Re: Ancient writing systems

On Apr 24, 1:34 pm, hru...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Herman Rubin) wrote:

As has already been mentioned in this thread, Phoenician is not an
alphabet, "Indian" is neither a script (there are hundreds of Indian
scripts) nor an alphabet, and Korean is not an alphabet.

It is not universally agreed that an alphabet must be a
system which includes both consonants and vowels, nor that
one cannot have compound characters. Characters with an
accent above, etc., are common compound characters.

Every encyclopedia article I have read on "alphabets"
claims that the Greek alphabet is derived from the
Phoenician alphabet, and it is called an alphabet.
The Hebrew and Arabic character systems are called
alphabets by quite a few.

Then you haven't read an encyclopedia article written in the last ten
years or so, since my analysis started gaining favor.

The Devanagari script, and many of those derived from it,
are alphabets; these have consonants and vowels. Korean
may be questioned, but the idea of putting the recognizable
parts of a syllable in a block does not detract from the
idea of an alphabet with a syllable separator character
instead of just a word separator character.

What do you think you know about Devanagari, and what scripts do you
think are derived from Devanagari???

.

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