[HN Gopher] Who Invented the Alphabet?
___________________________________________________________________
Who Invented the Alphabet?
Author : diodorus
Score : 57 points
Date : 2021-01-11 19:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| bolangi wrote:
| Historical authority Rudyard Kipling describes it well in his
| "Just So" stories, "The First Letter" and "How the Alphabet was
| Made".
| FigmentEngine wrote:
| related book on the alphabet by rosen
| https://www.npr.org/2015/02/07/384108640/alphabetical-tells-...
| [deleted]
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| Highly recommend Thoth's Pill [1] for a fun video on the subject.
|
| Goes deep but keeps it relatively light.
|
| Has the added bonus of going into Mesoamerican writing systems
| which are often underrepresented in these analyses.
|
| [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=PdO3IP0Pro8
| cbozeman wrote:
| After listening to Dr. Robert M. Schoch on various podcasts, I'm
| starting to wonder if there could be, or have been, long-dead
| civilizations for which we have little-to-no evidence. This guy
| isn't a crackpot from some backwater university, this is a Yale-
| trained Ph.D.. His hypothesis that the Sphinx is actually 12,000
| years old would imply that there have been much older
| civilizations which have died out.
|
| Can you build something like the Sphinx without any form of
| written system at all? I don't honestly know, but my educated
| guess would be a resounding "no". If that's the case, it throws
| everything we know about "the Alphabet" up in the air.
|
| What if our writing system is actually far, far older than we
| believe? I don't think its really "important", but its definitely
| fun to ponder.
| User23 wrote:
| I know that traditionalist Hindus believe human civilization is
| much much much older than is generally thought in the West.
|
| This doesn't strike me as impossible. The glaciers would have
| obliterated all trace of any northern civilizations older than
| 12000 years for example.
|
| Not to mention superstitious successor cultures could plausibly
| have destroyed artifacts as well.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 1) The only places that were completely glaciated during the
| LGM were Canada and a few bits of Northern Europe, which
| aren't the kinds of places you'd really expect to see a
| precursor "civilization".
|
| 2) You can still find stuff in previously glaciated areas,
| under reasonable conditions. I've found artifacts in probable
| pre-LGM deposits myself.
|
| 3) It's _very_ difficult / borderline impossible for human
| hands to erase entire cultures. North Americans spent
| centuries eliminating as much native culture as they could,
| and it's still visible almost everywhere. We'd expect lots of
| indications to survive, from faunal population estimates, to
| sophisticated material culture, to simply drawings and other
| creative works, not to mention houses and infrastructure.
| These are all things we find for upper pleistocene groups,
| but not for hypothetical industrial precursors.
| varenc wrote:
| He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely
| disputed. His dating of the Sphinx seems solely based on
| certain erosion patterns and are not supported by other
| evidence.
|
| If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think
| that their writing system and it's influence would be one of
| the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our
| best source of information on ancient civilizations. So it's
| more plausible to me that if there's unknown civilizations,
| then they lacked meaningful use of writing.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think
| that their writing system and it's influence would be one of
| the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our
| best source of information on ancient civilizations.
|
| This only works if you actually find the things they wrote.
| If those works are still trapped in ice or ground somewhere,
| potentially thousands of feet or more underground, we may
| never find them. That's even assuming they used writing
| materials that would be preserved.
| seebetter wrote:
| Wish I had time to refute your comment.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely
| disputed.
|
| I forgot that I wanted to mention this... I can't find the
| video on YouTube - its probably been lost to time, but there
| was a video where Michael Crichton was speaking to a crowd
| about scientific truth. I'm going to do my best to recall
| exactly what Dr. Crichton said, but it was something along
| the lines of, "The story of plate tectonics really is the
| story of a single person having it right and everyone else
| having it wrong." He's referring to Alfred Wegener, of
| course, who theorized continental drift back in 1912 or so.
| He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and
| it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single
| geologist.
|
| Sadly, Wegener died long before he would have his theory
| confirmed.
| irrational wrote:
| There is some Harvard professor that believes that Oumuamua is
| an alien probe. Just being educated at or teaching at an ivy
| league schools doesn't make you immune from being a crackpot.
| opportune wrote:
| Well uncynically, a small number of crackpot theories end up
| being true. Science needs crackpots on some level to drive
| the truth forward.
|
| Cynically, after having already achieved some level of
| legitimacy, having one or two big crackpot theories is a good
| way to drum up publicity/notability. If it turns out to be
| true, you would also be enormously respected and influential.
| So it's incentivized by more than just discovering the truth
| anonunivgrad wrote:
| The pyramids are landing pads for alien spaceships.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Depends how long dead we're talking about. You might like this
| paper[1] which asks what evidence would be left if there had
| been a pre-human industrial civilisation.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
| cbozeman wrote:
| I would totally love this paper. Thank you so much!
