Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic

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Spread of Proto-Sinaitic writing systems from India to Eastern Asia. Note that 'Nepali' on the map is not the Nepali language or its script; also the spread of Siddham is not associated with the evolution of Chinese or Japanese writing systems.
Spread of Proto-Sinaitic writing systems from India to Eastern Asia. Note that 'Nepali' on the map is not the Nepali language or its script; also the spread of Siddham is not associated with the evolution of Chinese or Japanese writing systems.

Nearly all the segmental scripts ("alphabets", but see below for more precise terminology) used around the globe were apparently derived from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. These include the Latin alphabet — forms of which are used today to write numerous languages — but also such disparate cousins as the writing systems of Hebrew, Arabic, both Germanic and Hungarian runes, Ethiopic, Devanagari writing of India, the native scripts of the Philippines and Indonesia, and perhaps Cree 'syllabics'. There are also true syllabic systems derived only superficially from these alphabets, such as Cherokee.

Notable exceptions that were not derived from Proto-Sinaitic include Hangul, invented by Sejong the Great in 1444, Ol Chiki, Zhuyin and the now obsolete Meroitic script, among others.

The first Middle Bronze Age alphabets were adapted from Egyptian hieroglyphs. A possibly independent alphabet, the Meroitic alphabet, was also adapted from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and therefore may be a cousin to the Proto-Sinaitic family.

  • The dates are intended to show the approximate 'birthdate' of a script; however in many cases (marked by 'c.') they are widely approximate, and may be off even by centuries. In several cases, the development of one script into another was a gradual process over several centuries, that is difficult to pin down with precision. Following that, in parentheses, is the name of one or two modern countries corresponding to the region where the script was first widely used. In a few cases, a direct graphic letter-to-letter correspondence cannot be precisely established between a 'parent script' and its children, making the exact placement of some family members somewhat controversial, eg. in the case of the Tibetan or Georgian alphabets. Much of the information here was compiled from the "Ancient Scripts" and "Omniglot" websites, which do not always agree. Despite many of these scripts commonly being called "alphabets", the recent linguistic classifications of abugidas and semi-syllabaries are shown in Italic; the others are abjads or alphabets proper. Many of these scripts are no longer widely used for writing any language today, having been abandoned in favor of others; those that still are, have been marked with '*', and additionally are written in bold.
  • Some scholars, including Gari Ledyard, have suggested that certain features of the Hangul consonant symbols may have been influenced by the earlier 'Phags-pa script. See Gari Ledyard for more complete information.

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