A couple of weeks ago, I was in Chennai for my US Visa interview (I’ve written a blog about that experience which you can read here). After the interview, I had some time before my evening train back to Bangalore. I picked up the phone and called my ever-dependable sources of information – my parents. They recommended the Egmore Museum. And that’s where I stumbled upon something super fascinating – a display showcasing the evolution of the Tamil scripts from 3rd century BC to modern times. 

The rapid evolution of the Tamil script

What really caught my eye was the realization that the Tamil script only began to resemble its modern form around the 15th century. Think about that for a moment – a person today who can fluently read Tamil will be completely unable to decipher their own language’s script from just 600 years ago! And this is for a language whose script has been dated back 2500 years and the language itself to roughly 5000 years!

So this brought me to the question – what is the age or lifespan of a script? I saw a bunch of scripts in the museum that day and none of them exist or even resemble any modern day Indian language – and these were all from the years 800-1500 CE. Let’s try to go a bit deeper.

A global perspective on the evolution of scripts

To understand the lifespan and evolution of scripts, I decided to pick a few popular languages and scripts from modern times and dig deeper into their stories.

English

The Latin alphabet forms the foundation of the modern English script. It originated in Ancient Rome which was itself derived from the Greek alphabet. Some other interesting facts:

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