Atlas Trail
How Sure Are We? Language Families and the Alphabet's Own Descent
Reconstructing a family tree is not one method with one confidence level: some families are securely rebuilt branch by branch, others carry a rejected macrofamily hypothesis, and at least one has no agreed proto-language at all. The same method, applied to writing rather than speech, traces the alphabet's own descent from Phoenician through Greek.
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Language Families
Proto-Bantu: one of the better-supported reconstructions within Niger-Congo, reflecting Bantu's own closer genealogical unity.
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Language Families
Niger-Congo as a whole: no proto-language has ever been securely reconstructed, and the family's very unity remains an open question.
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Language Families
Turkic: securely reconstructed on its own, but its proposed deeper kinship with Mongolic and Tungusic under "Altaic" is a largely rejected hypothesis.
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Language Families
Slavic: by contrast, securely reconstructed and cleanly divided into three well-established branches.
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Language Families
East Slavic: one of the three, ancestor to Russian.
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Language Families
West Slavic: the second branch, ancestor to Czech and Polish.
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Language Families
South Slavic: the third branch, ancestor to Bulgarian.
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Scripts
The same reconstruction method, applied to writing instead of speech: Phoenician script, ancestor of nearly every alphabet in use today.
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Scripts
Greek script: adapted from Phoenician, with the key innovation of dedicated vowel letters.
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