| bitwize wrote:
| It was Tegumai Bopsulai and his daughter, Taffimai Metallumai, as
| I recall.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| What I find interesting is the evolution of written languages:
|
| 1. pictures
|
| 2. hieroglyphs
|
| 3. hieroglyphs with phonetic sounds
|
| 4. alphabets
|
| 5. start over with step 1
| umeshunni wrote:
| What's an example of #2? Aren't egyptian hieroglyphics also
| with phonetic sounds?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The hieroglyphics started out as pictures, and later evolved
| into being both pictures and sounds. Same with the Mayan
| script.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I recall reading that in the 300s AD, the Romans were using
| cartoons to give instructions to army troops, because they had
| too many barbarian troops who couldn't read. (Thus going back
| to step 1...)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Just like the Mac :-)
| duxup wrote:
| The PBS series NOVA had a great show on the alphabet and more
| generally went over how such things develop.
|
| I think it was this episode:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabe...
|
| One of the things that was striking was that the process for
| coming up for an alphabet or pieces of it seem like they easily
| could have developed in multiple places at once, or come and gone
| here or there.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I have been led to believe that the Phoenician writing system was
| a syllabary, and that the Greeks made an alphabet out of it.
|
| Are they using "alphabet" in an informal sense, in the article,
| to include syllabaries? Or am I misinformed?
|
| And then, what are the hieroglyphs? Are they just talking about
| the specific set of letters we call our alphabet, and not the
| idea of an alphabet, which surely the Egyptians had? Unless that
| is itself a syllabary, and so doesn't count?
| notagoodidea wrote:
| Phoenician writing system was an abjad [0], an alphabet where
| each symbol stands for consonant, vowels being implied or if
| symbols exist, they are optional. Where alphabet have vowels
| and consonants. Modern Arab, Hebrew and semitic languages have
| abjad.
|
| Hieroglyph are pictograms/logographic scripts. One word for one
| logogram to represent one word.
|
| They mostly talk about the fact that the Phoenician may have
| come from illiterate worker in the Canaan mines. Unable to
| learn hieroglyphs, they may have invented a simplified writing
| system leading to the Phoenician. The main interest is that the
| Phoenician abjad is not a construction from savant but by
| illiterate workers.
|
| What do you mean by count? Various writing system exists in
| parallel, none really prevails on the other. Egyptians did not
| have an alphabet per se like Mandarin do not really have one
| either at least not really one that is reflected in the writing
| system.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet
| ogogmad wrote:
| > I have been led to believe that the Phoenician writing system
| was a syllabary, and that the Greeks made an alphabet out of
| it.
|
| My understanding is that it was an abjad, not a syllabary. An
| abjad has only consonants, not vowels. When a word is written,
| only its consonants get written, and the vowels are only
| implied. Hebrew and Arabic are abjads.
|
| The Phoenician alphabet was preceded by the Ugaritic
| "alphabet", which was also an abjad.
|
| A syllabary usually has many more symbols than an abjad or
| alphabet. If n denotes the number of phonemes in a language,
| then a syllabary has O(n^2) or O(n^3) symbols. In contrast, the
| Phoenician abjad has fewer symbols than even the English
| alphabet.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Wikipedia claims that _matres lectionis_ appeared in the
| Phoenician system only rather late [0], and so I would
| presume after transmission to the Greeks. Consequently, could
| the Phoenician system really be called an abjad at the time
| that the Greeks borrowed it? See also [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Greek-
| deri...
| ogogmad wrote:
| A pure abjad doesn't have matres lectionis.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Yes, my mistake, and unfortunately your reply came an
| instant before I could delete my post to avoid wasting
| everyone's time here.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Abjad, yeah. One story I heard was that Greeks since greeks
| lacked unvoiced velar/glottal stops as meaningful phonemes,
| they heard aleph as just a vowel, thus creating an actual
| alphabet.
|
| I've no idea how well that story is supported, but abusing
| new technology for purposes it was never intended to fill
| does seem like an eternal human fact.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Both the Ugaritic "alphabet" and the Phoenician "alphabet"
| must have been derived from an earlier abjad, from which we
| do not have any preserved example.
|
| The earlier, unknown, abjad, must have been used to write the
| same 27 consonants as in the Ugaritic alphabet, but using
| graphic signs similar to those used by the 22-sign Phoenician
| alphabet, which resemble in form the Egyptian signs.
|
| There is no doubt that the Egyptian writing system was the
| inspiration for the first abjad, because both the method of
| writing only the consonants and the direction of writing were
| inherited from the Egyptians.
