What we call alphabets, as distinguished from abigudas, abjads, and syllabaries, almost all derived directly or indirectly from Greek. Abigudas and abjads also almost all derived from Phoenician/Egyptian (from which Greek also derived). The independent systems of Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica all ended up no further than syllabaries. What Indus Valley Script is isn't clear.
So while writing was indisputably multiply invented, the alphabet (i.e., representing all phonemes instead of syllables) itself appears to have been independently invented only once (excluding perhaps Hangul, which is somewhat closer to a rigorously-construct syllabary than an alphabet).
If you're unfamiliar with terminology:
* Alphabet = Every phoneme (consonant and vowel) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Latin, Greek, Cyrillic.
* Abiguda = Every consonant has a distinct glyph. Vowels are indicated by systematic modification of the glyph. Examples include Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Devanagari, Ethiopian.
* Abjad = Every consonant has a distinct glyph. Vowels are indicated by (optional) diacritic marks. Examples include Arabic, Hebrew.
* Syllabary = Every syllable (or, more often, Consonant-Vowel cluster) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Japanese kana, Mayan.
* Logograph = Every word (/morpheme) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Chinese, although Japanese and Mayan also include logographic components. Arguably modern English with emoji. ;-)
> What we call alphabets, as distinguished from abigudas, abjads, and syllabaries, almost all derived directly or indirectly from Greek. Abigudas and abjads also almost all derived from Phoenician/Egyptian (from which Greek also derived). The independent systems of Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica all ended up no further than syllabaries. What Indus Valley Script is isn't clear.
> So while writing was indisputably multiply invented, the alphabet (i.e., representing all phonemes instead of syllables) itself appears to have been independently invented only once (excluding perhaps Hangul, which is somewhat closer to a rigorously-construct syllabary than an alphabet).
Sure, I agree with this; I had thought that GP was using ‘alphabet’ in the informal sense of ‘any writing system’ rather than as a technical term.
The only reason one might consider it a syllabary according to these definitions is that the way the letters are arranged into a block form syllabic glyphs, but that’s more similar to writing direction (e.g. English left to right).
Real languages, and especially phonetic drift over the centuries, do complicate the analysis somewhat. But the fact that some English phonemes in Latin script require the use of digraphs instead of single glyphs or there are multiple glyphs with the same phonemic value doesn't change the fact that the Latin script is providing glyphs for both consonants and vowels.
The same way Japanese is not a 'pure' syllabary (or moraic) script, as there are 1 mora syllables written with more than 1 symbol in an alphabet like fashion, such as しゃ (shi + small a = sha) or more recently ファ (fu + small a = fa)
So while writing was indisputably multiply invented, the alphabet (i.e., representing all phonemes instead of syllables) itself appears to have been independently invented only once (excluding perhaps Hangul, which is somewhat closer to a rigorously-construct syllabary than an alphabet).
If you're unfamiliar with terminology:
* Alphabet = Every phoneme (consonant and vowel) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Latin, Greek, Cyrillic.
* Abiguda = Every consonant has a distinct glyph. Vowels are indicated by systematic modification of the glyph. Examples include Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Devanagari, Ethiopian.
* Abjad = Every consonant has a distinct glyph. Vowels are indicated by (optional) diacritic marks. Examples include Arabic, Hebrew.
* Syllabary = Every syllable (or, more often, Consonant-Vowel cluster) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Japanese kana, Mayan.
* Logograph = Every word (/morpheme) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Chinese, although Japanese and Mayan also include logographic components. Arguably modern English with emoji. ;-)