Have there been attempts in making artificial alphabets for the Indo-European languages?

Question

As far as I know linguists came to conclusion that most of the modern alphabets initially derived from the Phoenician Alphabet, which belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family of languages. Phoenician basically invented the idea of the Alphabet, that eventually spread to other cultures, and through trade routes.

Most of the modern European languages use some variations of the Latin and Greece alphabets, because the Ancient Greeks and the Latins had close cultural interconnections and trading routes with Phoenician colonies, and these two civilizations were the most developed European cultures in ancient times.

As I understand it, the Phoenician Alphabet was a simplified method of communication in a sense of a trading information transmissions in contrast to more complicated systems of hieroglyphic writing. But naturally the Phoenician Alphabet follows the basic ideas of hieroglyphic writing too. Such as the letter Alep (𐤀) depicts an ox, and it basically means "livestock", and the letter Bet (𐤁) depicts a house, and it refers to "domestic". Having these letters as the first letters of the alphabet makes sense in the proto-semitic culture, because the livestock basically refers to the amount of wealth in a subsistence farming economy, and the house refers to an economic agent (a household).

But such hieroglyphs make no sense in the Indo-European family of languages. At first glance even if the ancient Latins had kept their alphabet set as it is, they at least had to take different images and choose different phonetics for the letters. The Latin word for "Alpha-Bet" probably would sound more native as "Bos-Dom" in this case.

Nowadays, there are a lot of attempts and related research in developing new artificial languages. I'm wondering whether there has been any research in developing of new alphabets in the sense of the glyphs depictions and their phonetics that would better fit the Indo-European family of languages, and the historical cultural aspects (such that the letters would at least reflect the most important PIE roots).

Answer 1

While the Phoenician glyphs (or rather their ancestors, the Proto-Sinaitic glyphs) were originally based on recognizable objects, they didn't actually mean those objects, any more than the letter B means "house" in English. Rather, they repurposed various hieroglyphs to represent the first sound of that object's name—a hieroglyph of a house meant the /b/ sound because their word for "house" was something like baytu, and a hieroglyph of water meant the /m/ sound because their word for "water" was something like maymu. But you couldn't use those glyphs to actually mean "house" and "water"; they just meant /b/ and /m/.

By the time the system got to the Phoenicians, the symbols were basically arbitrary. The symbol for /b/ no longer looked recognizably like a house, and while they still called it "house" (beit), it just meant the sound /b/. When the Greeks adopted it, even that final link was severed; beta became just an arbitrary name, and the Romans called it simply be, after its sound. (The letter names we use today in English are descended from the Roman names, after going through a bunch of sound changes, hence "bee".)

P.S. Even in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the "house" glyph and the "water" glyph more often represented sounds (pr and n respectively) than houses and water. You could use them to mean the actual things, but if you did, you had to add a special mark meaning "this sign means the actual object it represents instead of a particular sound". After all, you use the /n/ sound a lot more than you use the word "water"!

Answer 2

The ancient cultural milieu of proto Indo-European is very old and little understood, but there are numerous attempts to discern something about their lifestyle 8,000 years ago. We may assume that they lived in the Pontic–Caspian steppe. They had dog, horses and cows, probably some "force of nature" deities, wheels, and so on. The question then is what cultural facts of proto-Semitic or Afro-Asiatic society are "inappropriate" for Indo-European: and did any of those facts impinge on the shape of letters in Semitic alphabets. The earliest Semitic letter shapes are simplified pictograms derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics which are drawings of common objects like "mouth", "ox", "stick". The letter "b" derives from a drawing of a house, the Semitic word being something like bayt, ultimately standing in for the sound b. If one were to re-invent the alphabet based on PIE cultural facts, "house" probably would not be a sufficiently prominent concept, but no doubt there would be common objects whose outlines could take the place of pictures of foreign concepts like "house". The thing is that there are very few objects that underlie Egyptian writing which are significantly foreign to PIE culture.

