Scripts descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs | Hacker News Reader

Scripts descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs

thearchaeologist.org

28 pointsvinnyglennon14 comments

Taken from https://starkeycomics.com/2018/12/11/the-abcd-family-tree/

Which is a site that doesn't also spread conspiracy theories. Might be worth changing the link.

The next story I saw on this website was about a hidden underground civilisation underneath Antarctica. So for now I will take this with a grain of salt.

The chart looks fine. I don't know all the scripts, so there could be a contentious arrow or two in it somewhere, but it's broadly correct. The alphabet (in the sense of a writing system that represents the language with a small fixed set of symbols representing sounds) appears to have been invented only once.

I've seen this infographic many times before, and being a huge history buff, I've double checked a bunch of the alphabet/script progressions to see if wikipedia has sources confirming. As far as I can tell, it's pretty accurate.

Based on a cursory look, it appears largely correct historically. Here are a few pointers on the evolution of the Latin and Brahmi scripts if you'd like to dig in more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_script

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script

A super interesting example:

- It is generally held that the Latins derived their alphabet (the very one we're using to write these comments!) from the Etruscan alphabet.

- The Etruscan alphabet originated as an adaptation of the Euboean alphabet used by the Euboean Greeks in their first colonies in Italy

- The Greek alphabet was originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet

- Canaanites and/or Hyksos who spoke a Semitic language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct what would become the Phoenician script.

> - Canaanites and/or Hyksos who spoke a Semitic language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct what would become the Phoenician script.

- If they did it was via demotic script[1], Egyptian hieroglyphic writing of cursive form that was used in handwritten texts from the early 7th century BCE until the 5th century CE.

- Phoenician and Ancient Hebrew (or Paleo-Hebrew / Proto-Hebrew) alphabets[2] are very similar if not the same. Talmud even calls it "Lebanon script".

"The Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets are two slight regional variants of the same script."[2]

BTW: this is a well researched area, I'm just too lazy to find the relevant papers/books. But there are relatively good resources even on YouTube, but not necessarily in English.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet

oops, it seems that demotic script was developed 1000 years later than Hyksos period. So Hyksos is out, but these still might be Canaanites, or maybe there were earlier versions of rusive/handwriting script like demoitic.

Each letter was developed from a logogram of Semitic word starting with the same letter in Semitic language, e.g.

  Alef   - ox
  Bet    - house
  Gimmel - camel
  Dalet  - door
  etc.

One of my favorite fun facts that I learned because of this chart:

So the Coptic script is the Egyptian language but written with Greek letters (plus 6 extra letters for sounds the Greek alphabet doesn't cover).

What's particularly interesting is that the Greek alphabet itself was based on the Phoenician alphabet, which was in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In other words, the final stage of the Egyptian language (before Arabic was introduced) was written with a Greek script that was originally descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Full circle!

What in the hell is up with the Georgian script? The "A" is about the only letter of theirs I can match with the sound it makes, and it sort of looks like an upside down question mark without the dot. That's definitely not right.

The Georgian script is of uncertain origin. It's very old; at least 1600 years. It does seem to have influence from Greek.

It was common for Christian missionaries to invent an alphabet for the language of the community they meant to convert. Usually based closely on the Greek, but sometimes only very loosely. Coptic (the descendant of spoken ancient Egyptian) got a modified Greek alphabet with some extra letters. Gothic (a Germanic language once spoken in southeast Europe) did as well. But the early Slavic languages got the [3] Glagolitic alphabet, which is much more divergent, though still Greek inspired.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_alphabet [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script

I like how the tree begins at the root, at the bottom.

Knuth talks about how the idea of representing a tree structure as a proper tree collided with the top-down style of reading.

How we lay out symbols is as interesting as the symbols themselves.

Letter "D" comes from "door" not from "fish". It's wrong Egyptian hieroglyph.

ok, I see that it probably comes from this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script where the "fish" ("dag") hieroglyph is used. However, this wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalet) refers to the "door" (delet) hieroglyph.

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