OK *deep breath* So I'm finally beginning work on Serian-Tur, the ancient tongue, and I want to give it an alphabet. The languages I've worked on previously have only used modified latin characters so that I can type them with my keyboard, but I'd like to go a little bit deeper this time.

So - how to develop an alphabet? How to simulate the organic change of letters over time? I have several languages that branch off from this - is it realistic for them to have quite different writing systems?

How have y'all developed your alphabets in the past? I'm all ears!

eru

Actually, I have not made an alphabet yet, but I do have some ideas on how to make one What I was thinking was combining some of the letters we have in our language! Like, combining an "H" with a "U" and getting an "H" with a round bottom! Hope this helped!

Have you seen omniglot yet? (I am giving this link to everyone who has a writing system question it seems)
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/types.htm

Congratulations on going deeper!

Do you already have the sound set for this language? Do you know what sounds will be in their writing system?

Try making some complex letters, and then write them quickly with your hand to simulate how they might change to suit people's convenience in writing quickly?

Take what happened with Latin as an example, perhaps? French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and (and even some less Latin languages, like English and German) all use the same basic writing system with little tweaks (accents, mainly) in each. But then you have the Cyrillic alphabet used in eastern European languages, which I believe is also descended from the Latin alphabet (though I'm not sure...I would check this out before claiming anything). So, perhaps your ancient alphabet could have two or three main descendant writing systems, which are then tweaked as needed by local languages/cultures.

*Edit - So, cyrillic actually comes from greek. But hey, so did latin, right? *

Or start with a highly angular alphabet (suitable for carving into stone with a chisel or engraving into clay) and then make the letters more rounded and add flourishes--both of those are typical changes as an alphabet moves from use only on stone or on clay tablets to writing on something like paper. (Some of the best dictionaries begin each letter of the alphabet with examples of the equivalent letter in several of the alphabet from which our present one developed---my family's 1978 American Heritage does, but not any of the others we have immediately to hand, for example. If you can find such a dictionary, or similar script-comparison guides elsewhere, I'd suggest looking at that and modeling your changes loosely on some stages in our alphabet's history.)


I'm fairly sure Cyrillic was designed based on the Greek alphabet. (As you noted in an edit---but it was designed, as opposed to developing naturally, like the Roman alphabet did from Greek and, I think, Phoenician and perhaps other roots.)

How much writing systems would change would, I think, depend in large part on cultural factors, but a significantly simpler system will nearly always "win" (which is why we use "Arabic" numerals rather than using letters as numerals like the Romans, the Hebrews, and probably others).

We have one of those, New College Edition, 1976. Very interesting.

This is a very interesting link, a little ways down it has a chart of the changes in the Chinese writing system:
http://ancientscripts.com/chinese.html

Here is one with a similar chart for Sumerian:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sumerian.htm

What seems unexpected is that both of these writing systems went decidedly from curving, simple, recognizable pictures to angular, unrecognizable, and sometimes more complex symbols.

Okay, this is a really old thread, but this is how I would go about creating an alphabet (or any other kind of writing system, for that matter):

1. Think about the kinds of materials your people would be using when the writing system developed. Are they making marks in clay? Are they carving on wood? Are they etching in stone? Are they using brushes on paper?

2. Now consider how those materials would affect the system. If you were carving in wood, for instance, you would probably prefer simple, straight marks over curves and curlicues and so on.

3. Having done this, you could try to doodle different symbols that could be in the writing system, or you could try to consider what different strokes would make up the letters. Like for the wood-carved alphabet I'm imagining - maybe you have a long straight vertical line, a long straight horizontal line, a short line slanted to the right, a long line slanted to the right...and then once you have an idea of the strokes that would make up the letters, put them together and see what you can come up with.

4. Once you have some symbols, write them over and over and over again (but still keep in mind the materials your people would be using!) to see how they might change and simplify over time. Also try writing different symbols after each other to make sure that writing whole words and sentences is pretty comfortable.

5. Only at this point would I assign specific sounds to letters. In general you want to be careful about making an alphabet too perfect, e.g. having similar symbols stand for similar sounds, since this is pretty rare among real alphabets. If you do make your alphabet perfect like this, it might be a nice idea to explain it somehow - maybe somebody consciously invented the alphabet to fit nicely with the sounds of its language.

6. Also remember that many languages borrow alphabets from other languages. Think of all the languages that have been written using the Latin alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet, for instance! So if you already have an alphabet for one language, consider borrowing it for another. The messier the borrowing, the more fun! Maybe the language that borrowed it has more sounds that the origin language, and so some sounds aren't written...or maybe they just added some symbols. Maybe the people who borrowed the alphabet misunderstood how it originally worked, and so perhaps what originally stood for a D sound stands for an R sound in the borrowed version of the alphabet. (By the way, some kinds of R's, e.g. the "Spanish r," technically an alveolar flap, are quite similar to D - I didn't choose those sounds randomly! )

This podcast episode is quite enlightening on the subject of what people can use to write and how it affects their writing systems, but warning! There may be some bad language. I don't remember how bad this particular episode was, but this podcast in general can have a bit of swearing. It's definitely worth it in my opinion, though, since they have a lot of really interesting information to share and they do it in a fun way. (The other episodes also have a lot of great info on language creation, but it may be a bit too technical if you haven't studied much linguistics.) http://conlangery.com/2012/05/14/conlangery-50-the-technology-of-literacy/