Comment by FridayoLeary
Comment by FridayoLeary 12 hours ago
ot but i recently discovered that the latin alphabet western languages use has it's roots in the semitic languages of the middle east. It is of course obvious when you think about it, even the name alphabet is basically the same as aleph bet, the first two letters of hebrew. It's even more obvious when you look at the similarities in the names of the Greek alphabet which Latin is based off.
What happened in short was that the greeks copied the ancient and now virtually defunct phoenican script, varieties of which were used across the region and kept the names even though they made no sense in the context of Greek, added vowels and wrote it from left to right.
The russians adapted the script in one way, Latin in another, Hebrew and arabic took entirely separate paths and now the only thing they share in common is alphabets that follows vaguely the same ordering.
And Phoenician and Proto-Sinaitic in turn derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Furthermore, most alphabets in the world derive from that same one source.
It goes to show just how powerful the idea of writing is - once you have a society where it's pervasive, all its neighbors acquire it from them in short order, and they usually do so by adapting the original writing script to their needs. I strongly suspect that the reason why alphabets (and to a lesser extent syllabaries) spread especially widely is because they are easier to adapt to a different language - usually, once you've learned a new alphabet, it's more or less readily obvious how to use it to approximate any language that you already know.
(Which is also how you get imperfect spellings even in brand new orthographies. Practicality usually beats purity.)