The oldest evidences of alphabetical script are found in southern Arabia in the Minæan and Sabæan scripts--differentiated, without doubt, according to sect--which probably go back to the tenth century before Christ.[207] The Jews, Mandæans, and Manichæans in Babylonia spoke Eastern Aramaic, but all of them had scripts of their own. From the Abbassid period onward Arabic ruled, but Christians and Jews wrote it in their own characters.[208] Islam spread the Arabic script universally amongst its adherents, irrespective of whether their spoken language was Semitic, Mongolian, Aryan, or a Negro tongue.[209] The growth of the writing habit brings with it, everywhere and inevitably, the distinction between the written and the colloquial languages. The written language brings the symbolism of duration to bear upon its own grammatical condition, which itself yields only slowly and reluctantly to the progressive modifications of the colloquial language--the latter, therefore, always representing at any given moment a younger condition. There is not one Hellenic κοινή, but two,[210] and the immense distance between the written and the living Latin of Imperial times is sufficiently evidenced in the structure of the early Romance languages.[211] The older a Civilization becomes, the more abrupt is the distinction, until we have the gap that to-day separates written Chinese from Kuan-Chua, the spoken language of educated North Chinese--a matter no longer of two dialects but of two reciprocally alien languages.