|
| In Ugarit, in order to write on earth tablets, like in
| Mesopotamia, the original graphic signs used for the 27
| consonants were replaced with cuneiform signs.
|
| On the other hand, the Phoenicians deleted 5 letters, because
| their language was simplified and the 5 deleted consonants
| were eventually pronounced identically with other 5
| consonants. It is supposed that the Phoenician pronunciation
| was simplified so much because it was used as a lingua franca
| for commerce, by many people.
|
| This reduction in the number of consonants created later
| problems for other Semitic people, e.g. Hebrews and Arabs,
| who still pronounced distinctly some of the consonants that
| were deleted from the Phoenician alphabet, so they had to
| invent diacritics to mark the missing consonants (e.g. shin
| and sin in Hebrew).
| anateus wrote:
| Was hoping a message like this would be more prominent
| here.
|
| Although the Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets come from
| the same area, they are discontinuous. However, the
| ordering being roughly the same, and following an earlier
| Egyptian ordering, is the big hint that they share at least
| inspirational descent from the same source.
|
| Why that area of Lebanon? Byblos has been an Egyptian
| colony in that region for a very long time (~4600 years
| ago), ensuring continuous scribal presence. Scribes of that
| region are noted for intense multi-lingualism (as perusal
| of Ugaritic tablets is evidence of), so cross-pollination
| of scripts makes a lot of sense.
|
| I haven't read through Goldwassers papers, but a lot of
| what they quote in the article seems to be unnecessary to
| explain the transmission of the abjad.
| lovecg wrote:
| I enjoyed this visualization
| https://starkeycomics.com/2018/12/11/the-abcd-family-tree/
|
| Not all connections are super well established, but a lot of them
| are. It really drives home the point that writing was invented
| independently only a handful of times. The letters you're
| currently reading are direct descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs!
| ithkuil wrote:
| Nice visualizations. Nitpick: etruscan (like some early greek
| variants) was mostly written right-to-left (and other times in
| boustrophedon style)
| cptnapalm wrote:
| I've long wondered if the direction of writing was due to the
| inventor's handedness.
| com wrote:
| Carving in stone for right handlers may be easier for
| right-to-left scripts, which begs the question about what
| happened with the Greeks? What triggered left/to-right?
| lovecg wrote:
| I don't remember where I read this explanation, but it
| appears that originally the writing was in both
| directions: you would get to the edge, and then write the
| next row backwards under it (in a snakes-and-ladders
| fashion). Then over time some cultures dropped one or the
| other direction. The continuous style is probably more
| natural when carving or with tablets, etc. while a single
| direction makes more sense when writing with a pen.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| I remember reading that hieroglyphs work that way with a
| neat idea of changing the facing of the characters
| depending on which way to read it.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> I don't remember where I read this explanation, but it
| appears that originally the writing was in both
| directions: you would get to the edge, and then write the
| next row backwards under it (in a snakes-and-ladders
| fashion).
|
| That is "boustrophedon" as in ithkuil's comment.
|
| "Boustrophedon" means "as an ox turns" in Greek and it
| aludes to the way an ox is directed to walk while tilling
| a field, tilling one "row" in one direction, then turning
| around and tilling the next row in the opposite
| direction, etc. Like this (where the ">" and "<" show the
| ox starting a new row in a new direction):
| ->-----------. ,----------<-' `->----------
|
| And so on. The alternative is to get to the end of one
| row and then walk without tilling to the start of the
| next row, but of course that wastes time.
| kibwen wrote:
| _" Abjads, like the Hebrew and Arabic scripts, use letters to
| show consonants, but often don't display vowel sounds at all._"
|
| Given that the link there is about tracing the lineage of
| "ABCD", how are those analogues of "A" pronounced, if not with
| a vowel sound?
|
| EDIT: looks like there's a Wikipedia page for the abjad version
| of "A": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph , which suggests
| its non-vowel pronunciation is
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_consonant
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| I started writing a reply with an explanation for Arabic
| script when I found that wikipedia does a better and more
| complete job of it than I could:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Vowels
| [deleted]
| breck wrote:
| Relatedly, I made a little interactive vis a while back about
| the symbols on our keyboards:
| https://breckyunits.com/files/keyboard/
|
| It's amazing to me that there are distinct, concentric rings on
| all of our keyboards that are very analogous to the concentric
| rings you find in trees revealing their age. The oldest keys
| are in the center, newest are along the edge. (I count about 5
| rings: https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html)
|
| (Maybe someone could take this idea and make a nice tree ring
| visual of the keyboard?)
| saberdancer wrote:
| What was the cause of the increasing complexity of characters
| when crossing from Aramaic into the eastern group of scripts?
