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The South Semitic scripts are a family of 
The exception was
"Proposal to Encode the Old North Arabian Script in the SMP of the UCS"
''Proposals from the Script Encoding Initiative'', UC Berkeley, 2010.
alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
s that had split from Proto-Sinaitic script
The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about Serabit el-Khadim proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, 30-40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as Wadi el ...
by the 10th century BC. The family has two main branches: Ancient North Arabian
Languages and scripts in the 1st Century Arabia
Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Ara ...
(ANA) and Ancient South Arabian (ASA).
The scripts were exclusive to Arabia
The Arabian Peninsula (, , or , , ) or Arabia, is a peninsula in West Asia, situated north-east of Africa on the Arabian plate. At , comparable in size to India, the Arabian Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the world.
Geographically, the ...
and the Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa (HoA), also known as the Somali Peninsula, is a large peninsula and geopolitical region in East Africa.Robert Stock, ''Africa South of the Sahara, Second Edition: A Geographical Interpretation'', (The Guilford Press; 2004), ...
. All the ANA and most of the ASA scripts fell out of use by the 6th century AD.
The exception was Geʽez
Geez ( or ; , and sometimes referred to in scholarly literature as Classical Ethiopic) is an ancient South Semitic language. The language originates from what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Today, Geez is used as the main liturgical langu ...
, a child of ASA in use in Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...
. It and its variants remain in use today for various Ethiosemitic languages. In Arabia, the South Semitic scripts were replaced by the Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...
, which is descended from the Nabataean script.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