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

[Tom Zurinskas]

Video of where English came from and alphabet history chart.
http://www.gramatica.com.au/the-english-language.html  Origin of English language (from Ukraine) plus origin and transformation of the alphabet From Greg Byrnes Grammatica site


Tom Zurinskas,  Originally from SW Conn 20 yrs,  college NE Tenn 3,  work SE NJ  33,  resides SE Florida 18...  truespel.com






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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at MST.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, October 4, 2020 7:12 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Invention of the Alphabet. Thank you Canaanites

It's not simply that two Arabic letters can be joined but that many

of them are reduced in size in the process, so that only a small

part of the original letter may be used in a ligature. The result is a form of

shorthand writing,  And since vowels are usually omitted in writing,

the shorthand feature is double.


And on a side note, it's interesting to see how the individual letters

originated.


Gerald Cohen

________________________________
James Landau <jjjrlandau at NETSCAPE.COM>, wrote Saturday, October 3, 2020 3:20 PM:

On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 06:05:26 Zone-0400=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0Wilson Gray <hwgray@=
GMAIL.COM>=C2=A0 wrote:
<quote>It's been said that the alphabet was invented only once. There is on=
ly one
alphabet, with many variations. Wikipedia says that this may well be the
case and says that the Arabic 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 ne=
ver joined.
Arabic never had such a rule and went slaphappy with ligatured letters, dev=
eloping into the present Arabic alphabet in which each letter has four form=
s, depending on whether it stands alone in a word, has only a preceding let=
ter, has only a following letter, or has letters on both sides.
James Landau
jjjrlandau at netscape.com

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