Bokstavslek

Bokstavslek, or "letter kinship," is the study of historical relationships among writing symbols used in alphabets and their descendants. It focuses on the origins and lineage of graphemes, tracing how letters in modern scripts such as Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Runic connect to earlier forms. The central idea is that many letters are cognates, descended from common ancestral proto-letters, most of which derive from the Phoenician alphabet via Greek and Etruscan intermediaries. The term is used in linguistics and palaeography to understand how shapes and sounds change over time and across regions.

Scholars compare letter shapes, phonetic values, and historical manuscripts to reconstruct ancestral forms and pathways of development. They distinguish between phonemic identity (sound) and graphemic representation (visual symbol). The study is multidisciplinary, drawing on philology, palaeography, codicology, and typology. It also considers non-Latin scripts, such as Cyrillic or Runic, exploring how they relate to or diverge from the Latin family.

In practice, letters like A and B can be traced back to early Semitic proto-letters through Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan stages before becoming the Latin A and B. However, not all alphabets preserve a direct one-to-one correspondence; some letters were redesigned to suit different phonologies, writing directions, or aesthetic traditions. The field emphasizes cautious reconstruction, dating, and acknowledgment of borrowings and innovations.

Bokstavslek informs the history of writing, orthography reforms, and the understanding of how reading and writing systems influence each other. See also History of the Latin alphabet; Palaeography; Alphabet.