Donald Ryan states, "Language existed long before writing, emerging probably simultaneously with sapience, abstract thought and the Genus Homo. In my opinion, the signature event that separated the emergence of palaeohumans from their anthropoid progenitors was not tool-making but a rudimentary oral communication that replaced the hoots and gestures still used by lower primates. The transfer of more complex information, ideas and concepts from one individual to another, or to a group, was the single most advantageous evolutionary adaptation for species preservation. As long ago as 25,000-30,000 years BP, humans were painting pictures on cave walls. Whether these pictures were telling a "story" or represented some type of 'spirit house' or ritual exercise is not known."
http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm
Cyrillic Alphabet The Cyrillic alphabet has been influenced by both the Greek and Latin alphabets. The original is called Old Church Slavonic.
It is used for several languages in Eastern Europe: Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian
Etruscan Alphabet The Etruscan alphabet was used for the language of the Etruscans. They were a pre-Roman people from ancient Italy. It is an adaptation of the Greek alphabet and later influenced the Latin alphabet.
Latin Alphabet The Latin alphabet was developed from the Greek and Etruscan alphabets for Latin, the language of the Roman Empire.
This is now the most used writing system in the world. Hundreds of languages use it in Europe (English, French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech), Africa (Zulu, Swahili, Wolof), The Americas (Spanish, Portuguese, Nahuatl, Quechua) and Asia (Turkish, Malay, Vietnamese).
Phonecian Alphabet Phonecian is one of the oldest alphabets in the world and the basis of most of the world's alphabets and syllabaries. The language was spoken by the Phonoecians around the Mediterranean Sea.
Chinese Characters Chinese script is made up of characters that represent a complete word. It is used for most of the languages of China (Mandarain, Cantonese, Wu, etc) as well as Japanese.
The Japanese Alphabets The Japanese language is written with Chinese characters. It also uses two alphabets for word endings and for foreign words. These are called Hiragana and Katakana.
The Sanskrit Syllabary The Sanskrit script was developed for the language of the same name spoken in North India over 2500 years ago. The Hindu holy books were written with this language. The script is the basis for most of the North Indian writing systems.
