How many times have the uesti invented writing?

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Thomas Winwood
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Post by Thomas Winwood »

Zeta got removed from the Latin alphabet around 300 BCE when Latin rhotacised all its [z]s and didn't need the letter anymore. It got reimported from Greek later on, hence why in pretty much all the languages of Europe it's pronounced "zed" or "zet".

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Post by zompist »

Your original statement was that the Latin alphabet was "at least as removed in regards to sequence" as Hangul and Brahmi. And that's just not true: the Hangul order, if it's related at all, is quite disordered; the Latin order, barring lost symbols, is exactly the same.

Zeta was borrowed into the Latin alphabet in the proper position, after F; but then it was discarded-- it's a lost letter, like Greek san. When it was reintroduced from Greek along with Y, it was evidently perceived as a new letter and added at the end. (The Greeks followed the same principle with their new letters.)

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Post by zompist »

brandrinn wrote:But Hangul doesn't fit the pattern quite so well. The order of Korean letters is: K N T L M P S... etc. K still comes first, and T comes before P, but otherwise the order is messed up. Maybe it's a recent thing.
I was curious and looked into this more; turns out Korean has changed the alphabetic order. The original was

k kh ng t th n p ph m c ch s ʔ h null l z

From k to m this is the order of Devanagari; after that it pretty much goes to hell.

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Post by rotting bones »

brandrinn wrote:I did some quick Googling, and yep, the orders of the letters in Japanese are pretty obviously influenced by the Brahmi family of scripts.
Interesting, if s comes from ch, h/f from p and w is v/w, then it's exactly the same:

a a
i i
u u
e e
o o

k-series k
ch-series s
t-series t n
p-series h m
y y
r,l r
v w
~ (nasalization) final n

This isn't surprising since Japan is the only place where Siddham, the sacred script of Tang Tantrism survived in regular and widespread use. What was the original order of kana, gojuon or iroha?
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Thomas Winwood
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Post by Thomas Winwood »

Iroha is the traditional order, but the earliest recorded ordering is the gojuon.

The S-row was originally [ts] and the H-row was originally [p], hence their placement in the Japanese gojuon.

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Post by rotting bones »

XinuX wrote:Iroha is the traditional order, but the earliest recorded ordering is the gojuon.

The S-row was originally [ts] and the H-row was originally [p], hence their placement in the Japanese gojuon.
Figures, thanks!
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Post by brandrinn »

zompist wrote:
brandrinn wrote:But Hangul doesn't fit the pattern quite so well. The order of Korean letters is: K N T L M P S... etc. K still comes first, and T comes before P, but otherwise the order is messed up. Maybe it's a recent thing.
I was curious and looked into this more; turns out Korean has changed the alphabetic order. The original was

k kh ng t th n p ph m c ch s ʔ h null l z

From k to m this is the order of Devanagari; after that it pretty much goes to hell.
The Hangul letter for /ts\/ looks an awful lot like the phags-pa for /s/, which was added after the stops, so that may explain why Hangul's CH is out of place.
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Re: How many times have the uesti invented writing?

Post by Aidan »

rotting ham wrote:
con quesa wrote:Writing, although not alphabetic writing, was invented probably three times in Earth's history, by the Chinese, the Mayans, and the Sumerians (and by the Egyptians as well depending on whether or not heiroglyphics were inspired by Sumerian writing, although they probably were).
Lol no, writing has been discovered several times even without including some intriguing possibilities in prehistoric Europe, India, South America, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing But that may just be due to Earth's greater land area. [...] BTW, I've never heard it seriously argued that Egyptian hieroglyphs were inspired by cuneiforms before.
Actually, the wikipedia article you link more or less agrees with con quesa:
"True writing, or phonetic writing, records were developed independently in four different civilizations in the world."

Being the four con quesa lists, except quesa finds the hypothesis of Egyptian independent development doubtful.

I would go further and say I find the Egyptian independent origin extremely doubtful, and the Chinese independent origin somewhat doubtful as well.

Egyptian and Chinese writing are each clearly based on previous non-writing symbols used in meaningful ways in those regions, but it does not necessarily follow that the conversion of those symbols to true writing was not inspired from outside the region.

In my opinion, Earthly humans have invented writing only twice. Possibly three times. So that's pretty much the same count as you put forward for Almea!

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Re: How many times have the uesti invented writing?

