caucasus, creating Armenian and the Georgian scripts.
What this means is that Turkey, surrounded by 8 countries, is surrounded by 6 different
scripts, all of which are actually related to one another.
Getting back out of Europe now, the Phoenicians also did plenty of that colonization stuff,
but also plenty of that trading stuff with their neighbors.
The Berbers saw that neat little script the Phoenicians had and yoinked it for themselves,
as did the Arameans, the next link in our journey.
You see Aramaic was used for the Aramaic language (shocker, I know) which became the lingua
franca of the Neo-Babylonian and later the Persian Achaemenid Empire.
From this seat of prominence, Aramaic would inspire the writing systems used in Hebrew,
Arabic, and a script called Syriac, which in turn gave rise to Sogdian, Old Turkic,
Old Hungarian, Uyghur, and Mongolian.
And that brings us to China, and by extension Japan and Korea, and it’s important we mention
China here because… there’s literally no relation here whatsoever, let’s go somewhere
else.
But there’s another branch that might also descend from Phoenician.
In India, the script known as Kharosthi descended from Aramaic, but there is also another, more
influential script that might belong within this family as well.
You see, many linguists think that the Aramaic script might also be the ancestor of the Brahmi
script (not that kind of Brummie, this kind of Brahmi), which was used in Northern India
for several hundred years.
However many does not mean *all*, as there are two camps, those who believe Brahmi developed
on its own with no non-Indian influences (or perhaps from the script used by the Indus
River Valley civilization), and those who believe there were at least some non-Indian
influences, perhaps from a Semitic script like Aramaic?
So that leaves me sort of between a rock and a hard place.
Either I can talk about a linguistic theory that could be completely wrong, or I can have
a shorter and arguably more boring video.
But hey, when you’re between a rock and a hard place, why not just walk around them?
So *if* there is a connection between Brahmi and Aramaic, then that expands the Phoenician
phonetic family throughout all these places east of the Middle East.
As I mentioned in a previous video, Brahmi was used to write Sanskrit for several centuries,
but slowly split into several different regional varieties, largely divided into a northern
and southern family.
In the north we get scripts like Devanagari (that’s what this script you see all over
India is called), Bengali, Odia, Tibetan, and several others (India has a lot of writing
systems, you might want to watch that video after this one).
In the south meanwhile we get Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Sinhala, but also many indigenous
scripts used across Southeast Asia, like Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Balinese, and Baybayin.
So the next time you look at a writing system you’re not familiar with, look more closely,
because it might just be more familiar than you think… or something like that, pfft
I don’t know, I just like talking about writing systems and wanted to sell shirts.