In primary school, after doing extra reading on the Phoenicians and Etruscans, I handed in a couple of history assignments written using the respective alphabets to be a smart-ass (with the "logic" that she'd never specified which alphabet to use). To her credit, instead of punishing me for it, my teacher wrote the corrections using the same alphabets.

They did in my public school…

But I only recently learned about the final fall of Carthage in the second Punic war, when Hannibal had to return to Africa to face the young Roman general Scipio. The war elephants weren’t so veteran and so the Roman’s were able to scare them off as they charged, breaking the Carthaginian line, leading to a rapid routing.

Great battles were described in fairly great detail —

> the final fall of Carthage in the second Punic war

The final (non-metaphorical) Fall happened at the end of the third Punic War about 50 years later.

I've heard the hypothesis that many in the US elite saw the confrontation with USSR as being similar to the Punic wars. With US similar to Carthage being the sea/trading power and USSR similar to Rome being the land power - poorer, but highly militarized. This being one of the arguments for keeping the US military budget high, as one of the reason for Carthage destruction was it's elites had a lot of money, but didn't invest enough into army and navy.

> The war elephants weren’t so veteran and so the Roman’s were able to scare them off as they charged

Just smear a bunch of pigs with flammable grease, set on fire, and send off towards the elephants who will promptly panic.

Super easy, barely an inconvience.

Most war elephants were extensively trained with burning pigs. But they forgot to allocate enough budget for flaming porcine that year, and the mistake was fatal.

This is why the Congress never fails to add pork to every spending bill, just in case the Romans return.

> English alphabet is based on Latin

There is no such thing as an English alphabet. English uses the modern Latin alphabet, as do most European languages, full stop. Some languages make use of diacritics or have one or two (extra) modified letters (e.g. Ł or IJ), but English doesn't use any of that (unless a word is imported).

u

And w, j, and maybe y ("Greek i" in French)?

J was actually invented by the Romans and was orthographically distinct and present. It wasn't invented in the 1500, like some many people claim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=lfB9mX5UUNU (Why you should write "J" when writing in Latin)

Cool, thanks for the correction.

In the US, the school system is significantly less standardized than in most other parts of the world, and the quality of education is incredibly dependent on zip code. So my public school in an admittedly fairly wealthy area certainly covered the Phoenecians and Carthage (though Carthage mostly in the context of Rome and the Punic Wars).