Very interesting information. Not that I could ever use it. Which is on me, not you or the author.
BUT, this has raised some questions that you may be able to answer. (learning from others is what FR is all about)
I find it interesting that we (humans) created a variety of ways to scribe our words, instead of a uniform growth from the original ‘language’ and the characters used (what ever that was).
So, there are the English characters pretty much in use by all the romance languages, even Russian.
There are the Chinese and Japanese characters, which are similar, but not identical.
Here is where my question arises. Across the entire Middle East, what ‘characters’ do they use, and is there a ton of variety from country to country, tribe to tribe?
Is the Aramaic or modern Hebrew anything like the , say Iranian or Arab characters?
I studied Arabic many years ago and can still sound out words and speak a little bit but don't know whether the alphabet follows the same sequence with the same or similar numeric values as Hebrew. I do recall from history classes that by the time of the Arab conquest (7th and 8th centuries) Hebrew was a solely liturgical language and completely out of use as a daily spoken tongue, and that the same was true in the time of Christ (He likely spoke in Aramaic and his contemporary fellow Jews would have used a good deal of Greek and Latin as well). I was taught that the grammar of modern spoken Hebrew had to be reinvented following Arabic rules and developed under the Moors in Andalusia (Spain) whose government administration over Spain relied heavily on the far better educated Jews among them.
What I have a hard time understanding from this article is why the "consensus" of opinion among Torah scholars is that a script which, even in its name "Ashura", is so clearly related to the Assyrian conquest and Babylonian Captivity would be the "original" used to write the oldest versions of the Torah, versus what seems to be a more ancient script the name of which derives from "Hebrew". Just doesn't make sense in terms of well established historic chronology.
I can answer this aas I am of Lebanese origin. Most of the semitic languages including modern hebrew, are all derived from canaanite I believe. Lebanon’s official language was aramaic until it changed to arabic I think during the Ottoman occupaiton. There are alot of forms of the language and I believe the Maronite church performs liturgy in Aramaic (or Syriac, which is also a very close derivation). All semitic languages have similarities. There are very many similarities between syriac, aramaic and hebrew much in the same way that there are similarities between latin and say italian where you can practically guess what a word means because the roots of the word in both languages is the same.
I dont speak syriac or aramaic but I do have a decent grasp on Lebanese Arabic. I say Lebanese mainly because its a much different accent when spoken than gulf arabic. Also, Lebanese has many words influenced by French and Turkish because well combined those countries had the region for like 500 years.
an example of similarities between aramaic arabic and hebrew.
English: Peace , house
Arabic: Salam , Beit
Aramaic: Shlomo , beita
Hebrew: Shalom , bayit
As for the characters of Arabic. They are the same in most countries, egypt for example have an extra letter which sounds like “G”. other arab countries dont use this letter, instead they pronounce it like “J”. Technically its just a pronounciation difference (which does sound very different) but they use a different character for it which is like the arabic “J” character but with an extra dot. Although not Arabic; Urdu uses alot of the same characters with several extra ones but I believe the relationship between the languages is far removed. I remember having a conversation with a pakistani, and he said he could read the quran in arabic(due to the similarity in the alphabet) but he doesnt understand anything. Accents in the arab world basically are different and you can tell the difference simply from the way a person speaks.
The characters of aramaic hebrew and arabic are pretty different with aramaic looking closer to hebrew than arabic. The letters correspond to one another though and basically when a Hebrew speaking person says alaph, it means a character in hebrew and it also is the name of a charcter in arabic and aramaic yet they are just written differently.
Ok well thats the most that I know, and I dont think there is any sort of organization to what I wrote, I just spewed out what was in my head :P
The Germanic languages (German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, etc) and the Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, etc) languages all use the Latin alphabet. The Russians use Cyrillic, which is a conglomeration of Greek letters, Latin letters, and Latin numbers. St. Cryil (or, more likely his followers) had to invent an alphabet, so they just kinda used whatever they felt like. That's why there are words in Cyrillic comprised entirely of latin letters, but pronounced completely differently.
For instance, in the Latin alphabet, we'd spell the name of the river that runs through Moscow as "Moskva." The Russians would spell it "Mockba," yet we both pronounce it the same way.