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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription This is as important a discovery because it helped deciph

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription This is as important a discovery because it helped decipher cuneiform, a language that existed in parallel to hieroglyphics. The Demotic language mentioned as a shorthand form of hieroglyphics... it's the script used to write what we now call "Arabic". That's right, written Arabic is a direct descendent of hieroglyphics.

KoftaBob 5y ago
To add to this: while we lost the ability to decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs until the Rosetta stone, the Egyptian language itself (the words and their meanings) continued to be known/understood/spoken to this day, in the form of the Coptic language. The Coptic language is essentially Greek letters (plus 7 additional ones for sounds not covered by the Greek alphabet) used to write the Egyptian language. Coptic was supplanted by Egyptian Arabic as the primary spoken language of Egypt following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, although it remains in use today as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Another fun fact: the Greek letters used to write the Coptic language were based on the Phoenician alphabet, which were based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. So in essence, the alphabet brought over by the foreign Greeks and then used to write the Egyptian language, was itself based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, bringing it full circle!
wl 5y ago
Demotic looks like the Arabic script, sure. However, it doesn't work like Arabic. It's a cursive form of the more well-known hieroglyphic script using a later form of the Egyptian language. That means bi-/tri-literals, determinatives, and all that stuff. The modern Arabic script is only related to Demotic in the sense that it's probably derived from the Phoenician script, which in turn is probably derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
- idontwantthis 5y ago
  Aren't most European scripts derived from Phoenecian? Latin and Cyrillic at least.
  - spijdar 5y ago
    Apparently yes, although most indirectly. Latin and Cyrillic are effectively derivatives of the Greek alphabet (the second one, formed after the totally unrelated Linear-B was forgotten), itself a derivative of Phoenician script. Cyrillic also borrows some characters directly from Hebrew/Arabic IIRC, which are more directly descended from Phoenician, all in the same language family. The hard part, especially when talking about language artifacts this old, is distinguishing between "derived" and "ancestor of" compared to "influenced" and "contributed to". The difference between being the genetic offspring of something and just "borrowing" some genes. It's easy to guess some sort of shared lineage between the Semitic writing systems, the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic, and the European Latin/Greek offspring, but I bet it's not a nice tree so much as a directed graph with at least some borrowing and cross-pollination. :-)
    - adrian_b 5y ago
      In all such cases when a derived system of writing was created, the creator was familiar with one or more older writing systems, but different choices were made about how much to take from the old system and how many new features to add. The creator of the Greek alphabet knew the Phoenician alphabet and its adaptation to the Greek language preserved almost all Phoenician letters, with their names and their alphabetic order and their pronunciations, with just a few exceptions when some letters have been reassigned to other sounds (the most significant being the reassignment of ALEF, HE, AYIN to the sounds A, E, O) and a few letters were added at the end of the alphabet for sounds missing in Phoenician. On the other hand, the creator of the first Semitic alphabet (many hundreds of years before the creation of the Phoenician variant) knew the Egyptian hieratic writing system (not the Demotic, which is much more recent than even the Phoenician alphabet). However, the Semitic alphabet preserved much less from the hieratic script, mainly the principle of using a sign for each consonant, without marking the vowels, and the writing direction from right to left. Because we know very little of the early evolution of the Semitic alphabet (the few so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are very obscure), we do not even know for sure if any signs were taken directly from hieratic or all the Semitic signs were completely new. Also, it is not known which are the origins of the 2 traditional orders of the letters in the Semitic alphabets (the one used in Phoenician/Ugaritic, which was inherited by the European alphabets, and the different order used in the South-Arabic alphabet). So the ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet has taken much less from the hieratic script than the Greek alphabet has taken from the Phoenician, but it can be argued that a principle like using a sign per consonant is much more important than the graphic signs that are used (especially because this idea seems to have occurred only once in history, all the other not-derived-from-Egyptian writing systems have used signs for either syllables or words, not for simpler sounds).

KoftaBob 5y ago

To add to this: while we lost the ability to decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs until the Rosetta stone, the Egyptian language itself (the words and their meanings) continued to be known/understood/spoken to this day, in the form of the Coptic language. The Coptic language is essentially Greek letters (plus 7 additional ones for sounds not covered by the Greek alphabet) used to write the Egyptian language. Coptic was supplanted by Egyptian Arabic as the primary spoken language of Egypt following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, although it remains in use today as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Another fun fact: the Greek letters used to write the Coptic language were based on the Phoenician alphabet, which were based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. So in essence, the alphabet brought over by the foreign Greeks and then used to write the Egyptian language, was itself based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, bringing it full circle!

wl 5y ago

Demotic looks like the Arabic script, sure. However, it doesn't work like Arabic. It's a cursive form of the more well-known hieroglyphic script using a later form of the Egyptian language. That means bi-/tri-literals, determinatives, and all that stuff. The modern Arabic script is only related to Demotic in the sense that it's probably derived from the Phoenician script, which in turn is probably derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

idontwantthis 5y ago
Aren't most European scripts derived from Phoenecian? Latin and Cyrillic at least.
- spijdar 5y ago
  Apparently yes, although most indirectly. Latin and Cyrillic are effectively derivatives of the Greek alphabet (the second one, formed after the totally unrelated Linear-B was forgotten), itself a derivative of Phoenician script. Cyrillic also borrows some characters directly from Hebrew/Arabic IIRC, which are more directly descended from Phoenician, all in the same language family. The hard part, especially when talking about language artifacts this old, is distinguishing between "derived" and "ancestor of" compared to "influenced" and "contributed to". The difference between being the genetic offspring of something and just "borrowing" some genes. It's easy to guess some sort of shared lineage between the Semitic writing systems, the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic, and the European Latin/Greek offspring, but I bet it's not a nice tree so much as a directed graph with at least some borrowing and cross-pollination. :-)
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    In all such cases when a derived system of writing was created, the creator was familiar with one or more older writing systems, but different choices were made about how much to take from the old system and how many new features to add. The creator of the Greek alphabet knew the Phoenician alphabet and its adaptation to the Greek language preserved almost all Phoenician letters, with their names and their alphabetic order and their pronunciations, with just a few exceptions when some letters have been reassigned to other sounds (the most significant being the reassignment of ALEF, HE, AYIN to the sounds A, E, O) and a few letters were added at the end of the alphabet for sounds missing in Phoenician. On the other hand, the creator of the first Semitic alphabet (many hundreds of years before the creation of the Phoenician variant) knew the Egyptian hieratic writing system (not the Demotic, which is much more recent than even the Phoenician alphabet). However, the Semitic alphabet preserved much less from the hieratic script, mainly the principle of using a sign for each consonant, without marking the vowels, and the writing direction from right to left. Because we know very little of the early evolution of the Semitic alphabet (the few so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are very obscure), we do not even know for sure if any signs were taken directly from hieratic or all the Semitic signs were completely new. Also, it is not known which are the origins of the 2 traditional orders of the letters in the Semitic alphabets (the one used in Phoenician/Ugaritic, which was inherited by the European alphabets, and the different order used in the South-Arabic alphabet). So the ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet has taken much less from the hieratic script than the Greek alphabet has taken from the Phoenician, but it can be argued that a principle like using a sign per consonant is much more important than the graphic signs that are used (especially because this idea seems to have occurred only once in history, all the other not-derived-from-Egyptian writing systems have used signs for either syllables or words, not for simpler sounds).