[HN Gopher] Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthe...
___________________________________________________________________
Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient
Syrian city
Author : Someone
Score : 329 points
Date : 2024-11-23 22:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hub.jhu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (hub.jhu.edu)
| mihaic wrote:
| Wow, this is impressive if actually true. I wonder how accurate
| their dating methodology is, since they have to do carbon dating
| on something in that layer, and not on the clay tablet itself.
|
| It does seem strange that the alphabet would have remained
| isolated for so many hundreds years, and not spread out somewhere
| else.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| CHON?
| ggambetta wrote:
| I guess they also knew organic chemistry back then!
| mometsi wrote:
| It's the brand name. When you need authentic pottery built to
| last, look for CHON on the cylinder.
|
| Customer: *checks cylinder*, hey, this isn't CHON, it's CON!
| drcode wrote:
| To clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing,
| cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older.
| Archelaos wrote:
| It should also be noted that a difference is often made between
| alphabets in the strict sense, where consonants and also vowels
| are represented by distinct symbols, and alphabets in the wider
| sense, where this is not the case (vowels are not represented
| at all or occasionally by certain consonant symbols typically
| when clarification is necessary). A writing system where
| symbols denote larger units of speech is not called an
| alphabet, but a syllabary. If it does not represent phonetic,
| but semantic units, it is called a logographic script. There
| are of course all kinds of mixed forms ("I NY").
| ejplatzer wrote:
| Technically, a syllabary only refers to writing systems where
| the symbol represents the specific consonant and vowel pair,
| such as Japanese's Hiragana. For example, in a syllabary, the
| syllables "ka" and "ki" are two different symbols.
|
| If the vowels are optional or not present, e.g. there's one
| "k" symbol regardless of the vowel, it's an Abjad. The
| archetypal Abjad is the Hebrew writing system.
|
| If the vowels are written by adding them to the consonant
| symbol (similar to diacritics), it's called an Abugida. One
| example of this is the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia.
| Archelaos wrote:
| I did not want to make it too technical, so "Abjad" falls
| under "alphabets in the wider sense" and "Abugida" under
| "mixed forms". My comment was based on the assumption that
| the article in question does not necessarily refer to an
| alphabet in the strict sense. To make this clear, I did not
| think it was necessary to go into too much detail.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There are many specialized terms for different types of
| writing system, but those distinctions are generally of very
| little interest unless you're compiling a table of different
| writing systems.
|
| Generally you look at what concepts are embodied in the
| script, and at the form of the glyphs. So:
|
| You might have a script that assigns glyphs to phonemes.
| ("Language is made of sounds.")
|
| You might have a script that assigns glyphs to consonants and
| doesn't bother to represent vowels. ("Language is made of
| sounds, and some of them are more important than others.")
|
| You might have a script that assigns glyphs to syllables.
| ("Language is made of things you can say.")
|
| You might have a script in which the glyphs assigned to
| syllables are composed of recognizable and conceptually
| distinct parts, but those parts have no independent
| representation. (Compare the glyphs ha la hha with the
| related glyphs hee lee hhee.) ("Language is made of things
| you can say, but there are patterns.")
|
| You might have a script that assigns glyphs to words, though
| in almost all cases you don't. The label "logographic
| script", applied to a script the labeler doesn't know well,
| is infinitely more popular than the concept "logographic
| script". I don't think any script has ever existed meeting
| the criterion of "it does not represent phonetic, but
| semantic units". But there are some, and used to be more,
| that leaned more or less strongly in that direction.
| abtinf wrote:
| > To clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing,
| cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older.
|
| That's literally in the title of both the post and the article.
| What are you "clarifying"?
