I wonder if the Latin alphabet looks as aesthetically pleasing to those unfamiliar with it as many other writing systems look to us
@Felthry I remember hearing somewhere once that in pre-literate cultures north of the Roman Empire, folks would sometimes decorate swords and shit with stuff that looked kinda sorta like words in Roman alphabet, but without any kind of meaning.
'Cause it looked cool.
@starkatt the cherokee syllabary has a sort of similar history: the inventor Sequoyah saw the newspapers and books that the invaders had and thought "that seems really useful", so without understanding anything about the Latin alphabet other than the concept of writing, he invented his own set of symbols to encode his native language
this is why there are characters in the cherokee syllabary that look suspiciously similar to latin letters, in fact
@Felthry :looks it up: okay that's rad as heck.
Aleut speakers (in the region of modern-day coastal Alaska) did a similar thing when the Russians showed up. They were like "oh this alphabet thing is a great idea, so we're gonna start writing our language in (modified) Cyrillic now."
(I was just looking it up to confirm this story I heard years ago, and apparently there's less than 100-150 native speakers now. And, Aleut is the sole member of an entire branch of a language family. Fuck.)
@starkatt (of course, in this case it was taken further--not just an aesthetic choice but the idea of writing itself was taken)