
World's Writing Systems - Schiphol
http://worldswritingsystems.org/
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kijin
It's a nice list, but a bit more genealogy would improve it greatly.

Many of the oldest writing systems began as a loose collection of pictograms
but became more abstract over time. Where to draw the line between different
stages of their development is often an arbitrary decision, their continuity
hidden by the sparseness of ancient records.

For example, all of the following scripts can be seen as different stages of,
or variations within, the same writing system: Old Hanzi, Oracle Bone, Bronze,
Han, and Seal. Some of them might even be seen as different "fonts" encoding
more or less the same set of characters. Others such as the Khitan and Jurchen
scripts were clearly influenced by the Chinese writing system. It's a big
family of related scripts, and should be presented as such.

A similar lineage can be drawn across many middle-Eastern and near-Eastern
scripts that influenced one other and the Latin alphabet.

Of course there's still a lot of disagreement about exactly which way the
influences went, but if you paint the picture with a broad enough stroke, you
should be able to accommodate most of the uncertainty.

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mario0b1
As interesting as this website might be, this layout is awful. I am not able
to scroll on the overlays and if my firefox window is too small I can't even
see the links to wikipedia and sorts.

Plus I really dislike those slow animations and really can't stand them, but
that's just preference I guess.

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laumars
I feel your pain. I've got a Firefox window open full screen on a 1080 display
and I still lost some of the links on most of the overlays I opened.

I think this is one of those sites that was designed and tested on the
developers machine and looked good on the browser they used, but wasn't tested
anywhere else. But given it's probably just a hobby project, I can't really
blame them for that at all.

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MarsAscendant
That's seriously neat. I never realized quite how many writing systems there
are in the world, or were historically.

It's good presentation. With a bit of work, it could be an amazing first-
impression tool for people interested in scripts or linguistics.

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rauhl
For a rather more readable site with much of the same information, there’s
always [http://www.omniglot.com/](http://www.omniglot.com/)

I’ve been a huge fan of it for years.

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theandrewbailey
I'm guessing the things like "25 c" might be dates (century maybe, but century
25 hasn't happened yet). I don't understand it.

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sudenmorsian
If I'm not mistaken, it refers to the 25th century BC if you're talking about
the -25 c.

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userulluipeste
I'd add Vinča symbols as one of the oldest scripts out there. Maybe for some
it may be a stretch to count it a full script, but considering their time (and
the fact that this list included Runic, which was used more like for isolated
markings or ornaments and less like building pieces of written messages), i'd
say it should get a pass.

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snambi
This is half backed information. The present day Tamil script was modified by
missionaries in the 19th century. That means the present day script is only
1-2 century old. It should be split in multiple scripts instead of just one.

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I_complete_me
I am surprised that Old Irish isn't featured. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography).

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KSS42
Perhaps, they treat it as a variant of the Latin script:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type):

Unicode treats the Gaelic script as a font variant of the Latin alphabet.

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I_complete_me
I note that another site [0] _does_ see them as distinct. Also the article you
refer to [1] shows no examples of the Irish Uncial writing system. I make the
point to suggest that other significant writing systems may also have been
omitted.
[0][http://www.omniglot.com/writing/clogaelach.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/writing/clogaelach.htm)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script)

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morekozhambu
Actually Brahmi is not just a writing system but a family of scripts.

All Indic writing systems today are decedents of Brahmi.

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a2dictator
And I already found an error in it. The Kannada script has evidence of it
existed at least since 400 AD, but the website shows it as 1500 AD (?).

Additionally, the Vedic scripts would be much much older than what is depicted
- circa 7,000 BC

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dilippkumar
> Additionally, the Vedic scripts would be much much older than what is
> depicted - circa 7,000 BC

That can’t be correct. The proto-Indo-European language has an upper bound at
somewhere near 4,500BC if I recall correctly [0]

[0]
[https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8488.html](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8488.html)