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| It's common to think of alphabetic writing as all writing. I
| assume that the author is asserting that the characters
| represent individual phonemes as opposed to pictograms or
| syllables because those have been around much earlier.
| There's not much information though and I have no idea how
| they can make such a radical claim with 4 finger-sized
| cylinders.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Well it helped me, I didn't put two and two together.
| alok-g wrote:
| Yes, however, I was still left wondering about the writing
| that existing from earlier; and was hoping the article would
| explain it.
|
| I am still not fully clear actually -- Alphabet being a
| finite set of symbols, how did pre-alphabetic writing work?
| Electricniko wrote:
| Alphabets have symbols that represent sounds which are
| strung together to make words. Other types of writing might
| include symbols that represent words or phrases, with an
| example being like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese
| characters.
| mmooss wrote:
| Also, in some, symbols represent syllables. It's
| significant because there are many more syllables than
| individual sounds.
| tdeck wrote:
| Just a fun fact: some later forms of cuneiform were alphabets.
| Like Old Persian Cuneiform:
|
| https://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm
|
| If you wanted to tell people you "learned cuneiform" you could
| memorize this in an afternoon!
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I'm curious how they arrived at the conclusion it's an alphabet
| without deciphering it.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Right. 4 clay cylinders inch-long, perforated, with geometric
| symbols on the outside, are not jewelry (otherwise found in the
| same tomb) but ... labels with a new form of writing because...
| they were found next to the pottery?
|
| The article is brilliantly written to lead with the
| significance of such a find before providing evidence.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The article is well cited. They handily beat out newspapers
| by providing links to earlier blog posts on the research.
|
| You might want this one:
| http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
|
| > I will convey my own perspective regarding these four
| inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early
| Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters),
| the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early
| (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14
| dates).
|
| > My initial thought (because of the graphemic shapes of the
| signs on the cylinders and the clear similarity to Early
| Alphabetic letters) was that these cylinders might be
| intrusive
|
| So, the major argument that they're writing is that they look
| very similar to other writing that we can read. Imagine that
| you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with
| some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
| sterlind wrote:
| "Zhe Yi XChi Xin " looks like "EXTRA", but it's
| (meaninglessly-arranged) Chinese characters with a purely
| coincidental relationship to the Latin.
|
| Did they find a bunch of these artifacts, with a variety of
| inscriptions? If so then sure, I buy it. If it's just the
| "CHON" fragment - that could well be coincidence.
| blahedo wrote:
| Depends; your example (Zhe Yi XChi Xin ) would be a truly
| stupendous coincidence if it were the only extant example
| of something and the Chinese characters just _happened_
| to be arranged in that way, but would be much weaker
| evidence if you had gone mining through thousands of
| characters and cherry-picked one five-character string
| that happened to match something. It would be an even
| bigger coincidence if those five characters, in sequence,
| were found, by themselves, on a document created in an
| English-speaking or Latin-alphabet-writing region.
|
| So if all of the handful of fragments have marks that
| look like actual alphabetic symbols that were actually
| used in that area (later), that's substantially stronger
| evidence than you're giving credit for.
| mmooss wrote:
| Is it worth inquiring whether people who acquired PhDs
| and have spent lifetimes studying this subject, and (I
| think) years studying these particular objects, would
| overlook and be fooled by the most obvious issue?
| timeon wrote:
| > Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and
| you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should
| you call them writing?
|
| Not sure if this is good example since we know that Greek
| alphabet really is writing.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| ahmedfromtunis's comment was killed, presumably because he
| attributed it to Gemini, but it was correct on the facts.
| Here's the response I wrote to him:
|
| -----
|
| Count of symbol types is what you'd look at. You have a bunch
| of unknown symbols, so there's nothing else you _can_ look at.
|
| For comparison:
|
| Japanese hiragana: ~71 symbols [*]
|
| Cherokee syllabary: ~86 symbols
|
| Greek alphabet: ~24 symbols
|
| Latin alphabet: ~21 symbols (
| https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/graffito/AGP-EDR187776 )
|
| [*] Many Japanese syllables are spelled with digraphs ("sh", if
| the "h" appeared in a special combining form) or diacritics
| ("e", if e and e were completely distinct sounds, as they are
| in French), which lowers the memory burden. I've counted
| diacritics as creating new symbols and digraphs as not doing
| so.
| glandium wrote:
| How do you get 71 hiraganas? By counting the dakuten versions
| and smaller versions separately?
| teleforce wrote:
| Normally researcher will make a statistical distribution and
| compared it with the existing deciphered alphabets for example
| the most popular is the yet to be deciphered Indus script
| against the popular Egyption script or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
|
| The Indus script research findings on it being a script was so
| controversial that the researcher had a death threat upon him
| based on the discovery.
