Interactive keyboards for typing Unicoded genealogies of scripts in the Central Semitic tradition: Phoenician, Imperial Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Nabatean and Arabic. Each keyboard preserves the same qwerty layout across time periods, so pressing a key writes the letter in the script of the selected time period and allows the evolution of the characters to be visualised.
These genealogies constitute an unusually legible path from one of the
earliest stabilized alphabetic traditions. Across roughly three thousand
years they remain recoverable at the level of individual letters,
alphabetic structure and modern digital encoding. Comparable longevity
exists in other scripts, but no parallel descendents of a shared ancient
matrix may share this letter-by-letter equivalence across divergent
languages.
Unicode gives these genealogies a new form. Viewed synchronically, each
Unicode script block is a bounded set of abstract characters. Viewed
diachronically and supplemented by palaeographic dating, these blocks
become computational representations of successive stages within a
history of writing: cross-sections of a complex and diverse continuuum.
Religious textual institutions preserved the living descendants and
their abstract letter identities and Unicode formalised selected nodes
of the resulting genealogy as interoperable character systems. It
therefore records neither the historical continuum in full or digitises
its visible forms but cements judgments about which graphemic identities
constitute meaningful stages within it.