IV.

Writing

Except for two undeciphered scripts used by the ancient Canaanites, and the Latin alphabet as used for Maltese, Semitic languages have historically been written in three scripts. Assyro-Babylonian was written in cuneiform signs, and Ugaritic used a cuneiform alphabet. North Semitic, the early Semitic script, was an alphabetic script; one of its earliest examples is inscribed on the Moabite stone (9th century bc, discovered in 1868 and now in the Louvre, Paris). From the Aramaic variant of North Semitic, the modern Arabic and square Hebrew alphabets developed; North Semitic also gave rise to the Greek alphabet. Like ancient North Semitic, the Hebrew and Arabic scripts are alphabets of consonants only; special marks for vowels apparently came into use in about the 8th century ad. The third script, South Semitic or South Arabic, may or may not have been another variant of early North Semitic script. Also a consonantal alphabet, it was taken to Ethiopia in the 1st millennium bc and gave rise to the syllabic scripts used for modern Ethiopian languages.

See also Alphabet.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.