|
| I think the OP article author is wrong by claiming it's the
| oldest while it should be the Indus script but perhaps they
| considered the latter as symbols like Chinese characters not
| strictly alphabets [1].
|
| [1] Indus script:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
| reissbaker wrote:
| Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing:
| it's four cylinders with some markings on them, supposedly in
| an unknown language (convenient!), that appears to have had
| zero influence on and zero influence from its surrounding
| region. For the two claimants to the oldest alphabets -- the
| Indus script [1], and the Proto-Sinaitic script [2] -- there
| is ample evidence of broad usage and influence from existing
| cultures: the Proto-Sinaitic script developed as simplified
| hieroglyphics used to communicate with Canaanite slaves [3]
| in Egypt and was the origin of (probably) all modern
| alphabetic systems, and the Indus script developed from
| earlier potter's marks over hundreds of years and has nearly
| a thousand years of archeological evidence, although there is
| some debate as whether it qualifies as an alphabet. This
| appears unrelated to any existing writing system in the
| region, and -- if it _was_ an alphabet -- appears to have had
| no subsequent influence on any other writing system ever
| made. If archeologists are suspicious of even the Indus
| script, how on earth do these qualify?
|
| We have plenty of examples of pottery with markings on it
| that aren't alphabets. Cuneiform obviously, but also simply
| tradesman marks like the predecessors to the Indus script.
| What makes this "seem like alphabetic writing" as opposed to
| any of the other kinds of clay markings we've seen at the
| time? There are only four objects bearing the markings, with
| nothing else to compare against, in a supposedly "unknown"
| language!
|
| If this really is an alphabet: what did it develop from?
| Where are the cultures who used it? And why did no one in the
| region ever use anything like it again?
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script
|
| 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
| teleforce wrote:
| The skeptics also provided similar arguments as yours
| against the idea of Egyption hieroglyphics as
| syllabic/alphabets until they found the venerable Rosetta
| Stone, and the rest is history. We just need another
| Rosetta Stone but for Indus script.
| unscaled wrote:
| This does not make GP incorrect though. It just means we
| really cannot know for sure how the writing system works
| until we have enough information to decipher the
| inscriptions.
|
| I don't take beef with the possibility of an earlier
| alphabet that predates the Proto-Canaanite alphabet --
| that is entirely plausible. But I think the article is
| overselling the story. The evidence is not very strong at
| this point, and I although I can be wrong, I suspect it
| can never be with if we remain with just four very short
| inscriptions without external context.
|
| It is important to clarify the vast difference between
| this and the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. I
| think the myth and magic of the Rosetta stone is
| overemphasized in popular culture, so just a few points
| of difference between the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and
| scripts like the Indus Valley Script or Linear A.
|
| - Of course, to start with we did have the Rosetta Stone,
| and we have no equivalent for these scripts. But the
| Rosetta Stone was rediscovered in 1799, while Champollion
| provided the first phonetic interpretation of Egyptian
| hieroglyphs only two and half decades later, in 1822. But
| even after Champollion's famous achievement, we weren't
| able to read most hieroglyphic texts yet! Champollion
| didn't realize that many phonetic hieroglyphs represent
| not just a single consonant, but often two or three
| different consonants! It took a couple of more decades
| until we Egyptian was fully deciphered.
|
| - We knew exactly which culture and language the Egyptian
| Hieroglyphs belonged to. More importantly, we had a vast
| wealth of external historical sources about this culture
| that we could read: mostly in Greek, Hebrew, Roman and
| Aramaic. From these sources we knew the names of Egyptian
| kings that we could expect to find in Egyptian
| hieroglyphs, and we knew enough about Egyptian culture,
| religion and history to often guess what the texts would
| be talking about. This is not anywhere nearly as true for
| the Indus Valley Script! Since we don't know who their
| kings were, we cannot use the names of kings as a highly
| verifiable way to test the phonetic writing hypothesis.
|
| - We had a vast quantity of Hieroglyphs inscriptions.
| There are fewer attested Indus Valley Script
| inscriptions, but the number should be enough if we just
| had other external clues.
