[Ads-l] Invention of the Alphabet. Thank you Canaanites

[James Landau]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 06:05:26 Zone-0400   Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>  wrote:
<quote>It's been said that the alphabet was invented only once. There is only one
alphabet, with many variations. Wikipedia says that this may well be the
case and says that the Artabic alphabet looks weird because it's based on a
cursive version of the alphabet.<end quote>
There is a strict rule in Hebrew that no two letters may be joined together, as by a ligature.  As a result in Hebrew both the block letters used in printing and the cursive letters used in writing stand alone and are never joined.
Arabic never had such a rule and went slaphappy with ligatured letters, developing into the present Arabic alphabet in which each letter has four forms, depending on whether it stands alone in a word, has only a preceding letter, has only a following letter, or has letters on both sides.
James Landau
jjjrlandau at netscape.com

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