Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The nature of the symbols is unknown. Attempts to interpret the symbols have been made, but have not led to any agreement among scholars. It is unlikely that they represent a writing system. However, use of proto-writing systems featuring ideographic symbols may date as early as the Lower Paleolithic. The Vinča symbols may have served a range ...
The Old Italic scripts are a family of ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet , which was the immediate ancestor of the Latin alphabet used by more than 100 languages today, including English .
Finally, cuneiform became a general-purpose writing system with logograms, syllables, and numerals. From the 26th century BCE, the system was adapted to write the Akkadian language, and from there to others, such as Hurrian and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.
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. [3]
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. Other informative or qualifying ...
The Latin script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy.It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE [1] from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts emerging at the time.
A grapheme is the basic functional unit of a writing system. Graphemes are generally defined as minimally significant elements which, when taken together, comprise the set of symbols from which texts may be constructed. [13] All writing systems require a set of defined graphemes, collectively called a script. [14]
The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. [1] It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years.