Thursday, April 7, 2022

The Evolution of Alphabets

The Evolution of Alphabets

Dr. C. George Boeree

Nearly all modern alphabets are descended from an alphabet invented 4000 years ago, probably by a group of people related to the ancient Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Canaanites, living in what is now the Sinai desert. They got the idea from the Egyptians, but used their own simplified pictures to represented consonant sounds. The Phoenicians and others of the region simplified the pictures further and often rotated them, but if you use your imagination, you can still make out where most of the 22 letters came from. If you turn the A with the point down, for example, you can see a representation of an ox head.

[To see the Phoenician alphabet, click here!]

All the letters were for consonants, which is reasonable for Semitic languages like Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and even Egyptian. Even aleph and ayin actually represent the glottal sounds that preceded the A's. Greek (and most other languages) desperately need to represent vowels as well, so they took a few of the consonants they didn't need, and turned them into vowels -- aleph being the obvious example. They then added a few symbols of their own to represent extra sounds they needed. Three unused letters were retained in the Greek numbering system.

The Phoenicians, like the Hebrews and Arabs today, wrote from right to left. The Greeks originally did the same, then changed to a system where they changed direction every line, and finally to the present system of left to right. This has passed down to all the modern European alphabets.

The Latin alphabet, ancestor of most western European alphabets, is derived from the Greek, but was also influenced by the nearby Etruscan version of the alphabet. Over the centuries, extra letters were invented by varying older ones, or reintroducing Greek letters such as K and Y. It wasn't until the middle ages that small letters came into being, usually based on more cursive versions of the capital letters.

The alphabets of south and southeast Asia are all derived from the Brahmi alphabet, which in turn is loosely based on the Aramaic. With a far greater number of consonants, the ancient Indians created many of their letters, and organized them phonetically. The creativity continued as the idea moved eastward, and many of the later alphabets bear little resemblance to the earlier ones (see below).

Another way in which alphabets have developed involves the creativity of one or two specific inventors. Examples incluid the pre-cyrillic alphabet glagolitic, and the alphabets for Armenian and Georgian:

The only independently invented "true" alphabet is the beautiful Korean hangul. One very noticable feature is that the letters are arranged to fit inside a "box". For example, la Korean word for honeybee (kkulbeol) is written as 꿀벌, not ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ.

There are also a number of syllabaries (where each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme) that were independently invented, including two for Japanese, one for Cherokee, and one for the Cree and Inuit of Canada.

Examples of the variety of Brahmi-derived scripts of south and southeast Asia:

Evolution of the alphabet

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An infographic I drew back in 1999, my cluttered tabletop theory, Essential Elements of a Human Being

An excellent addition to this infographic

Fred Coulson

I'm thinking there's something missing here-- the desire to be close to non-human-fabricated things. Animals and plants. Digging in the dirt. Watching things grow. I know these things could appear under several of these rubrics, e.g. survival force, physical health, etc, but I think they deserve a plate of their own on the cluttered tabletop. This isn't a critique, just something I observed after I stopped being a city-dweller and moved to the country.

Love

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Moravian missionary socks, knitted in Kullu, Manali, Keylong, Lahaul, Spiti in the Indian Himalayas

Personal anecdote.

A century after Moravian missionaries came to the part of the Indian Himalayas, where I lived for six years in the middle 1970s, the local Indians were still knitting the kinds of hilariously garish socks the missionaries taught them how to make. The socks were typically decorated in neon colored patterns, often with rows of little swastikas, the ancient Hindu symbol highjacked by the Nazis.  Enough tourists were horrified by the innocent use of swastikas that the locals have since learned not to incorporate that into the designs. 

In the remote Himalayan provinces of Lahaul and Ladakh, during the six months of winter, several months of the year are snowed under. The roads are covered and the villagers spend the winter at home, sitting around the tandoor stove, living on fruit, vegetables and meat set out to dry in the summer months, and knitting. 

The socks knitted in winter are sold to tourists in the lower Himalayas in the summer. Unfortunately, in the 1970s anyway, the short fiber wool used to knit the socks unravelled quickly and the socks rarely lasted more than a few wears. Worse, was that the dyes used for the neon colored wool, invariably ran. If one made the mistake, as I did a number of times, of washing even one pair of Moravian style socks with any other clothing, all clothing would come out accidentally tie dyed. One could recognize friends who had made the same mistake when meeting them and their once beige sweater was now partly pink, partly green.

When I lived in the Himalayas, finding wool socks was surprisingly difficult. Indians apparently didn't have wool socks, so travelers to the mountains in winter were tempted to get the Moravian socks and learned to regret it. 

I wonder if the socks, which look very much the same now as they looked before, have improved over the decades. 

Map of Lahaul:
https://tinyurl.com/2p9cpzpe

https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Bible_translations_into_Tibetan

Lahaul is way up in the India Himalayas and there are many small, remote villages.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The blue wool is natural and the neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

"Left: the left-facing swastika is a sacred symbol in the Bon and Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions. Right: the right-facing swastika appears commonly in Hinduism, Jainism and Sri Lankan Buddhism"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

Lahauli women sitting around a tandoor, wood burning stove, which is the way rooms are warmed and food is prepared in the Himalayas.

The Moravian Mission house in Keylong, Lahaul, India. Way up on the Tibetan Plateau. This is how it looked in the late 1800s.

Women from Lahaul, India, wearing the outfits the Moravian missionaries from Germany taught them to wear back in the 1800s. The women in Lahaul still wear this style of clothing today.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The purple wool is natural and the neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

The Hindu deity, Ganesh with a swastika symbol of life in the middle.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The red wool is natural and the neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

Lahauli woman at a wedding party in Keylong, Lahaul, India, knitting Moravian style socks
Photo credit: Ramesh Lal

Women from Lahaul, India selling the Moravian style socks they knitted in winter.

Classic Moravian style knitted socks. The gray wool is natural and the neon design is made of "cashmilon"acrylic mix yarn.

Friday, April 1, 2022