The taxa are the followings: Arabic-early, Arabic-Kufic, Arabic-Naskh, Arabic-Mauritanian, Arabic-African, Arabic-modern, Nabataean, Palmyrene, Syriac-Estrangela and Syriac-Nestorian. The examined taxa features are extracted based on the collections of similar features of the script variants. These collections are called Similarity Features Groups (SFGs), and the purpose of their construction is to avoid the random coincidence of evolutionary unrelated but similar features (Hosszú, 2017: 182). The outgroup taxon is supposed to be the common ancestor of the ingroup. In our case, the studied script varieties of the Aramaic script family form the ingroup.
Hosszú, Gábor (2017): Phenetic Approach to Script Evolution. In: Hannah Busch, Franz Fischer, Patrick Sahle (eds.), Kodikologie und Paläographie im Digitalen Zeitalter 4 – Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 4. (Based on the conference lecture in Machines and Manuscripts III - Research of Written Documents in the Digital Age, February 22-23, 2016, Darmstadt) Schriften des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 11. Norderstedt: Books on Demand, ISBN: 978-3-7448-3877-1, 179–252. http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/7787/, URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-77871