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Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features.. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name.
The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC, to become the official script of the Achaemenid Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
The Phoenician alphabet [b] is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) [2] used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.
The oldest known alphabetic writing has been found etched onto finger-length clay cylinders unearthed from a tomb in Syria.. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in the US dated the writing ...
Ancient Letters, found near Dunhuang [80] 328: Arabic: Namara inscription: c. 350: Ge'ez: inscriptions of Ezana of Aksum [81] c. 350: Cham: Đông Yên Châu inscription found near Tra Kiêu [82] 4th century: Gothic: Gothic Bible, translated by Wulfila [83] A few problematic Gothic runic inscriptions may date to the early 4th century. c. 400 ...
The old Roman letters were retained for formal inscriptions and for emphasis in written documents. The languages that use the Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and for proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization.
Many pure alphabets were derived from abjads through the addition of dedicated vowel letters, as with the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet c. 800 BC. Abjad is the word for "alphabet" in Arabic: the term derives from the traditional order of letters in the Arabic alphabet ('alif, bā', jīm, dāl). [46]
The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed proto-Semitic consonant phonemes. Note that several of these distinctions were only secondarily added to the Arabic alphabet by means of diacritic dots.