Re: VMs: Stroke harmony. Was: Has anyone been down this route before?

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, Dan Gibson/CanBooks wrote:
> Not necessarily. Old Arabic, and related dialects,  before 600 AD were
> written with alphabets where the characters did NOT take on different forms
> depending on their position within words. Many of these dialects survived
> long after 600 AD among ethnic enclaves while Quraish Arabic became the
> standard among Muslims, and is still in use today.

But did the scripts survive, along with the dialects?  This isn't always
the case, even where it is a possibility.

I'm not well informed in regard to Arabic linguistic history, but I
gather, for example, that Elamite survived as a spoken language in
enclaves in southwestern Iran for some time after the advent of Islam.  I
don't think its reported that any distinctive script did, though I'm not
sure.  This is not a Semitic language, of course, but the circumstances
would have been somewhat similar.  Dialect and isolate enclaves like this
are always historically interesting, I think.

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