Personally I always thought it was easier to have the line on the left side and then the different stuff on the right side. Probably from being right handed.
Eg: B D E H K L M N P R
Those all have a line on the left and the right side differs
Not sure if true but I did hear somewhere that a big part of the Roman changes were to make carving letters into stone tablets and buildings easier.
It certainly explains using more straight lines in eg M and N. But maybe the flip also makes it easier to carve if you're chiseling right handed? I'm imagining how I'd chisel a K.
Fun fact, in the Arabic alphabet it starts out Alif and Ba just like alpha and beta here, and then veers way away from this chart into its own awesomely weird territory (thought German was “guttural”? try this nonvowel nonconsonant so far back in the throat you need consent and a physician’s referral) but JUST when you think you’ve lost your way, RIGHT the alphabet nears its end, you stop and stare because right there are four letters, in this same exact order, so familiar it might be a song you learned as a child: the letters K L M N.
The Phoencians took this invention to other places too, and this cluster of familiarity crystallised in the Arabic alphabet in the same order. Almost like a gene we could point to that says we had a common ancestor centuries ago, we were once so close that we learned the same thing from the same people.
“Almost like a gene we could point to that says we had a common ancestor centuries ago, we were once so close that we learned the same thing from the same people.“
Cultural genes are called memes. It’s kind of unfortunate that we usually only think of memes as jokes.
This chart does show different stages of alphabet in the lineage of the Modern Latin Alphabet. But these changes happened due to parallel interactions with other languages and alphabets not shown, so it is a little obscuring to call it an 'evolution'. Probably being overly pedantic but that's kind of the realm of linguistics.
I was a little disappointed they didn't show letters that were removed from the modern Latin alphabet but existed in the 2000 years since Rome, like thorn.
If by "ancient Latin alphabet" you mean the alphabet as depicted in charts like this you're talking about the Archaic alphabet, not the alphabet the Romans used for Classical Latin. The Romans after the Archaic Period used the same alphabet as we do (with minor additions depending on our precise European language), at least in inscriptions--Roman cursive is very different in form. The charts you're looking at are very misleading, in that Latin was written in the Archaic Period either right to left or boustrephedon, alternating direction with each line. But these are only the very earliest Latin inscriptions. By the time Latin really starts to be used regularly as a written language it is being written left to right, with the letters oriented to suit.
Yeah I wasn’t really sure how knowledgeable Matt Baker from usefulcharts is in ancient languages. Until I see actual sources I’m treating this chart as nothing more than guess work.
I have absolutely zero expertise in the field, but every time you see something like that in history, I always wonder if it was primarily spurred on by a change in writing medium. E.g. paper vs tablet.
Serifs are by products of the technology used to write them (stone, ink, etc) & are merely the on and off ramps to get to the real meat of it, & they are zero more.
Might even go so far to say they’re a waste of pixels and therefore energy. Fight me 😜
Love, death, tears. Eternal damnation is caused by human emotion. The correct path is in the stars. Humanity laughs gayly as they salute their fellow man and idolize him. Prayer is the answer, we watch lovingly as god watches us. We film the bumbling nerd as he falls to the ground, we celebrate the ancient athlete.
I think it's a miracle that people 2000 years ago were using the same alphabet as us. I guess it just goes to show how important the longevity of recorded information is.
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.
The Phoenician Q and H are way better than todays. And they got the X-Men belt buckle, that's fucking rad. They can keep it tho; I don't want to give Disney anymore free publicity.