Atlas Trail
Borrowed Alphabets, Missing Branches: Eight New Languages
A path through this wave's own new pages: an independent Indo-European branch (Armenian) and a Kra-Dai member with its own abugida (Thai); the branch this atlas was missing (Germanic), traced through Old Norse and its two scripts, runic then Latin; and one script own family tree, from Aramaic through the newly minted Old Uyghur Alphabet into the Mongolian script still used today.
Stop 1 of 6.
Languages
Armenian: its own independent branch of Indo-European, not a subgroup of any surviving neighbor, written in an alphabet devised in 405 AD.
Stop 2 of 6.
Languages
Thai: the Kra-Dai family's official-language member, written in its own abugida.
Stop 3 of 6.
Language Families
Germanic: the branch this atlas was missing, now the home for German, English and the next stop, Old Norse.
Stop 4 of 6.
Languages
Old Norse: the Viking Age tongue behind the modern Scandinavian languages, first runic, then Latin-alphabet after Christianization.
Stop 5 of 6.
Scripts
The Old Uyghur Alphabet: descended from Aramaic by way of Sogdian, and the script a captured scribe, Tata-tonga, taught the Mongol princes to write with.
Stop 6 of 6.
Languages
Mongolian: the language that script became the Mongolian script for, still written vertically in China today.
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