On the topic of what is an alphabet, what is a script, etc. that has been discussed lately, I just want to mention something of my own that may give us some terminology for talking about these matters. Years ago I felt that there was a problem with describing just how closely writing systems were related to or similar to one another, and I published a paper titled "A taxonomy of alphabets and scripts" in 1974 in _Visible Language_ 8:5-32. (Any taxonomy is a work-in-progress but it may, hopefully, be useful even though it is always uncompleted, and I would now want to make some changes in my 1974 paper. Specifically, the script that I then called "Neoroman" I now want to call "Roman/Latin"; for my reasoning see my 1999 paper "Toward disambiguating the term 'roman'" in _Visible Language_ 33:103-127.)

Using the terms in this taxonomy, English and any other alphabet that shares (most of) its characters is an alphabet of the Roman/Latin script, the Romanoid genus of scripts, and of the Hellenean family of scripts. The alphabets of Arabic in its various versions, Farsi, and Urdu are alphabets of the Araboid genus. (I did not deal with the Arabic-type writing systems because I did not feel confident in handling them, aside from the fact that the "six pens" should be one group of some sort.)

Since the topic being discussed involves just how similar these writing systems are to one another, some sort of hierarchical taxonomy seems to be what we need for practical purposes. Then we can talk about things with the level of specificity that we happen to need. In the biological taxonomy which I quite frankly took as my model, one can usefully discuss the differences in the behavior of typical canines (family Canidae), typical felines (family Felidae), and even untypical felines such as lions (which are still in the family Felidae).




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