All over India and Southeast Asia they write with these squiggly, loopy, hangy, sprouty scripts.

But perhaps the only thing cooler than the way they look is the way they work!

A spice market in India. The hooded figure in front of you apologizes for the kidnapping.

He needs your help. He explains that his land has taken part in history’s most elaborate

and rigorous memorization exercises. Instead of scribes, they had recitations. These weren’t

retellings of campfire stories, these were whole libraries of knowledge handed down for

generations. He says his name is Ashoka. This is his land, and he’s king. After a bloody

and violent war, he had a change of heart, and now has but one singular focus: to spread

his message - a law of tolerance and compassion - throughout the land.

But he doesn’t want to use the mouth-to-ear memorization ways of the oral tradition. That’s

for old texts and old ideas! No, his vision is to install massive pillars around his empire,

each one engraved with his list of edicts. This, he explains, is where you come in. See,

he’s been keeping tabs on you as you roamed the land of the Semitic abjads, and he really

likes this crazy consonant alphabet idea. He’ll take it.

But he also appreciates the whimsical simplicity of accenting consonants with vowel marks.

Oh, and he doesn’t want to have to write the vowel if it’s just a short “uh”.

His language is full of those. So he’ll write “funnel” something like this, with

these built in syllables. But wait, it’s not “funnel-uh”. That final “l” isn’t

a separate syllable. He needs a way to write just bare consonants, to tell his past apart

from his pasta. How? With a simple “hush” stroke below the letter. Now, he brags to

you, his system is complete.

Make sure you don’t miss the step he’s taking here. It’s a “Major Moments in

the History of Writing”! Each of the character units fundamentally represents a syllable.

It just so happens that, unless the vowel in that syllable is a short “a”, the vowel

gets added onto (or below or beside) the consonant character. On their own, the base characters

contain that dummy vowel “uh”, like “puh”, but you can take that “puh” and modify

it with any vowel you like. Certain vowels go in certain places - like “ee” to the

side or “oo” below. So in India, characters are syllables, but, unlike a full syllabary,

you don’t need a completely separate character for each separate syllable. And all characters

give consonant plus vowel information, but, unlike a full alphabet, you don’t line up

sequences of consonants plus vowels, consonants plus vowels. The hybrid combination nature

of this system earns it the name “alphasyllabary”.

Combos are built into this system, paving the way for over a thousand ligatures - commonly

linked characters - in the alphasyllabary. Sure, other writing systems develop ligatures

in their calligraphy. But the Indic alphasyllabary welcomes them naturally.

As it’s passed all around this entire slice of the world, up to Nepal and Tibet, down

the coast to Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and beyond, this script keeps updating its

look but continues to capture consonants and vowels accurately, like an alphabet, and to

write those voweled consonants in syllable units, like a syllabary.

Even completely unrelated alphasyllabaries seize on this same idea. This is the Ethiopic

symbol for “ma”. This one reads “me”. And this is “mu”. This is “la”, “le”

and “lu”. Now that you understand alphasyllabaries, you must answer this next question: if this

symbol sounds like “ba”, how do you write “be” and “bu” in Ethiopia? This is

your Ge’ez abcd’s, the abugida - looks different, but works much the same way.

Your characters have never looked so different, even after the Greeks and Romans took them

over. Maybe it’s this dizzying variety of writing systems. Or maybe Thoth’s pill is

starting to wear off.