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Comment by setopt | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like they count from approximately the origin of the first “alphabet” (including vowels), while writing itself is much much older.

Btw, I recommend anyone who hasn’t looked at it before to read up a bit on the history of writing. It shocked me a bit that writing has only been independently invented 4 times in known human history (Egypt, Middle East, China, Mesoamerica), with all other writing systems being either inspired or derived from nearby systems.

The English/Latin alphabet, for example, is a distant descendant of the Phoenician abjad, which itself was ultimately derived from Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Some traces are left today, like the letter “A” looking a bit like an up-side down bulls head with horns… because it actually descends from the hieroglyph for bull.

Interestingly, Arab, Hebrew, and Indic scripts are all derived from the same Phoenician ancestor, despite how different they all look today…

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> Interestingly, Arab, Hebrew, and Indic scripts are all derived from the same Phoenician ancestor, despite how different they all look today…

Same with Thai or... Mongolian - a not so distant cousin of Aramaic!

The fun thing about Mongolian is that to notice its similarity to Aramaic, you'll need to tilt your head by 90 degrees.

Compare this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script#/media/File:M...

With this: https://www.avesta.org/fonts/index.html

Now look at the first picture again and tilt your head.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that, although I studied Middle Persian and Avestan (both of which rely on a variant of Aramaic), it took me almost 15 years to notice that. Now, it’s impossible to unsee.

Yes, however Sumer were unique in hitting upon the idea of glyphs representing sounds, rather than ideograms, which seem to develop fairly frequently and independently. It did take the better part of 1500 years for them to make that breakthrough, but the result was enormous, and allowed the storage and transmission of information with much greater efficiency and nuance.

> It shocked me a bit that writing has only been independently invented 4 times in known human history

In the middle east alone there are several ancestral writing systems that can't be traced to a single origin.

Source and examples?

Note the focus on "independently" invented, and that I said "inspired or derived from nearby systems". There are many examples of writing systems that were made "from scratch" but only after contact with other civilizations that were already writing - e.g. the Korean Hangeul was designed from scratch, but only after millenia of Chinese literacy in Korea; and the Cherokee syllabary was designed from scratch, but only after centuries of contact with Western colonizers including access to their existing writing tools. If this is the kind of process you meant you meant with "multiple ancestral alphabets", I completely agree. But those were not "independent" inventions of "writing" as a concept. The idea of denoting ideas/sounds on paper is much harder to invent than the specific symbols mapped to each idea/sound.

My understanding is that the consensus in the literature is that all writing systems in the Middle East were either derived from an existing writing system, or created from scratch after prolonged contact with neighboring civilizations that could already write, where these historical lines can be drawn all the way back to Hieroglyphs and Cuneiform. I believe there is little evidence to suggest multiple inventions of writing as a concept by isolated groups in the region.

As for major writing systems that are still in use today across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia, there's even less variety: I believe most of them are ultimately descended from Phoenician.

Thank you, this is fascinating! Do you have any recommended reading?

Unfortunately, I don’t recall exactly which sources I read on this, it was many years ago. I just recall that it started as one of those “wild link chases” on Wikipedia and ended up deep in some downloaded textbook PDFs :)

But I do recall enjoying diagrams such as this illustrating how different modern alphabets are related via historical counterparts (there are similar diagrams showing how Hebrew and Arabic emerges from Phoenician, as well as comparisons to runes): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script#/media/File%3A...

I also rather enjoyed reading about the history from Hieroglyphs, to Hieratic, to Phoenician (as well as Phoenician history in general). But unfortunately, don’t recall where. Start with Wikipedia :)

Thanks! I used to have an old dictionary that traced the evolution of the letters, it was quite cool. There is a book 'Textual Scholarship' by Greetham that goes deep on the more modern letterforms like Uncial. I haven't cracked that in a while.

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