The Egyptian Hieroglyphs is one of the oldest writing systems on this world. Dated circa 3200 BC, who knows that the hieroglyphs is the origin of almost all existing writing systems! The Latin Alphabet in Europe, Cyrillic Alphabet in Eastern Europe and North Asia, Arabic Abjad in West Asia and North Africa, Devanagari Abugida in South Asia, and Javanese Abugida in Southeast Asia!
Knowing this, my curious mind want to know, if those scripts are from one origin, then how come they ended up differently? And so I started my research! I googled Javanese Script, and opened up the Wikipedia page. You could see the parent system of the script up until Proto-Sinaitic Script! The direct parent of Javanese Script is Kawi. Then Pallava, Brahmi, Aramaic, Phoenician, and finally Proto-Sinaitic. On the Proto-Sinaitic page, it is written that the parent of this script is the Egyptian Hieroglyph.
Having that information, now I want to see each of those writings, lay them side by side, and compare them. The problem is, some of the scripts have evolved into a more modern scripts. Like the Aramaic for example. The Aramaic that parents the Brahmi Script is different than the Aramaic you can see today.
The writing direction had changed too. The Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Phoenician are written from right to left. But then Brahmi Script and Greek changed the writing direction to left to right. While changing the writing direction, they also flipped the letters. The scripts that keep using the original writing direction is the scripts around Egypt like Arabic and Hebrew. So to make the comparison easier, I flipped the writing of Phoenician, Aramaic, Nabataean and its child scripts to left to right.
There are some other scripts that I wanted to include on this alphabet tree, like Thai, Sundanese, Balinese, Burmese, The Runes, Phags-Pa (which may had influenced Hangeul), etc. But then it'll take a very long time! It is also time consuming to do all of the letters. There could be a change too in the letters anyway. Some scripts had adjusted to fit the language where they're used.
Anyway, here it is! The alphabet tree I've drawn! Most of the scripts I got from here.
My first thought, who decided to add the extra lines on before and after the letters on Javanese!? I honestly really want to know. Why would they do that. The Balinese Script, which is also a child of the Kawi Script, looks like that too, you know. Except it is closer to the original Kawi. What is interesting to me is, Sundanese, another child of the Kawi script, doesn't seem to add the extra lines. The old Sundanese Script looks a lot like Kawi, but it's italic (slanted to the right). The modern Sundanese letters had transformed into more sharp cornered letters.
Devanagari, the script that is used to write Hindi, seems fine compared to Javanese. I can see the resemblances. Then Arabic, I honestly do not know who made Alif straight like that. There's only one source I could find on the internet that explains how it turned up like that, but I'm not really convinced. Looking at Nabataean, I think the Arabic Alif come from a variation of the Alif that is written in Nabataean. Which by the way, I have to also mention that there are a lot of variations too in Syriac, Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite, I have chosen the letters that shows the transformation. Finally moving to Greek, this script and its child are the scripts that had changed the least.
On the hieroglyph part, each letter from left to right symbolize an ox, house, stick, and door. How these letters pronounced is different than in Proto-Sinaitic, but they still symbolize the same thing. So starting from Proto-Sinaitic, the letters are named as how the object they symbolize called in Proto-Sinaitic. The ox is 'alp, the house is bayt, the stick is gaml, and the door is dalt. What is really clear to me is the house. House in Arabic is bayt too! On the modern scripts, the letters only kept the first consonant of the object they symbolize.
Final thought, even that they have changed quite a lot, when we lay them side by side, we can still see how the writing systems had evolved. Writing systems are a lot younger too compared to languages, and so it is easier to trace back. I wish I could do the same to spoken language, but we have no record of spoken language from the old times.
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