| To my untrained eye, characters in the green group are all more
| complex and hard to write than red (western) scripts.
|
| Did materials influence the style of script? If you need to
| write things in stone, you will struggle to do wavy characters.
| ljf wrote:
| Interesting idea on materials. I guess Rune is shaped so as
| it was mainly carved in wood with a simple knife.
|
| Would the Eastern scripts have made the jump to paper or
| similar mediums sooner?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Our Germanic linguistics professor (Elmer Antonsen in
| Urbana) had taught us the characters for runes were also
| optimized to consider the grain of the wood, for writing on
| wood.
| wl wrote:
| > Did materials influence the style of script?
|
| Absolutely. Cuneiform arose because the Mesopotamians had
| clay. It started out as stuff scratched in clay. Someone
| realized it was easier and faster to press a triangular
| stylus into clay and write with wedges. You would have never
| got cuneiform if the Mesopotamians used papyrus and ink. But
| I think you're seeing something else.
|
| Look at Egyptian hieroglyphs and compare them to Egyptian
| hieratic. Both writing systems were invented more or less
| simultaneously. Hieroglyphs were usually used in monumental
| or formal contexts, being carved or painted on objects or
| walls. But it was also written on papyrus. There's tons of
| detail and it took a lot of time to write. Hieratic was a
| simplified form that could be quickly written on papyrus with
| a reed pen or brush. You've got a script writing/cursive
| writing distinction.
|
| When you're looking at the green group, I think you're mostly
| seeing a cursive/script writing distinction rather than
| something arising from a difference in materials. Some
| scripts lost one style or the other.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| This is a great video that I highly recommend: Thoth's pill -
| Animated history of writing
|
| https://youtu.be/PdO3IP0Pro8
| FabHK wrote:
| My understanding is that writing was invented several times
| independently (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Americas, maybe Indus
| valley, maybe Easter island...).
|
| It seems fully alphabetic writing was only invented once, and can
| be traced back the Mesopotamian one, which in turn might have
| been inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs as described in the
| article?
| dave_sid wrote:
| Elmo
| bigdict wrote:
| Eric Schmidt
| dave_sid wrote:
| Ouch! Never, never joke about he alphabet.
| ExcavateGrandMa wrote:
| ABSOLUTLY WTH! :D
|
| I was experimenting things like 2 hours ago... with a, b, c, d...
| things I usually don't do often...
|
| Oh god, aliens are listening at me!
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Nova recently had a two part series on this, 'A to Z: The First
| Alphabet', it does a much better job of answering the question
| than this article...
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabe...
|
| My favorite part was this...
|
| "IRVING FINKEL: This [Sumerian] material goes from near the
| beginning of writing, so this is what we call a "pictographic"
| tablet from 3000 B.C. It's very slim, and it's ruled into columns
| with boxes of information that go together. These round and semi-
| round elements are numerals. And in each of the boxes, they have
| these things, which are added up at the end.
|
| NARRATOR: This clay tablet is the distant ancestor of today's
| spreadsheet: a grid of boxes with symbols that represent numbers
| and pictures that represent commodities."
| austincheney wrote:
| In history class the mentioned inventor was the city state of
| Ugarit on the coast. About 40 years later they were conquered by
| the Jews as a pagan city of the Canaanites. The writing system
| was adopted immediately and became the original writing system of
| the Hebrew language. Some time later it was adapted by the Greeks
| and the early Latins adapted it from the Greeks. Some few pre-
| Hebrew writing samples have survived to modern time but there
| aren't many since its was wasn't widespread and was present for
| only a small slice of time.
| wl wrote:
| Yes, an alphabet was used in Ugarit that may have been invented
| first. It arose from cuneiform and its ancestors died out long
| ago. The "Phoenician" alphabet used for archaic Hebrew and
| which later developed into the Greek and Latin scripts is
| what's being discussed here.
| tachion wrote:
| This is so obviously fake news. Latest research backed by
| carbon based spectrum analysis proves that it was "invented" by
| a tribe Alphabetians (or Aphapet-es as they called themselves).
| I'm saying "invented" because it was passed to them by the
| Giant Lizards From Space in visions inducted with direct brain
| 5G transmissions. Turn on your thinking and do your own
| research.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Stephen Wright:
|
| "Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?"
| irrational wrote:
| What surprises me is that the Egyptians didn't invent an
| alphabet. They had 24 hieroglyphs (uniliteral hieroglyphs) that
| each represented a single phoneme. They were this close to
| inventing the alphabet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy...
| ljf wrote:
| I wonder how much of that was about firmly keeping the
| ownership of 'writing' in the hands of the elite? Writing in
| that way would have been extremely costly, and so is another
| use of wealth in a vastly wealthy country?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-12 23:01 UTC)