[reissbaker]

Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who were taught a simplified version by seafaring Canaanites — the Phoenicians — and termed it the "Phoenician alphabet" [2] despite the Phoenicians not specifically inventing it), significant alterations had to be made and it's been an imperfect match for most Western languages ever since.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

[rafram]

> This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language

It most certainly does not!

I think you could more or less accurately make that claim about Standard Arabic, which has preserved a distinct sound for each letter and only rarely does things that you wouldn’t expect (tanween…).

Modern Hebrew, by contrast, has merged many consonant sounds without merging their letters (sin and samekh, tav and tet), dropped the ayin sound and left the letter as a pseudo-vowel, and decoupled long vowel sounds from their long vowel carrier letters to the point that they’re essentially arbitrary (for each letter, you can find an example of it representing every single vowel sound).

To your main point, though, the main commonality between Semitic scripts and western Latin/Greek-derived scripts is the rough order of the letters and some of the shapes. Latin alphabet isn’t an abjad, it has lots of letters that have no equivalent in Semitic… and it actually represents many languages very faithfully! English is an outlier. So I am not convinced by your argument.

[nvader]

At least one counter-example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul is technically an alphabet, and is non-Canaanite derived.

[reissbaker]

It wasn't directly cribbed (unlike Western alphabets), but given that Hangul was invented in the 1400s after exposure to Western alphabets, most scholars still consider alphabets to have only been invented once [1] and then copied, much like the wheel. Although I suppose that's true of Cherokee too!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

[yorwba]

The Wikipedia article on Hangul has been rewritten over the years to deemphasize the evidence for a not-purely-de-novo origin, but you can still find it if you click the right links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#Hypothesized_...

[amluto]

It's not quite in the same category, but there's also Zhuyin Fuhao:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

[komali2]

I think the idea is that since the inventers of bopomofo were exposed to other alphabets, it's still considered a descendant alphabet. I usually think of descendant as something that visibly manifests its ancestry, so for example modern traditional characters look somewhat like the earliest Chinese characters, or, all romance languages sharing some sounds or even words. So maybe we need a different way to describe things like wheels and alphabets.

[fnordpiglet]

My understanding is it’s the earliest known alphabet but not the ancestor to all alphabetic languages as there are Asian and other alphabetic languages that are not derived from western or Arabic alphabets. Specifically Greek and Latin alphabets and their descendants are based on it. Specifically Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic alphabets derived from kanji (and Chinese pictograms) as a simplification of the pictographic language and not derived from proto sinaitic. Others are possibly linked, like Thai, Khmer, etc through an Aramaic -> Brami-> Pallava->Khmer linkage but the Brami link is not fully established to be true.

[reissbaker]

No: most scholars believe alphabets were only invented once, much like the wheel. All Western alphabets are direct descendants, and the non-Western alphabets were directly inspired by it. [1]

Phonetic alphabets were introduced to most of Asia by various Brahmic scripts; the most widely-used (albeit briefly-used) one being the Mongolian Phags-pa script [2], derived from Tibetan, derived from various Brahmic scripts, derived from Aramaic, derived from Phoenician, derived from — sure enough — proto-Sinaitic. Thai and Khmer are derived from Pallava [3], which is derived from Tamil-Brahmi, derived from other Brahmic scripts, again derived from Aramaic and thus eventually from proto-Sinaitic; etc etc.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallava_script

[BobaFloutist]

The wheel was independently invented in the Americas, it just seems to have been used exclusively for toys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#/media/File:Remojadas_Wh...

[BigTTYGothGF]

Syllabaries are not alphabets.

[andsoitis]

Technically, the proto-Sinaitic script is an abjad, with the Greek alphabet being the first true alphabet (symbols for both consonants and vowels).

Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.”

Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language.

The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.

[applicative]

Canaanite and its abjad have been in continuous use, in various versions, for more than 2,800 years. It's true there's no Linear B.

[kkkqkqkqkqlqlql]

> This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language

Wasn't Hebrew dead for like 2000 years or something until the Israeli state was set up? Not hard to have a faithful alphabet when your spoken language is frozen in time. Hell, even evolving languages, like Spanish, can have somewhat phonetically accurate alphabets. As said in the other comment, English is more of an exception in that regard.

[QuiDortDine]

"and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible": That is the definition of a dialect.

Also, I don't know how you can claim Hebrew is phonetically represented by its alphabet rather than the other way around, as a revived language the pronunciations are largely a matter of convention based on Yiddish. It would be more accurate to say that modern Hebrew uses an ancient writing system, which happens to be closely related to the ancestor of modern European alphabets.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

[reissbaker]

Hebrew is not based on Yiddish, lol; only Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation was influenced by Yiddish. Modern Israeli Hebrew uses primarily Sephardi pronunciation, and Ashkenazi is mocked (i.e. Shabbat is Sephardi, Shabbos is Ashkenazi; modern Israeli Hebrew uses Shabbat). I grew up around Ashkenazi pronunciation in America, and had to unlearn it when I spent time in Israel. Nonetheless, Yemenite, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi Hebrew — the three major extant pronunciations, only one of which was ever influenced by Yiddish (Ashkenazi) — are all extremely similar and mutually intelligible, and thus all of them are extremely well mapped to the alphabet. Yemenite is most likely closest to the original spoken language, specifically the ע, but there are very few differences. And a modern Hebrew speaker can easily understand Biblical Hebrew — they're closer than even Modern English and Shakespearean.

Also, not all colloquial dialects are mutually intelligible. Different Chinese dialects are still often referred to as "dialects," despite not being mutually intelligible (e.g. Cantonese vs Mandarin). While that's typically mostly the case for Western languages, there's a spectrum even there.

