Alphabet

I was curious about our writing letter system, the Latin script. It consists of A through Z. The system has no Alpha or Beta. Alpha (α or A) and Beta (β or B) are within Greek script.

And the most baffling is the writing direction, Abjad has it right, pun intended. They start from right to left, that is natural for any right handed person to write like that, am I right? Or, in Logographic system (Kanji, Kana, Hanja — Chinese, Japanese, Korean) has it from top to bottom AND RIGHT TO LEFT (back in those days) — it's natural.

Left to right feels awkward at time. I was a left-handed child, but then time made me a right-handed man 😂 You know, tradition.

After discussing this with ChatGPT, I now can safely and fully blame the timeline tinkerers who ruined what could have been an actually logical writing system.

It goes something like this:

• Phoenician system (~1050 BCE)
  The Original Gangster of many writing systems. It was the origin of Abjad, only consonants, no vowels. The writing direction was right to left like a SANE person would do.
• Ancient Greek (~800 BCE)
  Yoinked the Phoenician system, slapped vowels on the system. Because it would make the word clearer, without any hesitation. This one I do appreciate 👍
  Flipped the direction of the writing system. Because hey, we don't want everybody calling us a copycat. Indeed, I won't.
• Etruscan system (~700 BCE)
  Borrowed the Greek system, put more funkiness into it. Because, why not?
• Roman system (~600 BCE onward)
  Stole the Etruscan system, trimmed all the "unnecessaries".

You see there who to blame? 😂

It was in Boustrophedon Phase (~6th century BCE). Where people in ancient Greece wrote things on stone tablets, chiseled it. So the history said, oh it's easier to chisel on each row with an opposing starting point, you know, like plowing a field. You can't just fly to the starting side to do the next plow.

That's awkward. I mean in the same era, other people in Mediterranea chiseled stones in ONE direction. Right to left, there was no switching direction on each row.

The Greeks thought, "Hey, what if we write one line right to left, then the next line left to right, then switch back again?" 😵‍💫

This was called Boustrophedon, which literally means "as the ox turns" (like plowing a field).

Imagine reading a book where every other line is mirrored, absolute chaos.

Some unorthodox experiment indeed 😒

And then the Greeks afterward, for reasons, they standardized the direction from LEFT to RIGHT. For reasons. One of them is the probability of being called a copycat.

My oh my 😑

So you see, the "thinkers" were going absurd at times, and it then became our basis for, well, writing.

Oh and another thing, ALPHABET, not ALPHABETA 😂

That's like a brand name, twisting or cutting off the original word such as "supra", "lexus", "vizio", "acura".

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And for Abugida (Sanskrit, Tamil, Khmer, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Batak, Thai, Lao, Inuit, Tifinagh, Ethiopian Ge'ez, etc.), they had independent timeline. The OG Indian scripts were written on palm leaves and birch bark, not stones like Mediterraneans gang. So, that 🤔

The OG Logographic, the Chinese, was like 😎 Man, that is proven to be artistic.

Both India and China had already implemented "ink" before the West folks. So to avoid smudging, that direction. But then again, it didn't really have to be like that. The smudging can always be avoided in any direction, it's the writing technique that matters. It was a consensus.

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So, all in all, eh, what works best 🤷‍♂️