[LAC-Tech]

Isn't there a theory that writing medium effects scripts? IE the angles of Runes lended themselves well to carving. And something about left-to-right scripts was to avoid smudging.

So I wonder the writing medium Arabic was for. Roman Alphabet does lend itself reasonably well to stone work I feel.

Or is that one of those linguistic myths that doesn't play out like that.

[bradrn]

I don’t think it’s a myth at all. Arabic was written with a reed pen or ‘qalam’ [0], and that can certainly be seen in the modern script (e.g. [1], to take the first random example I found). But its ‘joined-up’ nature seems to have been a regional style — it’s also found in scripts like Syriac, Avestan, Mandaic, Manichaean, and even the delightfully bizarre Bactrian Greek (there’s some nice samples in [2]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalam

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mppajQ7TLGs

[2] https://greekasia.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-bactrian-language...

[silversmith]

There might be some stretches of imagination there, but the base is solid - cuneiform writing was definitely formed by the medium (pressing a cut reed into clay).