[simiones]

> And a modern Hebrew speaker can easily understand Biblical Hebrew — they're closer than even Modern English and Shakespearean.

Of course, because modern Hebrew was constructed based on (the modern understanding of) Biblical Hebrew around the 1920s or slightly earlier, whereas Modern English naturally evolved for ~400 years from Shakespearean English and other forms of English.

[rafram]

That’s simply incorrect. Most of the innovations in Modern Hebrew (relative to Biblical Hebrew) came in the Mishnaic period, early CE. Hebrew continued to be used as a liturgical language, and occasionally a business language, both in its Biblical and Mishnaic forms, until the 1880s (not 1920s), when the Zionist movement brought it back into use for casual speech. The Hebrew used in the Mishnah is quite close to the modern written language, though it lacks modern words and some very recent innovations like topic-first sentences.

[yellowapple]

> That is the definition of a dialect.

I dunno, some English dialects don't seem particularly intelligible to me, and I'm a natively fluent speaker of it.

[QuiDortDine]

This is like speciation but for languages: there's no "ah-ha!" moment, but we know a lemur can't produce viable offsprings with a zebra. Likewise we know Italian isn't French even though some words are kinda similar. If you want to be technical about it, it's a spectrum: I understand British people and people from the American deep South, but it's far from certain they will understand each other. Hard to be precise with social sciences.

That said, two people who understand each other are, by any reasonable definition, speaking dialects of the same tongue (if not, obviously, the very same dialect).

[rafram]

No, there is no linguistic definition of a dialect. It’s a purely political term. Hindi and Urdu are “languages” despite being nearly identical in their spoken forms; Moroccan Arabic is a “dialect” even though Lebanese Arabic speakers can’t understand it; Galician and Portuguese are separate “languages,” with a mysteriously precise dividing line right at the Portuguese border!

Linguists elide over the whole thing by using the term “language variety.”

[rayiner]

Egyptian hieroglyphics already had alphabetic elements, and the canaanites borrowed those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs (“Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system”).

[reissbaker]

Egyptian heiroglyphs were not an alphabet, even if they had alphabetic elements (in addition to pictographic ones). Scholars generally agree that proto-Sinaitic was the first alphabet, and all subsequent alphabets used today are either direct descendants or directly inspired by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

[ummonk]

Protp-Sinaitic was an abjad not an alphabet.

[reissbaker]

As per the Wikipedia links, it's generally considered by scholars to be the origin of all alphabets and an early alphabetic script. Abjad is a term invented in 1990 to distinguish early alphabetic scripts without vowels from later scripts with them. Effectively every scholar agrees that Canaanite/Aramaic/Hebrew/Arabic are alphabetic systems (while also acknowledging them as abjads).

[canjobear]

Egyptian writing had phonetic elements (as does the modern Chinese writing system) but it was not an alphabet in the strict linguistic sense that individual symbols indicated individual phonemes.

[tedd4u]

Very enjoyable documentary on this alphabetic development with relevant on-site visits.

https://www.amazon.com/A-to-Z-Season-1/dp/B0CWCHTM3B

Episode 2 then covers the printing press.

[Terr_]

> all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite

Counterexample: Korean Hangul [0]

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

[austin-cheney]

Another counter-example is Phags Pa Script.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script

[buildsjets]

Explain. The wiki you linked to specifically states that it is descended from Tibetan script, which is in turn descended from Proto-Sinaitic script.

[austin-cheney]

The article said nothing like that. It was an original script invented by a Tibetan monk at the paid directions of Kublai Khan.

> Descending from Tibetan script, it is part of the Brahmic family of scripts, which includes Devanagari and scripts used throughout Southeast Asia and Central Asia.[5] It is unique among Brahmic scripts in that it is written from top to bottom,[5] as how classical Chinese used to be written, and as the Mongolian alphabet or later Manchu alphabet is still written.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script

> The origin of the script is still much debated, with most scholars stating that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts. Some scholars favour the idea of an indigenous origin,[19] or connection to the much older and as yet undeciphered Indus script[20][21] but the evidence is insufficient at best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script

So maybe, but probably not and this particular language though it has roots elsewhere of debated origin was an original spontaneous creation.

[cwnyth]

"but probably not": Actually, probably so. The scholars who favor the indigenous explanation are a small minority outside of India. It's possible it was independent, but very, very doubtful, and none can explain the enormous gap in time between the Indus script and later Brahmic scripts.

[austin-cheney]

What does it matter if some scholars are from outside of India? All I am seeing are conclusions from unstated assumptions that appear to be drawn from a bias.

My conclusions are coming directly from the Wikipedia articles that I linked to. If I am that wrong then edit the Wikipedia articles.

[reissbaker]

The Wikipedia articles say the majority of scholars believe it's based on Aramaic, while a minority of people (primarily non-linguistic-specialists in India) disagree. I think you're the one drawing from bias.

[ummonk]

"This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language" - nonsense. That's just because modern Hebrew is based on the written language and thus reflects spelling pronunciation rather than historical pronunciation.

Also, proto-Sinaitic is not an alphabet. That's why Persian writing became harder to read when they switched from the nearly alphabetic Old Persian cuneiform to Aramaic abjad descended from proto-Sinaitic.

[reissbaker]

No, modern Hebrew and ancient Hebrew mapped similarly well to the written script — the primary difference between the two is just consonant drift. Both used the same structure of triconsonant roots with affixed patterns, and modern Hebrew morphology is identical to ancient Hebrew (phonemes changed primarily due to consonant drift, but not its structure). Arabic, for example, is similar and similarly well-mapped to its script, as are other Semitic languages that are closely related to ancient Canaanite.

[dang]

> nonsense

Can you please make your substantive points without directing pejoratives at the other? This is covered in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Your comment would be just fine (indeed, excellent) without that bit.