Other than Latin alphabet dominant

What is the latest possible POD for making another than the Latin alphabet (greek, hebrew, chinese,....) dominant in Western Europe and/or the US

732 Battle of Tours?
216 BC Win for Carthage? Or can it be done after that (maybe 1521 that the Spanish use the Aztec/1534 the Inca script?)?
What do you think is the latest POD?
 
What is the latest possible POD for making another than the Latin alphabet (greek, hebrew, chinese,....) dominant in Western Europe and/or the US

732 Battle of Tours?
216 BC Win for Carthage? Or can it be done after that (maybe 1521 that the Spanish use the Aztec/1534 the Inca script?)?
What do you think is the latest POD?
There is no such thing as an Inca script, and the Aztec script was pictographic. Even if the Spanish felt compelled for some ASB reason to adopt the writing system of a conquered enemy, pictographs aren't as efficient as an alphabet like Latin. As for other scripts, I suppose Chinese would have a good chance, though it is a little limited in comparison to alphabets. Arabic is probably more likely.
 
China does not have an Alphabet, but Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet do.
They're syllabaries, not alphabets. And if you're listing Tibet, Mongolia, and Korea, how did you miss Japan?

Anyways, it'll be hard to use a different alphabet, considering most of the Mediterranean ones are based off of the writing style that the Middle East used. Maybe Linear A/B can survive... Runic, maybe? Or Ogham? It's not exactly a direct rip-off of Latin...
 
There are lots of alphabetic scripts around the Mediterranean, not only the big ones (though how to make Oscan or Libyan Punic dominant is hard to see). The main problem is that once Latin becomes the dominant language of post-Roman Western Europe, i.e. sometime around the 600s, there is very little leeway for changing it. You would need a complete cultural shift (e.g. a Muslim conversion, leading to Arabic becoming the main mode of international communication). The only alternative i can see is with slightly more vernacular literacy surviving in the Migration period. You could have local ascripts serving to write down local languages, which would mean having no dominant alphabet in Western Europe. The continent would be divided into a Runic-using north, a Latin south, a Glagolithic/Cyrillic or otherwise Greek-derived east and a few interesting enclaves.
 
I wonder whether it would have been possible for the Romans to adapt the Greek alphabet to writing Latin, and to then gradually begin writing Latin in the Greek script more and more, for reasons essentially of cultural snobbery. Relatively few Latin-speakers would have been literate, and many of those would be bi-literate, in both Latin and Greek; this would ease the transition. So would the rising Greek influence in the Empire, associated with the capital moving to Constantinople. Gradually, texts that had been written in Latin would tend to be translated into Greek, but even texts that remain transcriptions of Latin language also at least get rewritten in the Greek script; the skill of reading the increasingly peculiar-looking Roman text gets rarer and rarer.

An opportune time for completing this transition and locking it in even for Western Europe would be the time when Christianity is adopted by the Empire as its state religion; the Greek alphabet would have extra cachet, since the Gospels were written in Greek and the Eastern regions of the Empire were the places where conversion to Christianity had made the most progress. There would then be not just cultural fashion but two powerful institutions urging the transition forward--the Roman state, and the Christian church. If the Church has adopted (and adapted, to accommodate more sounds than the base alphabet covers) the Greek script as its standard before the Empire starts to disintegrate, then even the eventual Roman rite of the Christian church will develop scripts based on Greek rather than Latin script. That would make it universal (in, to be sure, localized versions) throughout the entire Roman-influenced world, except for places the Arabs later overwhelm with their influence.

A much weirder and in effect ASB scenario would be if the Hebrew or Aramaic scripts were adopted in a fit of Christian piety.
 
To extend my musings a bit:

WI some Roman scholar, widely respected, were to develop a scheme for systematically extending the Greek alphabet to cover the numerous peculiar sounds of various languages of peoples who were subject to the Empire but neither Greek nor Latin speakers--the Semitic languages, Germanic ones, eventually Slavs. The process of pre-adapting the expanded alphabet could begin long before the Romans were actually dealing with these peoples as actual subjects or as conquerors, because our scholar is trying to devise a scheme whereby agents of the Empire can accurately transcribe the speech of even distant peoples with whom Romans were trading or making alliances with (or against!) I'd think that an alphabet suitably expanded and with systematic plans already developed for accommodating a wide variety of sounds not typically used in the core languages would tend to persist and prevail because of its (near!) universal utility as is combined with an established scheme to incorporate new ones. It would seem especially well suited for Christian missionaries.

In fact, in a very specific application, this is how Cyrillic was developed. I'm talking though about a kind of ur-Cyrillic being developed earlier, when the Empire was still strong, and even before Christianity was adopted as state religion (though perhaps the scholastic inventor was a covert Christian, and so more strongly motivated to devise a scheme that would incorporate Semitic sounds from Aramaic and Hebrew). But the upshot would look rather like Cyrillic--maybe the numerous extra letters for Slavic sounds would not be the same ones as OTL, and there would be yet more letters for other sounds not found in Slavic either, but at a glance you'd have a core alphabet clearly based on Greek rather than Latin roots, with lots of new letters found in neither.

I guess it might simply be called "Imperial" script.
 
