Re: An arabo-romance conlang?

CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
>- How old is the Arabic alphabet? I suppose it's a sister alphabet of the
>Hebrew
>one, but did it already exist 2000 years ago, or was it devised later?
>Was it
>always used for the Arabic language or did they take it from another
>language?
>The reason for those questions is that I'd love to see a Romance language
>written in Arabic script (IMHO one of the most beautiful of the world,
>along
>with the Tibetan script and the devanagari), but I'm wondering if it's
>possible.
Well, "The world's Writing Systems"  says that it developed as a branch of
 Nabatean Aramaic script. The earliest writings are from the 4th century
C.E. Since the script had more consonants than Aramaic, some of the
letters were used for more than one consonant.  It wasnt until the 7th
century that diacritical dots were devised to  disambiguate the similar
looking consonants.




____________________________

Yours truly,

Cesar Javier Jaime Garcia