So, what does 'writing' look like?

Greek

This is specifically Ancient Greek, and is my favourite passage in that language. I'll give a bonus ten points to anyone who can tell me what it is. It's interesting to note that outside of Greece, most people know Greek letters from either a Bible passage ('I am the Alpha and the Omega' Revelation 22:13) or from maths and sciences. Why do we use Greek letters in those fields? Because the characters are fairly easy to find, many people used to know both Latin and Greek, and it gave us an extra 48 characters to assign meanings to.

Sumerian

The oldest writing system known, the Sumerian cuneiform was written using a triangular stick (a cuneus) which was pressed into clay to form these wedge shapes. It began as a pictorial system ('cow' was a drawing of a cow, etc.) but later transformed into abstract glyphs. It, through a ridiculous five thousand plus year journey, arrived at the Latin script you're currently reading.

Arabic

There are more variants of Arabic than stars in the sky (including a number of variants for languages entirely unrelated to Arabic itself, like Farsi or Pashto). It's interesting in part because vowels are, as a general rule, not written. T wld b lk wrttng n Nglsh smthng lk ths. And you wonder why Arabic is considered difficult for English-speakers to learn? By the way.... I DO in fact know that there are more stars in the sky than variants of Arabic. It's hyperbole. Exaggeration. Deliberate rhetorical overstatement. You can stop telling me that there are a lot of stars.

Bengali

The first of a large number of the scripts on this list which are distantly related to a single ancestral script known as the Brāhmī alphabet, which in turn is a very distant relative of our Latin script.

Burmese

Another relative of that Brāhmī script, Burmese has its distinct curving shape because instead of being written with pen and ink, it was written on the surface of palm leaves which tore when you drew straight lines. Burmese is not related to the languages of India like Hindi, Gujarati, etc., and is actually a distant relative of Mandarin and Cantonese.

Cherokee

The Cherokee writing system was one of the only scripts on this list invented by one person, and is also one of the newest scripts on this list, at just over 200 years old. It was invented by Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ) when he found the colonists reading their language using what he called 'leaves'. He went and, over the course of a number of years, developed this script entirely from scratch without knowing how to read the writing of the colonists. It's for this reason that, while the letters may look familiar, they are entirely different to their English look-alikes. For example, Ꭰ is a, Ꭱ is e, Ꮓ is no, Ꮃ is la, etc. This is also a good example of a syllabary, a point I'll explain below.

Inuktitut

Developed by missionaries, the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabary (as it's formally known) is used to write many of the native languages of Canada, although in a number of variants. Each character represents not a word or a single sound, but a syllable. The various smaller letters alter syllables to add an extra consonant that doesn't have a vowel of its own.

Coptic

A relative of Greek, Coptic is the liturgical script and language of most Egyptian Christians. It's a distant relative, although not too distant, of our own Latin script, and was influenced by a number of centuries of distance from Greece.

Armenian

With an alphabet that's been around since around 400 CE, Armenian is one of the most distinct relatives of the majority of other European languages. Most language in Europe are part of the Indo-European family, with farflung relatives throughout the Middle-East and India. Oddly, Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are completely unrelated to the rest of European languages, with the last three all related to one another, and Basque with no known relatives.

Chinese

There is no one language 'Chinese', but instead a number of related languages all written using similar but not identical writing systems. Each character represents a word or part of a word, although it's not a simple relationship, and very few characters are 'pictures' of what they read as, with a lot of complexities that get overlooked a lot of the time when people first hear about Chinese writing.

Cyrillic

Another of those scripts originally developed by one person, this time a Greek named Saint Cyril. It's change quite a lot over the years, but it still retains some of its original characteristic similarity to Greek. There are a number of variants, most of them dating back to the Soviet era when the Soviet government developed Cyrillic-based scripts for a large number of previously-unwritten languages or those written using Arabic variants.

Devanagari

The most commonly seen relative of Brāhmī, Devanagari is a stereotypical abugida. What that means is that the vowels aren't written as separate letters, but written as various extra strokes and swashes around the consonants. Many abugidas have so-called 'inherent vowels' which is a sort of vowel automatically included with each consonant unless you specifically write another vowel or a mark suppressing the vowel. In the case of Devanagari, it's an a.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

You probably know these, and if you don't, what rock have you been living under? What you probably don't know is that we have no idea what vowels Egyptian used, because they, like Arabic, didn't write them. So Queen Nefertiti? Egyptologists know her as Queen Nfr.t-jy.tj, because we have almost no idea what the vowels actually are in there except for those words we know from Greek sources.

Ogham

A writing system first developed by the Irish and later brought over to Britain and used by the Romans (to some small degree), ogham is perfect for carving into wood, consisting only of combinations of long and short lines and dots. This is not Irish, but English written in ogham.

Mongolian

Written vertically, this script is only written in cursive, and was displaced in large part by the Cyrillic alphabet in the Soviet era.

