For fictitious beings, see Character.
Characters (文字, monji) are symbols used to record language by writing it on paper or engraving it on objects such as stones or wood. With the birth of writing, languages that had previously been transmitted only orally could now be preserved as a form even across gaps in time and space.
Therefore, even ancient languages that have no speakers today can be deciphered if they are recorded in writing, and it is possible to infer to some extent the transition in oral pronunciation between modern and classical languages based on spelling changes and other factors.
The oldest writing is estimated to have been produced by Sumerians in Mesopotamia 5-6,000 years ago. Although language before the appearance of writing is often unclear due to a lack of data, it is thought that language existed as late as 50,000 years ago, when the present humans left Africa and began to spread around the world.
There are many types of letters, including major ones such as the Latin alphabet used in English, Spanish, French, etc., and minor ones such as the Canadian Aboriginal script used in Inuktitut and other languages, but in most cases, each language has its own set of letters.
However, there are cases where different scripts are used depending on religious, national, and political differences even though the words are almost the same linguistically. For example, Hindi in Hindu-majority India and Urdu in Muslim-majority Pakistan are almost the same language, but the former uses Devanagari and the latter Arabic-based script, and the languages are usually called by different names. Similarly, Persian in Iran and Tajik in Tajikistan, both based on the Arabic script, are essentially the same language, but the latter used the same Cyrillic script as Russian because it was part of the Soviet Union.
Just as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets were born from the Greek alphabet, and the Hiragana alphabet was born from the Kanji alphabet, there are relationships among letters that are equivalent to parent-child, sibling, and relative relationships. Some letters are similar to each other, such as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. For example, the Arabic alphabet, which at first glance does not appear to be similar to the Latin alphabet, is a relative of the Phoenician alphabet, which is the parent of the Greek alphabet, or rather, almost all of the major phonemic scripts in use today (see below), including the scripts of Indian languages and, according to some theories, Korean Hangul, are considered to be related to the Phoenician script.
However, the phylogenetic relationship of a script does not necessarily correspond to the phylogenetic relationship of the language itself that is written using that script. For example, although Chinese characters have historically been used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, these four languages are all separate lineages in terms of grammar and phonology (Chinese is Lhasa Tibetan, Japanese is Japanese–Ryukyuan, Korean is Koreanic, and Vietnamese is Austroasiatic).
