Hacker News Reader

Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

The Greeks. They're the first known group to explicitly represent vowels, unlike the older Egyptian derived systems which only represented consonants and thus were abjads rather than alphabets.

View on HN

While the Greeks have invented the most significant improvement of the writing system, after that when some Semitic people have simplified the Egyptian writing system by eliminating all the multi-consonant signs, any discussion about the Greek alphabet cannot omit the fact that they did not invent the alphabet, but they have only improved the Phoenician alphabet, by reusing signs corresponding to consonants not used in Greek to write the Greek vowels.

This was a huge advance, but it cannot be named as "inventing the alphabet".

It depends what you mean by alphabet. In the narrow sense (consonants AND vowels) Greek was the first language to have one - Phoenician had an abjad (consonants only), probably because most words had 3 consonant roots, with vowels varying with their grammatical role.

To elaborate on this a bit more: When discussing the history of writing systems, the term "alphabet" can be used in two different senses. In a broader sense the term refers to the set of symbols, typically in a specific order, that are based on representing phonetic elements with signs (in contrast to logographic systems). In a narrower sense, the term refers to the Greek alphabet and its derivatives, to distinguish them from their syllabic or consonant-only predecessors.

It should be noted in this context, that Semitic languages can be written with comparatively less disambiguity with a consonant-only set of symbols, as the correct vowels can be inferred with relatively good accuracy from the consonants and the context. For Indo-European languages, such as Greek, this is not the case. However, even for Semitic languages a consonant-only writing-system was far from ideal. Thus, various strategies have been developed to reduce ambiguity, such as the use of plene scriptum[1] or punctation[2] in Hebrew.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plene_scriptum

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_punctuation

The Japanese. They're the first known group to explicitly represent Emoji, unlike the older Latin derived systems which could only represent emotion through character combinations and thus were lame rather than complete.

Not sure if /s, but I recently read about emoji history. It apparently originated from pagers and then "graduated" to phones.

https://one-from-nippon.ghost.io/story-of-the-emoji/

Doesn't talk about kaomoji though which I think are supercool. Like this table flip: ( ╯ ° □ ° ） ╯ ︵ ┻ ━ ┻

Uh, emoji predate pagers and the contributions of the Japanese :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com