Ge'ez

A script rarely seen outside of Africa, Ge'ez is the standard writing system for Ethiopian language. Ge'ez is an abugida, with the inherent vowel being an ä. It's a distant (very distant) relative of Arabic, Devanagari, and our Latin alphabet. If you're starting to get the feeling that almost all writing systems are related, it's because they are. Writing was only invented from whole cloth in three or four places, and all other systems are descended from those, or at the very least impacted by them.

Georgian

This one sort of looks like Armenian except based on circles instead of straight lines. There were originally three Georgian scripts, but two have mostly fallen out of use. Like most scripts other than Greek and Latin descendents, there is no distinction between upper- and lower-case. If you think about it, why do we really need two alphabets, one we almost never use? It's a historical curiosity, but not a bad one.

Gujarati

Yet another Brahmic language, this one is interesting because it omits that long line connecting the various letters that many Brahmic scripts have.

Hebrew

A relative of Arabic, this one has distinct characters, but it still omits the vowels. It also shows more clearly the right-to-left direction that characterises relatives thereof.

Japanese

The Japanese use three different scripts, two of which are related syllabaries, and the last being a variant of the Chinese script. Both syllabaries are originally from Chinese script, but through a long time isolated and simplified by repetition, they have become unrecognisable. Japanese has such a mishmash of systems because it has a very unique grammar that doesn't mesh well with the traditional Chinese script.

Klingon

You didn't think that I would leave out some invented scripts just because they aren't 'natural', did you? What makes any script more natural than another? They're all invented by people and they all have certain developments throughout their use that alter them and create unique variants.

Korean

The Korean alphabet, Hangeul, may look similar to both Japanese and Chinese, but is very distinct. Unlike both Chinese and Japanese, Hangeul is an alphabet just like ours, it just groups its letters into syllables. It would be like if we split our words in to one syl lab le per word in stead of group ing them in to word s. The words are then divided using spaces between them. Hangeul is also another of those one-man creations like Cherokee!

Latin

The Latin alphabet we all know and use..... Just go read the picture.

Lontara

An example of how 'simple' some writing systems may appear, the Lontara alphabet is a radical simplification of the Brahmic script. It may look almost ridiculously simple, but it's no more so than any other, and is actually an abugida like some other scripts above.

Malayalam

Yet another Brahmic script, this one to write the Malayalam language. It's interesting to note that Malayalam is one of a number of languages in India which are NOT related to English distantly, but instead are Dravidian languages.

Maya

The only script on this list which was not invented from whole cloth on the Euro-Asio-African continent, the Maya script is a complex combination of logography (like Chinese) and syllabary. It took many years to decipher, and those efforts were greatly hampered by a monk in 1652 named Diego de Landa, who gathered up all of the books of the Maya and burnt them. Only a small number of paper texts remain, and the rest of what we know of the Maya writing comes from inscriptions on monuments.

Tengwar

The writing system (or rather, one of the writing systems) developed by J. R. R. Tolkien for his Elves, the Tengwar is an abugida, and since the Lord of the Rings movies, has become well known outside of Tolkien hobbyists. It's actually an incredibly simple system to learn, once you get used to it. Learning the Elvish languages on the other hand is a fair bit more difficult....

Circular Gallifreyan

This one was recently invented to look similar to the props on the show Doctor Who. For all this work writing all these circles, this picture shows just two sentences. It's cumbersome, and even though I like Doctor Who, I find this script to be rather poorly designed.

Tibetan

The Tibetan writing system is yet another Brahmic script, and is notable for its treatment of consonant clusters. Tibetan used to have some pretty impressive consonant clusters (a consonant cluster is a series of consonants in a row, for instance the str and ngths in strengths), and instead of writing the consonants after one another, they stacked them on top of one another to create the complex swash characters you see here.

Vulcan

The most recently created system on this list (save the last), I mainly included it because it just looks fucking cool. It may be nerdy, but it's still pretty cool. The long curves actually connect separate syllables together into words. The script was created to look like some of the props on Star Trek, and emulates if very well. It's one of the only scripts (apart from the Cherokee and Galifreyan above) to emulate the look, without emulating the function, of something else.

Runes

A common writing system throughout pre-Latin script Norselands and England (remembering that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and even Cornwall were later additions to the Kingdom of England), the runic scripts (this being just one example) were made to be easy to inscribe. After all, what's easier than carving straight lines? There is one rune which survived in Old and Middle English, the þ which represented the th-sound in three. The other th-sound (like in this) was represented by ð. The various Anglo-Scandinavian runes are known as the Fuþark or Fuþorc.

This last one was invented by yours truly for a language I'm creating. It's kind of neat, because some of the grammar is actually encoded in how you write certain things. It looks a bit like it was based on Greek, although it wasn't at all. It just converged on that look through its development.