Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/fascinating-chart-shows-the-ev.html
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Repost:
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Sooo…Z turned into I, and I turned into Z?
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I love alphabets. And syllabaries. And abjads.
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worth it.
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The chart starts from proto-sinaitic, you’ll have to fill in your thoughts about the evolution from Egyptian hieroglyphic.
Use your imagination!
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Minor quibble: the poster is tracing the evolution of the alphabet from Proto-Sinaitic to the modern alphabet.
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this would make a great t-shirt but it might not be good for any one who doesn’t want random Palaeograpers staring at their chest.
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(May I have a coke?)
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Hey! My eyes are up here!
Oh, right.
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This is interesting, but I dunno if I’d call it useful.
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See, that’s a matter of perspective. I’m tempted to buy the damn thing and I don’t have enough wall space as it is.
I’d accept mostly wonderful, though.
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From that graphic it looks like the Romans’ main contribution to the alphabet was to hold a mirror up to it.
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you’ll have to fill in your thoughts about the evolution from Egyptian hieroglyphic.
Egyptian hieroglyphics had a set of alphabetic characters for writing (mostly) foreign words and names. The Sinaitic people who worked as scribes for them realized that they could save a lot of time by writing everything using alphabetic characters, leaving out learning the thousands of more specialized hieroglyphic characters.
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Sure, Proto-Sinaitic adopted versions of hieroglyphs in use. But Proto-Sinaitic wasn’t just “Egyptian Hieroglyphics with the specialized characters omitted”.
The Egyptians didn’t use the same glyphs in the same way as Proto-Sinaitic. In Proto-Sinaitic, glyphs were chosen because the sound of the actual name of the glyph, matched the sound they were trying to convey, in their own non-Egyptian language. If Egyptian had a (purely-for-demonstration-purpose) glyph named “doubleyou” then it would be used to convey a “dah”. If there had been a glyph called crane, that looked like a crane, that could have been used to represent “kah”. That’s the pattern of the real forty-or-so Proto-Sinaitic characters, and the glyphs on the poster don’t match Egyptian usage.
That’s why the poster leaves out Egyptian. Because in that previous step, those “shapes” corresponded to completely different uses.
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I’d love to see something explaining/comparing the different alphabets and characters used in languages spoken today. IMO, speaking languages that use a different alphabet from your own may be difficult, but reading them is another matter.
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This is great - thanks! 
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I’ve learned most of the kanas. It’s easy if you take it slow.
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rachels english youtube channel does ‘learn the phonetic’
have since come up with various variables… ho-hum
