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A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

universityofcalifornia.edu

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Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#61

Post by casenmgreen »

adrian_b wrote: post #4
casenmgreen wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we are in fact talking a non proto-Sinaitic script? One that presumably did not succeed, and was superseded by proto-Sinaitic? Or perhaps influenced / led to proto-Sinaitic?

The article does not provide the slightest clue about why the researchers believe that this is an alphabetic script, taking into account that they say that it does not resemble other known scripts. Usually it is assumed that a script is alphabetic instead of being syllabic when the total number of distinct symbols is small, but this is not foolproof, because there are languages with a relatively small number of disti…

> The article does not provide the slightest clue about why the researchers believe that this is an alphabetic script

Yes. I noticed this too, upon reading. Symbols, yes. Alphabet rather than proto-writing? that's a claim!

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#62

Post by syene »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #33
adrian_b wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does not provide the slightest clue about why the researchers believe that this is an alphabetic script, taking into account that they say that it does not resemble other known scripts. Usually it is assumed that a script is alphabetic instead of being syllabic when the total number of distinct symbols is small, but this is not foolproof, because there are languages with a relatively small number of disti…

> All the many writing systems that have been invented independently of the Egyptian writing have used symbols denoting either syllables or words. Only the Egyptian writing had the peculiar characteristic of denoting only the consonants of the speech, independently of the vowels, which is what has enabled the development of alphabetic writing systems from it. Hangul was developed independently of Egyptian script and…

Aren’t Hangul consonants joined with vowels to create syllabic blocks? Is that still an alphabet? It seems different to the distinct characters for letters and vowels that the Latin alphabet, for example, has.
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