Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 08:11 -0500 2001-11-09, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >Peter_Constable@... wrote:
> >>
> >> >* Peter T. Daniels
> >> >|
> >> >| There's only one alphabet.
> >>
> >> I forgot to respond to this earlier: Only one? Cyrillic and Latin and
> >> Greek and Armenian and Georgian are all the same script?
> >
> >Of course. See any history of THE alphabet.
> >
> >(I mean, obviously, it was only invented once.)
>
> Putting it less subtly:
>
> *The* alphabet was invented once. It has many descendants, which are
> scripts. Most of these are still alphabetic, and some have evolved to
> have other properties.
>
> Hm. Waitaminnit. The Koreans invented an alphabet independently....

Nope -- they had the example of hPags pa before them (and adapted some
of its shapes to the iconic ones it uses), as well as a phonological
theory that seems to have been a bit more sophisticated than even the
Chinese one.

(There's a chart of the correspondences in my Urbana article, SLS 30:
73-86, following Hope 1956.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...