Make more scripts/alphabets be in use

Lothal

Lothal

OTL in Europe there is the Latin script, Greek, and Cyrillic, but in the past Glagolithic, Runes, the Gothic script, Hungarian runes, and the Permic script were all in use at one point.

How can we make these scripts survive till the modern day?

I know that Glagolithic was predominately used by Catholic slavs in Croatia, could it be spread by the Catholic church to be a script for the West Slavs in a protestant Poland scenario?
 
Atterdag

Atterdag

In general preventing latin supremacy in western europe would probably help, it could allow more regional christianities with their own scripts to emerge instead of the all-dominant catholicism. This of course leads to vastly different post-roman era for europe.
 

Analytical Engine

In regards to the Gothic Script, I'm not sure how long they would keep hold of it.

Might that depend on where the Goths end up? If they move into western Europe, then there are big, big incentives to adopt the Latin script instead.
 

Lalli

Probably you should at least avoid rise of Christianity so there is not large churches dominating everything. But I think that it might be possible get surviving Runic even if Scandinavians convert to Christianity. And if you keep Iberia as Muslim, there might be usage of Arabic script.
 

Analytical Engine

Lalli said:
Probably you should at least avoid rise of Christianity so there is not large churches dominating everything. But I think that it might be possible get surviving Runic even if Scandinavians convert to Christianity. And if you keep Iberia as Muslim, there might be usage of Arabic script.
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Thing is, the Glagolitic, Cyrillic and Gothic scripts were invented (at least in part) with the goal of converting the Slavs, the Slavs and the Goths respectively to Christianity.

Still, there's no reason why there couldn't be alternate Greek-derived scripts adapted for the use of the Slavic languages.
 

Zireael

Arabic script might also be used in Malta (IOTL Maltese uses Latin script even though the vast majority of its vocabulary is Arabic-derived)
 
Lothal

Lothal

Atterdag said:
In general preventing latin supremacy in western europe would probably help, it could allow more regional christianities with their own scripts to emerge instead of the all-dominant catholicism. This of course leads to vastly different post-roman era for europe.
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Or alternatively prevent the Gregorian reform, which suppressed the local rites, or alternatively make the Great Schism not happen or the 4th Crusade not usurp the empire. Hungary went alternating between vague Orthodoxy/Catholic to the eastern bastion of Catholicism because of the 4th. An Orthodox Hungary probably could have became a tsardom and granted its own patriarchate in a no 4th Crusade scenario. Apparently iconoclastic reformists and unitarians in Hungary maintained the use of the Hungarian runes to convey spiritual meaning because the runes were considered magical. Also, there was a brief effort to raise the Archbishop of Bremen to being the Patriarchate of the North, so i guess that could maintain the use of Runes.
Siberian Tiger said:
Ogham (or something deriving from it) could've continued to be used in Ireland and other Celtic-speaking nations.
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From what ive heard Ogham is actually kind of a terrible script, latin despite its problems is probably the best system that could be used for Irish.
 
Aghasverov

Aghasverov

There were several interesting scripts invented for the Albanian language in the 1700's and 1800's, that just never saw wide acceptance.....
 

Jan Olbracht

Zireael said:
Arabic script might also be used in Malta (IOTL Maltese uses Latin script even though the vast majority of its vocabulary is Arabic-derived)
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Arabic was used also by Bosnian Muslims to write Serbo-Croatian (Bosnians changed Arab abjad into full alphabet). Lipka Tatars used Arabic script to write Belarusian and Polish.
 
Quinkana

Quinkana

Neo Aramaic written in the Syriac writing system as a normal day writing system would be cool but the only people that would use such a system theoretically are the Lebanese and Assyrians.
 

Madhukar_Shah

A culture that privileges oral knowledge over written means standardisation is less important- the conundrum of why the Sanskrit language spread across India and beyond without using a standardised script is possibly answered by the fact that the people who used this standardized knowledge learnt and taught it completely orally.

If you want the same in Europe, provide for a more Celtic dominated continent, as druids were forbidden to write down their knowledge, just like Brahmans. This means writing becomes a much more local, temporary thing and allows for diversification of scripts. Perhaps a Celtic beat down of Rome and Greece in the 3rd and 4th centuries BC could get you this.
 
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