(Though the Roman style & Fraktur style of Latin script are probably more
different from each other as some of the separately encoded Indic scripts [e.g. Kannada / Telugu])
Sorry, Chris, this is unsubstantiated speculation, and it doesn't happen to be true.
In 1997, I showed some comparisons between Coptic, Greek, Cyrillic, and Gothic showing that all of them but Greek were similar enough to be read with a minimum of training and practice. I revised this a bit in 2001: http://www.evertype.com/standards/cy/coptic.html. German, English, and Irish can all be read with similarly low learning curve whether the script is Fraktur or Gaelic; the number of letterforms which differ is small. Wedding invitations in English-speaking countries are routinely written in non-Latin garb. the identification is uncontested! No student of writing systems classes the "Gaelic script" as something different from "Latin script". The same cannot be said of Phoenician, Samaritan, and Hebrew, for instance.
So in the case of the ancient Semitic scripts - even if they are closely related, is each associated with a particular written language - or were the different but related scripts being used to write a common language?
All of them can be used to write more than one language. Some of them may not have been. It's complex and needs review.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
