The English and Arabic alphabets are descended from the same alphabet (Phoenician), yet they bare basically no similarities to each other. How did they diverge so much

Question

Not only are all the letter completely different, but even the direction you write in is even different.

In: 6

Answer 1

Saying English and Arabic alphabets descend from the same alphabet is kind of equivalent to saying Humans and Chimpanzees descend from the same primate ancestor — it is technically true but there are many steps in between the common ancestor and what exists today. The Phoenician alphabet originated around 3000 years ago and began spreading out — the modern Arabic and English alphabets come around 1500-2000 years later, depending on how you judge “modern”. That’s a huge amount of time for the script to change and adapt, to say nothing of the different cultures/geographies at play.

Phoenician script was originally written right to left (like Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi), and found its way to the deeper Arabian peninsula via Aramaic and then Nabataen forms of the script — each language making adjustments to the writing style and alphabet to fit their own language and their own cultures. The modern English alphabet, on the other hand, comes from the Latin alphabet, itself an adaptation of the Greek adaption of the Phoenician alphabet. Each culture makes changes (some big, some small) and eventually you get a completely different script, just like over time divergences in animal traits lead to new species that only vaguely resemble one another.