Script evolution

The hobby of conscripting is related to the hobby of conlanging (in fact conscripting is very often a part of conlanging). A conscript is the writing system (e.g. an alphabet) used by the inhabitants of a fictional reality. The inscription on the ring in The Lord of the Rings was written in a conscript.

It’s not something I’ve ever got into. However, one aspect of conscripting that I have played with a bit is that of simulating the way that scripts evolve over hundreds of years. In the real world, it is well known that different scripts are related to each other, as the shapes of letters were gradually modified by generations of writers. I recommend this website for the animated illustrations of the process, including the evolution of the latin alphabet (you may need to do a forced refresh (Ctrl-F5) in order to see it more than once).

So let’s play a game in which we take an existing script, and speculate on how it might have evolved in an alternative reality.

Note: Make sure you pay attention to whether each script is written from left to right, or from right to left. The very same alphabet may be written in different directions on different websites, so it is easy to get confused if you don’t pay attention.

First of all, let’s imagine that on our imaginary Earth, the Hebrew script evolves into the following. It is written from right to left, so the fork-shaped glyph on the left is our hypothetical evolved Tav, and the X-shaped glyph on the right is our hypothetical evolved Aleph.

Now let’s take the ancient Phoenician script, a common ancestor of many existing scripts including the Hebrew, the Greek, and our own. The Phoenician script was written from right to left, however the imaginary evolved form pictured below is written from left to right, so the C-shaped glyph on the left is an evolved Aleph and the X-shaped glyph on the right is an evolved Taw.

The Proto-Canaanite script is the ancestor of the Phoenician, and hence even older. The following descendent from our imaginary Earth is written from left to right, so the nested semicircles on the left are an evolved Alp, and the plus-sign-shaped glyph on the right is an evolved Taw. Two glyphs below do not correspond to any known Proto-Canaanite letters, because the real world history of Teth and Samek are unclear. My version includes glyphs for these letters (in 9th and 15th place, respectively) which I basically made up to fill the gaps.

Perhaps you would like to take one of my imaginary scripts and publish an illustration of what it might evolve into in turn. If you do, please let me know – it would make a great multiplayer activity.