WI no alphabet?

[Tyr]

WI the Greeks never develop their alphabet and so this never develops into the latin, cyrilic, etc.... alphabets?
Lets suppose Greek writing deveopes in a Egyptian hieroglyphic/Chinese script sort of direction instead.

The Arabic and other alphabets are unaffected directly. They can develop their own way, its just the European alphabets we're getting rid of here.. Is the need for an alphabet so strong they would eventually drop their script and adopt a Asian alphabet?

The impact here could be rather huge...assuming some sort of Roman empire analogue still emerges we'd have a unifying written language unrelated to the various spoken languages ala Chinese.

 

[LadyPoland]

a pictographic written language can transcend dialects or language in a way that a written alphabet can not...

if the greeks or romans had that kind of written language, maybe they can maintain a pax after the fall..

 

[Swan Station]

The only thing the Greeks did to create their alphabet was take the Phoenician abjad and add vowel sounds.

I think you have to go further back, to the Phoenicians, not the Greeks.

At the time the Greeks were creating theirs, Phoenician-derived and similar abjads were already popular all over the Mediterranean. Egyptian scripts based on hieroglyphics was itself already leaning more towards an Abjad.

Even precursors to the Greek alphabet, such as Linear B, were phonetic-based syllabaries.

 

[Falecius]

Honestly, it is hard. I guess that a POD allowing for a tendentially ideographic script in Greece needs to be way far back, no later than Middle Bronze Age, and someone will stumble over a more phonetic way to write at some point, with all its advantages. It happened rather early in Japan and many Far Eastern people (Mongolians, Koreans) adopted phonetically-oriented scripts rather early when they in contact with them. China kept ideograms and hardly developed any more phonetically-oriented script on its own, but this has much to do with a set of specific local condition (linguistical, political, ideological) that were not in place in Western Eurasia. It is possible that the Greeks adopt, say, hieroglyphics, and keep them (o, better, reset back them) as a dominantly logographic script, though it would be a true pain in the ass for a language like Greek.
That would have significant social and cultural effects: a scribe caste would in some way be kept, and literacy would be overall less widespread. More, the ideograms are more language-sensitive as a system when it comes to their spreading, you cannot just take the principle but you need to buy the whole set or a substantial part of it, so the spreading of Greek writing to other areas such as Italy would be far slower. OTOH, written forms of, say, Greek, Latin and Etruscan would have a far greater reciprocal intelligibility after writing is established. But far less people around able to communicate that way for quite a long while.

 

[Falecius]

a pictographic written language can transcend dialects or language in a way that a written alphabet can not...

if the greeks or romans had that kind of written language, maybe they can maintain a pax after the fall..

Why? Almost everybody wrote in Latin or Greek in any case, even when their mother tongues were other ones. Think of Ennius, as an early example for Latin, or Lucian for Greek. And Lucian spoke Aramaic, that was not a small local dialect however.

 

[Color-Copycat]

Forgive me from posting off the top of my head, but didn't the Greeks lose their written language at some point before coming up with a new one (based off the Phoenician alphabet)? I vaguely recall something along those lines from a humanities course I took a few years ago.

 

[NKVD]

Unless some other alphabet is invented, since the Greek alphabet is just Phoenician with vowel signs, they might use a syllabary like Linear B. Which may itself evolve into an abjad, alphabet, or even an abugida. And that seems likely, considering how present the much simpler abjads were in the Med.

It actually would be more likely, if you butterflied away Phoenician entirely.

Literacy rates might be lower.

 

[Falecius]

Forgive me from posting off the top of my head, but didn't the Greeks lose their written language at some point before coming up with a new one (based off the Phoenician alphabet)? I vaguely recall something along those lines from a humanities course I took a few years ago.

Yes, after the fall of the Micenean cities. The bad thing about complex writing systems like linear-B or cuneiform is that they required institutional training, usually in urban, official contexts. Greek cities, (an Hittite ones, for that matter) however, were still far less populous, has a lesser agricultural surplus to rely on, and had a shorter-lived written tradition known to a smaller number of specialists, in relation to Egypt or other areas. So, writing was a fragile part of the system. Linear-B was not entrenched in Micenean culture: its use and purpose was mainly archival. When official archives were no longer needed, there was not a number of scribes sufficient to keep the writing alive. So, Phoenician abjad did not displace Linear-B, that had died some, IIRC, two or three centuries before it started being adopted.

 

[corditeman]

Literacy needs symbols of some kind...

The simplest I know of is probably Ogham - lines across a line. The 33-symbol Early English Runic futhorc is fascinating and survives on the Ruthwell Cross here in glorious (currently wet) Dumfries & Galloway. Neither script bears any relationship to Mediterranean scripts, Ogham is particularly stand-alone.

Point is, you don't need the Med or China or pictograms to come up with literacy - just patterns with an accepted meaning and a spelling system linked to suitable sounds. Greek script is a tough one for the tourist.