i18n wrote:

> Over time there have been countless writing systems, which
> can be more or less categorized according to various properties.
>
> The writing systems are used to express in written form one
> or more languages, dialects, etc., each of which can also be
> categorized according to a different set of properties
> (grammatical type, etc.)
>
> I wonder if there is any sort of correlation among the
> historical use of certain categories of writing systems with
> certain categories of languages.
>
> Anyone have any information or speculation?

IMHO, you can find a faint correlation only in a few cases and, anyway, only
for the language that a script was originally invented for.

E.g., the Chinese script makes sense for a morphologically non flexive
language such as Chinese; the Semitic "abjads" (sort of alphabets which do
not indicate vowels) make sense for languages such as the Semitic, where
world roots are indicated only by consonants.

But facts show that any kind of script can be adapted to any kind language
with minor modification, so this correlation is lost as soon the script is
borrowed by other people.

And people invariably adopt a script because of its cultural, political or
religious connotation, rather that for its real or perceived functional
properties.

The best demonstration of this are several well-known couples of strictly
related languages (or even just the same language) which adopted two
different scripts because of differing religious differences:

- German, Spanish, Italian (Latin script = Christianity) vs. Yiddish,
Judezmo, Italkian (Hebrew scr. = Judaism);
- Serbian (Cyrillic scr. = Orthodox Church) vs. Croatian (Latin scr. =
Catholic Church);
- Arabic (Arabic scr. = Islam) vs. Maltese (Latin scr. = Christianity);
- Urdu, Pakistani Sindhi (Arabic scr. = Islam) vs. Hindi, Indian Sindhi
(Devanagari scr. = Hinduism);
- Mongolian (Arabic scr. = Laicity) vs. Mongolian (Mongolian scr. =
Buddhism);
- etc. etc.

So, I'd rather look for a correlation between letters and gods.

_ Marco