One root · two roads · many living letters

One Root, Two Roads

The 26 letters under your eyes are not the end of the alphabet's story — they're one surviving twig. The single Phoenician sign behind your A is also the ancestor of the letter that opens real words today in Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic — and, down a separate Aramaic road, in Hebrew, Arabic and Devanagari. Here are the cousins still writing — by what road they got here, and where the line genuinely runs out.