can you stop fucking adding commentary to tags? it isn’t funny and it makes almost all of your posts un-rebloggable due to cringey comments
The Greek alphabet, from which the Latin alphabet used to write English today is derived, was originally created by adapting the Phoenician alphabet. (Ok, yeah, technically the Phoenician writing system was an abjad not an alphabet but nobody who isn’t a grammatologist knows what an abjad is so I’m calling it an alphabet. Fight me.) The funny thing about it is that, when the Phoenician alphabet was adapted to write Greek, the letters were rotated. This isn’t abnormal (writing systems sometimes rotate as they evolve, usually because the material on which they are being written changes), but what’s weird about the Phoenician-to-Greek rotations is that they’re inconsistent. Some of them got rotated 90°, like Phoenician aleph 𐤀 to Greek alpha A. Some got flipped symmetrically, like Phoenician gimel 𐤂 to Greek gamma Γ. And some, like Phoenician daleth 𐤃 to Greek delta Δ, didn’t rotate at all. For those of you who don’t know a lot about writing systems and to whom this might not register as weird, let me assure you that it is extremely weird.
Naturally, this weirdness has led to a lot of theories about how the hell this happened. Most of those theories are complicated and boring, like that a change in media from stone carving to papyrus combined with a simultaneous change in writing direction from boustrophedon to…..and now I’m asleep.
But there are three good theories which I would like to share with you. One of them, put forward somewhat facetiously by Marc Zender, is that the Greek who originally learned the Phoenician script learned it by watching a Phoenician write from across a table, and was therefore constantly turning his head in order to get a better angle, resulting in him seeing different letters with different degrees of rotation.
The other two theories are theories which I personally invented, and I believe wholeheartedly that at least one of them is true. My theories are that the Greek who first adapted the Phoenician alphabet was either a) dyslexic or b) drunk. As your science teachers no doubt taught you, Occam’s Razor is a fundamental principle. Since my theories are both infinitely simpler than anything else anyone has put forward, I’m sticking with them. Any linguistics or anthropology departments interested in hiring me should send me a message.
