The South Semitic scripts are a family of
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
s that had split from
Proto-Sinaitic script
Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, the North Semitic alphabet, or Early Alphabetic) is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian ...
by the 10th century BC. The family has two main branches:
Ancient North Arabian (ANA) and
Ancient South Arabian (ASA). The scripts were exclusive to
Arabia
The Arabian Peninsula, (; ar, شِبْهُ الْجَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِيَّة, , "Arabian Peninsula" or , , "Island of the Arabs") or Arabia, is a peninsula of Western Asia, situated northeast of Africa on the Arabian Plat ...
and the
Horn of Africa. All the ANA and most of the ASA scripts fell out of use by the 6th century AD. The exception was
Geʽez
Geez (; ' , and sometimes referred to in scholarly literature as Classical Ethiopic) is an ancient Ethiopian Semitic language. The language originates from what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Today, Geez is used as the main liturgi ...
, a child of ASA in use in
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
. It and its variants remain in use today for various
Ethiosemitic languages
Ethiopian Semitic (also Ethio-Semitic, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic or Abyssinian) is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan. They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages, itself a sub-branch of Semitic, part of the ...
. In Arabia, the South Semitic scripts were replaced by
Arabic script, which is descended from
Aramaic script
The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...
.
[Michael Everson and Michael Macdonald]
"Proposal to Encode the Old North Arabian Script in the SMP of the UCS"
''Proposals from the Script Encoding Initiative'', UC Berkeley, 2010.
References
Semitic writing systems
{{writingsystem-stub