After you have assembled the culturally-prominent vocabulary of ancient PIE society and the associated words for those things, you have to pick a subset where there is a suitable sound-meaning correspondence, for example "b" and "bayt" (house); "m" and "maym" (water). There is a bit of a problem with "b", that b was a marginal phoneme in PIE, also a knowledge problem that there remains substantial controversy over what the phonemes of PIE were (and what words have them). Given a substantial vocabulary list from PIE, we might decide ti represent the phoneme /bh/ with a drawing of a brother (*bʰréh₂tēr in some theories), /m/ with a drawing of a mother (méh₂tēr), /p/ with a drawing of a father (ph₂tḗr) and so on. Those would not be the best choices, since it's not obvious how those drawings would be reliably distinguished.

So there have been no such attempts, but you can take a crack at it if you'd like. I don't see any problem with our various writing systems that relates to the ancient cultural context, and I see nothing by problems in any attempt to limit the inspiration for letter shapes to facts of an ancient long-dead culture that didn't have computers or cars.

Answer 3

First point, Indo-European languages had used many different alphabets throughout their history, including Minoan script, cuneiform, Devanghari, Armenian alphabet and Glagolitic.

Most of the scripts used were derivatives of Phonecean script. Armenian and Glagolitic were sufficiently novel despite having many letters borroved from Phonecean-derived alphabets.

The Phoenecean scipt in turn originated from Egyptian hyerogliphs. So, the letter names did not have separate meaning except for better memorization already in Semitic family. The letters were originally named after objcts in Egyptian, not in Semitic.

In various languages thare are different names for latters, different from names of letters in Phonecean alphabet. Those names were usually meant to improve memorization, and nothing else. For instance, in Old Russian letter "Ꙁ" was named "ꙁємлꙗ" (earth), letter "Д" "добро" (good), "А" "аꙁъ" (I), "Ж" "живѣтє" (live), "Л" "люди" (people), "М" "мыслєтє" (think), "C" "слово" (word).

Answer 4

The Latin word for "Alpha-Bet" probably would sound more native as "Bos-Dom" in this case.

Indeed, an argument can be made that the rune ⟨ᚠ⟩ fehu deserved first place in the Futhark because it translates ʔālep from Phoenician, because the name is commonly explained as "cattle", "property", "wealth".

By the same line of reasoning, ⟨ᚢ⟩ would have to stand in the name of PIE *weyḱ- ("house, village") in the sense of bayt "house", cp. beta. The shape would be reminiscent of Hieratic ⟨Π⟩ pr "house" (which was largely replaced by Demotic ꜥ.wy using the same character as logogram). But the original runic name is unknown and the character is usually derived from Phoenician ⟨𐤅⟩. The names of ⟨ᚢ⟩ attested in Younger Futhark and Gothic don't corroborate the similarity anyhow.

Although, the shape of ⟨ᚠ⟩ seems corresponding to Phoenician ⟨𐤅⟩ instead (cp. en.WP: Digamma, grep "Crete"). The original name is reconstructed and not immediately attested. Oscan 𐌅𐌝𐌕𐌄𐌋𐌉𐌞 "land of bulls / young cattle" may still support the cattle theory as ⟨V⟩ is derived from the same Phoenician letter. However, the closest resemblance is born by Arabic ʾalif ⟨ا⟩ and Hebrew waw ⟨ו⟩ and various Hieratic horizontal strokes. Note that /w/ may be an allophone of /u/ e.g. Arabic و / ؤ, but this looks much closer to Greek φ.

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At any rate, since ʔālep has an initial consonant and the shape of 𐤀 resembles runic ⟨ᚲ⟩, Greek ⟨κ⟩, notwithstanding gamma, German Kalb "calf" is rather suspect because it has no PIE etymology.

But such hieroglyphs make no sense in the Indo-European family of languages.

Nevertheless, the iconicity is there: ⟨A⟩ is an ox on its head. The remaining difficulties never stopped anyone from making superficial comparison.

In this view, the question recieves a definite yes. Yes, the artifice is quite elaborate, actualy. We vmcan understand "artifical" in the same sense as synthetic – synthesis of largely unrelated scripts.