A much weirder and in effect ASB scenario would be if the Hebrew or Aramaic scripts were adopted in a fit of Christian piety.

Whilst I'm not saying it's exactly very likely, I wouldn't necessarily say having Hebrew or Aramaic as a 'lingua fraca' is entirely ASB, provided the POD is sufficiently far enough back.

If early Christians take the view of either Hebrew/Aramaic as a particularly prestigious and revered holy language, in much the same way that Islam views Arabic, then it is certainly possible.

Another possibility I've always thought as interesting (and is possibly worthy of a thread of its own), is what is during the Reformation, Protestants, instead of developing a penchant for translating the Bible into the vernacular of the local population, instead emphasise a return to Hebrew/Aramaic as the 'true' language of Christians? (as opposed to the Latin of the Catholic Church. A 'back to basics' approach to the Bible was certainly a major theme of Reformation-era Protestantism.
 
Well, One of the first books printed in Cape Town, South Africa, was a Muslim prayer book.

It was printed using Arabic lettering, but the language used was Afrikaans. I have no clue how it looked or sounded.
 
Another possibility I've always thought as interesting (and is possibly worthy of a thread of its own), is what is during the Reformation, Protestants, instead of developing a penchant for translating the Bible into the vernacular of the local population, instead emphasise a return to Hebrew/Aramaic as the 'true' language of Christians? (as opposed to the Latin of the Catholic Church. A 'back to basics' approach to the Bible was certainly a major theme of Reformation-era Protestantism.

I can't see how that could happen. The times were virulently anti-semitic, both in the places that remained in the RC church, and in the places where the Reformation took hold. A likelier candidate is Greek.
And for even THAT to happen, you need someone else than Luther to be the catalyst for the Reformation, as one of his biggest issues was making the entire language of the church readily accessible to everyone - including those that didn't understand Latin, much less Greek (and Hebrew!).
 
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Whilst I'm not saying it's exactly very likely, I wouldn't necessarily say having Hebrew or Aramaic as a 'lingua fraca' is entirely ASB, provided the POD is sufficiently far enough back....

I hope it's clear, I wasn't talking about adopting the Hebrew or Aramaic language, but rather their alphabets.

Well, One of the first books printed in Cape Town, South Africa, was a Muslim prayer book.

It was printed using Arabic lettering, but the language used was Afrikaans. I have no clue how it looked or sounded.

That's more the kind of thing I was speculating about.

Why would Afrikaans be written in Arabic script though? If for Muslim converts whose first or common language was Afrikaans, why not use the Latin alphabet? Was this prayer book written by someone literate in Arabic, and fluent in Afrikaans, for the benefit of people who spoke Afrikaans but were not, before their education by Muslim missionaries, literate in any language so their Muslim teachers simply taught them the same alphabet they would hopefully some day be reading the Koran and other Arabic writings in?

Anyway I thought the thread topic was, European languages, presumably in this alt-timeline having evolved much as they did OTL, but not written in Roman letters but something else. Greek letters are something of a cop-out since they are so close to Latin ones already, but I see them as the only realistic competitor to Roman ones, and that only if the Romans themselves adopted them. Only Greek had the right combination of proximity to the Romans and cultural cachet; the only possible rivals would have to be propelled as it were by very strong religious reasons.

Of course if the alt-history is so drastically different the Romans don't wind up dominant at all, then the Latin script would be as obscure as the Latin language in general. But the question of the thread seems to imply we have the Roman Empire still and all its successor states; just using a different alphabet that's all.
 
Part of the problem is that the Latin alphabet is already an adaptation of the Greek one - largely by the Etruscans IRCC.

So we'll need to have the Latins consciously adopt the early Greek alphabet before they are dominant in Italy.
That way we can retain the spread of the Romans roughly as OTL while spreading the "Roman Greek Alphabet".

A side effect could be more Greek influence of Latin (&vv).
 
Shevek,

Not sure how it came about.

However, the Cape was and is Afrikaans, insofar as Afrikaans developed in the Cape.

The earliest settlers (who came from Java by and large) took their slaves along; hence the heavy Muslim influence.

The book dates to some 18XX, so it is not ancient either.

My theory is that it was for an Afrikaans speaking audience, and audience not using any other language (or only sporadic). If this audience is also Muslim, it would make a lot of sense to use Arabic lettering.

I would not be surprised if our (strong) Greek community, who may not be Greek speaking at all, would use Greek lettering on soem occasions. That still needs to be seen though.

Ivan
 
They're syllabaries, not alphabets. And if you're listing Tibet, Mongolia, and Korea, how did you miss Japan?

I don't know about Tibetan and Mongolian but Korean, unlike Japanese, is definitely written with an alphabet not a syllabary. Of course it was only created in the 15th century and encountered by the wider world even later so it would have a poor shot to dethrone the Latin alphabet.
 
I don't know about Tibetan and Mongolian but Korean, unlike Japanese, is definitely written with an alphabet not a syllabary. Of course it was only created in the 15th century and encountered by the wider world even later so it would have a poor shot to dethrone the Latin alphabet.

Korean Hangul is a crazy script. It's like an alphabet and a syllabary. The individual characters are syllabic, but the characters are comprised on alphabetic units. I'm using a similar idea in my script for Chiricahua Apache.
 
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