Post by rotting bones »

Aidan wrote:"True writing, or phonetic writing, records were developed independently in four different civilizations in the world."
Like I said, only if you don't count indirect transmissions of ideas.
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Re: How many times have the uesti invented writing?

Post by Aidan »

rotting ham wrote:
Aidan wrote:"True writing, or phonetic writing, records were developed independently in four different civilizations in the world."
Like I said, only if you don't count indirect transmissions of ideas.
Uh, okay. Yes I see now you said that later on. I'm confused, however, of what the value is in discussing how many times people have invented writing once they already knew about writing; or why your response to a fact you apparently agreed with was "lol no". But whatever.

Anyway. In conclusion, it seems like the number of times each writing and alphabetic writing have been invented on Almea is nearly identical to on Earth, within the margin of historical knowledge. So, well played, Z.

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Re: How many times have the uesti invented writing?

Post by rotting bones »

Aidan wrote:So, well played, Z.
I agree, it's very plausible.
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Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

There's more to say and ask, however. We know about the uesti, and it is implied that the flaids borrowed from the uesti. However, on Almea, you also have the ilii and the elcari. Obviously, the ilii invented their own writing a couple of times at least (unless the spiritual beings taught them to?..). As for the elcari, we know nothing, though their system, featural, doesn't seem to derive from ilii writing.

What about them, have you worked on their part of the history of writing on Almea?
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Post by So Haleza Grise »

sano wrote:
zompist wrote:And my point is that there was no change of order. The Roman alphabet is precisely the same order as the Semitic:
Your missing the zayn. Also, I would say that the loss or addition of letters could be considered as a change in collating sequence.
On what basis? Creating J as a variation of I is a a great deal less of a change than, for example, creating it from scratch including it between Q and R. U V W is not a 'new' sequence at all. It's like saying that an ordering of A a B b C c is a radical innovation. The innovation is the characters, the sequence is identical.
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rotting ham wrote:The Cia-Cia even adopted a Hangul Koreanization for reasons I dare not speculate upon: http://thejakartaglobe.com/home/southea ... gue/322636 ("reflects our efforts for years to spread Hangul abroad"? wtf)
That's turned to be classical unwarranted and misleading language-related journalistic hype. The post even notes "Indonesia's Basic Law stipulates that all tribal languages be recorded in Roman letters to preserve national unity." (emphasis mine)
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Re: How many times have the uesti invented writing?

Post by Tropylium »

Speaking of collation order: where does the Phoenician come from? There seems to be some sort of an attempt at featuralness with the /ʔ b d g/ beginning (I can overlook that /ʔ/ isn't voiced)… after that it goes pretty much batshit. Yet the nasals stick together and are in the same POA order as the voiced stops. Ḥeth-ṭeth, tsade-qoph, and shin-taw also share some features (but this is so little it might as well be random).
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Re: How many times have the uesti invented writing?

Post by Legion »

The Levantin alphabet order originated in the Ugaritic language, an ancient semitic language attested from the 14th to 12th centuries BC, which had actually two competing alphabetic orders, both seemingly arbitrary.

’a b g x d h w z ħ ṭ y k š š' l m ð n ẓ s c p ṣ q r θ γ t ś ’i ’u

and

h l ħ m q w š r t s k n x b ś p ’ c ẓ g d γ ṭ z ð y θ ṣ

The first one gave the alphabetic order of Phoenician (and thus of Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian), Hebrew and Arabic.

The second one was used by the South Arabian alphabet and is still used in the Ge'ez script.

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Re: How many times have the uesti invented writing?

Post by WeepingElf »

Legion wrote:The Levantin alphabet order originated in the Ugaritic language, an ancient semitic language attested from the 14th to 12th centuries BC, which had actually two competing alphabetic orders, both seemingly arbitrary.

’a b g x d h w z ħ ṭ y k š š' l m ð n ẓ s c p ṣ q r θ γ t ś ’i ’u

and

h l ħ m q w š r t s k n x b ś p ’ c ẓ g d γ ṭ z ð y θ ṣ

The first one gave the alphabetic order of Phoenician (and thus of Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian), Hebrew and Arabic.

The second one was used by the South Arabian alphabet and is still used in the Ge'ez script.
No idea where these come from. I once read an article in which the author tried to show that they resulted from transpositions of a more featural order, but it was not very convincing. Perhaps they are based on mnemonic verses in which each word began with one of the consonants, which are now forgotten.
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