Cladistic Analysis of the Evolution of Some Aramaic and Arabic Script Varieties

Introduction

Systematics, all different types of organisms on the Earth are the result of evolution. If we traced back an organism’s phylogeny, we would find it connects through shared ancestors to families of other organisms. So that all life we see is connected to a huge tree called a phylogenetic tree (Lipscomb, 1998). There are various kinds of phylogenetic trees, e.g., cladogram and phenogram. In what follows, groups of units of study are called taxa, where a taxon is a group of objects (organisms, species, entities, statistical units, or data points) of the same category. Phylogenetic trees are very important to understanding the evolution to analyze differences between closely related taxa (McKinnon et al., 2021).

Phenetics analyses and inspects relationships among a taxon based on their similarity, e.g., molecular similarity, phenotypic similarity, or even anatomical similarity. The outcome of phenetics can be a tree-like graph showing taxa’s phenetic relationships, known as a phenogram (Opperdoes, 1997).

Cladistics—oppositely phenetics—is a process of hypothesizing relationships among taxa. In other words, it is the method of reconstructing evolutionary trees. The basis of the cladistic analysis is data on the features or traits of the taxa in which we are interested. These features could be anatomical and physiological properties, behaviors, or genetic sequences. So, it relies on assumptions about ancestral relationships and current data (Kitching et al., 2001).

Pattern systems are specific representations of symbolic communication, consisting of symbols and the syntactic rules (syntax) that govern their use. We are specifically concerned with pattern systems that show the evolution over time to model pattern evolution. In the phylogenetic modelling of pattern evolution, the taxon is a pattern system. Especially, we are focusing on a particular type of pattern system called writing system (shortly script). The modelling of the evolution of scripts is called scriptinformatics as part of the pattern evolution. Scriptinformatics deals with investigating the evolution of graphemes in scripts and the exploration of relationships between scripts, where scripts could be any sequence of symbols of cultural origin, such as historical writing systems (Hosszú, 2017; Hosszú, 2021a, p. 9). Scriptinformatics deals with phylogenetic modelling, namely phenetic, evolutionary, and statistical analyses of the studied scripts’ features (Hosszú, 2014; Hosszú, 2021b). An analogue of scriptinformatics is the use of phylogeny for historical linguistics (Forster and Renfrew 2006). The symbols are typically graphemes in the scripts, objects with one or more glyphs and sound values. The grapheme can be a letter, a numeral, an accent, or a punctuation mark, among others.

The article’s structure is as follows: first, background, then the database of the used pattern systems (Aramaic and Arabic script varieties) are presented. Next, the various cladistics methods and then the resulting cladograms are described. Finally, the conclusions are drawn.

Problem Statement

Our research deals with the evolutionary modelling of historical scripts. The importance of the research lies in the fact that it is easier to determine the circumstances of the creation of a large number of manuscripts, some of unknown origin, by tracing the evolution of the scripts used in them. In this context, the taxon is a historical script or a script variant. In such a way, the evolutionary modelling developed in biological species extends to historical scripts as taxa. This paper’s main goal is to demonstrate that the cladistic approach can process paleographical datasets and evaluate their cladistics modelling. The cladistics method was applied for the selected varieties of the Arabic and Aramaic scripts, which were phenetically analyzed earlier (Salman & Hosszú, in press). In the present article, the cladistic analysis of these script varieties is presented.