this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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The most insane thing to me is that — as far as anyone can tell — a phonetic alphabet was developed only once in all oh human history.
Hangul is the phonetic alphabet used in Korea.
Yes, but it’s quite recent, only a few hundred years old - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
Not exactly. There are some phonetic bits of Asian writing so it’s happened at least twice.
Do you have any info on that? I’m not too familiar with Eastern languages, but all of the examples that I can think of have phonetic alphabets less than a millennium old.
Here’s Japanese phonetic writing that’s older than a millennium, although much newer than Phoenician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27yōgana
Here’s Korean which is also much newer than Phoenician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
But note that neither of these systems stemmed from Phoenician.
Oh, yup, these are not derived from Phoenecian, but considering how recent they are they were developed after the concept of a phonetic alphabet had already been widely circulated
Japanese Manyogana does not count as a true alphabet because each character represents a mora (several sounds together), not an individual consonant or vowel.
Hangul is a bit debatable as to whether or not it is a true alphabet because. Although individual components within each jamo (the characters in hangul) do indeed represent individual consonants and vowels, they cannot exist alone and must always be part of a set of 2, 3, or 4 components. So in a sense it works more like a syllabary (the same as hiragana in Japanese) rather than an alphabet. Opinions are varied on this. Though Hangul was also very much artificially created (it wasn't an evolution of an existing system, it was made from scratch), as Korea used Chinese characters up until then, so if we go by naturally evolving Latin/Greek is still the only one.
This is why in linguistics we typically say that Greek (and by extension the Latin that derived from it) is literally the only time humanity naturally invented a true alphabet, ie a system where consonants and vowels are represented individually and separately. All other alphabets before then were what we call either abjad (alphabet systems with no vowel indicators, like Arabic) or abugida (systems where vowels are only represented with diacritic marks, like Thai).