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  2. History of the alphabet - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

    [5] [6] The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and South Asia, mainly through Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic (derived from the Phoenician alphabet) and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into ...

  3. Proto-writing - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-writing

    Such systems emerged from earlier traditions of symbol systems in the early Neolithic, as early as the 7th millennium BC in China and southeastern Europe. They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols or both to represent a limited number of concepts, in contrast to true writing systems, which record the language of the writer. [2]

  4. Proto-Sinaitic script - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script

    Here, aleph, whose glyph depicts the head of an ox, is a logogram used to represent the word "ox" (*ʾalp), he, whose glyph depicts a man in celebration, is a logogram for the words "celebration" (*hillul) and "she/her" (hiʾ‎ ‍), and resh, whose glyph depicts a man's head, is a logogram for the word "utmost/greatest" (*raʾš). This ...

  5. Alphabet - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet

    This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it probably was a syllabary—a script where syllables are represented with characters—with symbols that were not needed being removed. The best-attested Bronze Age alphabet is Ugaritic, invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BCE.

  6. Egyptian hieroglyphs - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs

    Determinatives or semagrams (semantic symbols specifying meaning) are placed at the end of a word. These mute characters serve to clarify what the word is about, as homophonic glyphs are common. If a similar procedure existed in English, words with the same spelling would be followed by an indicator that would not be read, but which would fine ...

  7. List of Egyptian hieroglyphs - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Egyptian_hieroglyphs

    In Unicode, the block Egyptian Hieroglyphs (2009) includes 1071 signs, organization based on Gardiner's list. As of 2016, there is a proposal by Michael Everson to extend the Unicode standard to comprise Möller's list.

  8. Mesoamerican writing systems - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems

    This suggests that writing may have developed out of an older artistic tradition, in which abstract concepts were represented with symbols, which later more concretely came to represent spoken language. The Zapotec developed a highly advanced 260-day ritual calendar, and a 365-day secular calendar from their knowledge in astronomy.

  9. Origin of language - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language

    The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...