1224: Most Writing-Systems come from 1 Source Apr 16, 2018

Think of an alphabet other than the Latin script, and what comes to mind: Cyrillic? Greek? Hebrew (Assyrian)? Arabic? Ge'ez? Brahmi? Devanāgāri? Pallava? Khmer? the list goes on and on, but one thing that these and many others have in common is that they are all ultimately descended from the ancient, Phoenician writing-system. There are literally dozens of writing systems that have some roots with the Phoenician alphabet (it's called that but technically it's an abjad), with a few notable exceptions being Chinese, Korean, and anything from the Americas, including Cree, which was nevertheless was invented by someone who had the Latin script. This means that as foreign-looking as something written in Hindi or Khmer looks to someone writing in English, the alphabets all go back to the same place. Sometimes this is obvious, such as what became ה in Hebrew (Assyrian) became h in Latin, but other times it may look like more of a stretch. Carrying on from yesterday, there will be more about writing systems in the coming days.
Today, a radio-style video about an alternate history of English was released on Patreon, so check it out: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-english-have-18200654?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=postshare.