favourite thing at the moment (apart from the cookies):
ok here goes: who here knows a western alphabet other than the Latin one?
bc you see. All writing systems currently in use for any living language are descended either from Ancient Egyptian or Ancient Chinese writing systems. Generally accepted facts. I know nothing about ones descended from Chinese so this is not about them I'm afraid
but for my sins I am learning a third alphabet atm (lecturer was like "this project you want to do would be way easier if you knew Greek and I was like LET'S GO THEN)
and the thing that's really interesting is like. occasionally you can see the family resemblance in the letter, right? α looks like a. σ doesn't look like s but it DOES look like ס.
More interesting, though, and we'll take the Hebrew alphabet for two reasons - it's the one I've spent more time with, and it's conceptually farther from the Latin - here's the second half of the Hebrew alphabet:
ל מ ם נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת
(this looks wrong to me bc they're written left to right but we'll work with it)
so far so... you can't tell what's going on visually, really. If you mirror them, you can see a couple of resemblances: p פ; q ק; r ר
but let me tell you the NAMES of those letters. Cause those are lamed, mem, nun, samech, ayin, peh, tsaddi, qof, resh, shin, and tav
take out samech and tsaddi, which snuck in somehow, and you have lmnop qrst
which suggests that not only are the letters themselves inherited, the concept of an alphabet - the concept that you can list letters in a standardized order to keep track of them - somehow that's part of what was handed down too! Isn't that cool!
And then you get into the weeds and find out that a) that is very much part of what was handed down and b) the earliest known Phoenician abecedary (written alphabet) is from around 1000BC and more or less in the order of the above