|
| - Egyptian still had a (barely-)living descendant
| (Coptic) at the time Champollion and other scholars were
| working on its decipherment. Coptic priests and AFAIK
| even native speakers have provided a lot of help them in
| understanding how the Egyptian language they were trying
| to decipher might sound and work.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing
|
| What is their evidence and argument for it?
| casenmgreen wrote:
| > If this really is an alphabet: what did it develop from?
| Where are the cultures who used it? And why did no one in
| the region ever use anything like it again?
|
| All good points, and my sense of it also is that it's pre-
| writing, but it might be that additional material just
| hasn't yet been discovered. Linear A and PS are known from
| a very, very few inscriptions.
| Steko wrote:
| The tldr is that they don't know it's alphabetic for sure (see
| below quote). The main scholar (Glenn Schwartz) who co-oversaw
| the '94-'10 excavation isn't an expert in writing. He put it
| out there around 2010 and said "maybe it's alphabetic, idk" and
| there was not much followup from the community. So he consulted
| with some writing experts who helped him with the 2021 paper
| where he goes over the evidence for different possibilities and
| suggests that the strongest argument is for alphabetic. The
| dating seems to be on firmer ground but the error bands on this
| and Wadi el-Hol can probably knock a century or two off the
| "500 years".
|
| A decent summary is the blog post below from another researcher
| who briefly was part of the same dig and a former student of
| Schwartz (so not entirely independent):
|
| http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
|
| _It is worth noting that in the past Schwartz has been
| reluctant to affirm that the four inscribed clay cylinders from
| Tomb 4 of Umm el-Marra are alphabetic (Schwartz 2010). Thus, he
| certainly did not rush to this conclusion. Moreover, his most
| recent article about these is also very cautious (Schwartz
| 2021), as he moves through various possibilities (as discussed
| above). But it is clear that he is now willing to state that
| this is the most reasonable position (i.e., it is Early
| Alphabetic). And I concur. That is, the most reasonable
| conclusion is that the Umm el-Marra clay cylinders are
| inscribed with signs that are most readily understood as Early
| Alphabetic letters (graphemes). Moreover, since the Early
| Alphabetic alphabet was used to write Semitic, it is logical to
| conclude that this is the language of the Umm el-Marra
| inscriptions (the fact that they were found in Syria would also
| augment this conclusion, of course)._
|
| The full blog post is worth reading and summarizes the case for
| various non-alphabetic possibilities.
| unscaled wrote:
| I admit I didn't have time to read this blog post deeply, but
| it doesn't sound very convincing. It doesn't bring any
| EVIDENCE that this is an alphabet it just cites other cases
| of _possible_ alphabets in Mesopotamia and the near East [1].
|
| Besides that, this blog post mentions some morphological
| characteristics of the inscriptions that make the author
| believe the writing is alphabetic, but it fails to mention
| these characteristics. I don't doubt Rollston has good
| reasons for this statement, but the claims behind them need
| to be published and reviewed. I'm not sure if this is the
| case (and I do not have access to the 2021 article).
|
| [1] This includes the Lachish Dagger I tried to look up, but
| its dating seems disputed, but even the earliest proposed
| date (the 17th century) is more recent than the Wadi el-Hol
| inscriptions, so I'm not entirely sure what it is supposed to
| prove, except perhaps an earlier spread of the Alphabet from
| Egypt and the Sinai peninsula to Canaan proper?
| Steko wrote:
| > it doesn't sound very convincing
|
| That's because it's not a strong conclusion. It's a "better
| than the alternatives" hypothesis. Repeating my tldr above
| "they don't know it's alphabetic".
|
| > doesn't bring any EVIDENCE .. some morphological
| characteristics of the inscriptions
|
| I'd say the "morphological characteristics of the
| inscriptions" count as evidence and I'll just recap
| everything linked that I think counts as evidence: the
| graphemes include several repetitions even with only 12
| signs in total; they don't resemble cuneiform at all; they
| have a weak resemblances to some Egyptian glyphs but weak
| and Egypt didn't have these clay cigars; they have a weak
| resemblance to some Indus glyphs and (later) Byblos glyphs
| but again weak; they don't appear to be numbers, potmarks,
| etc.; but what they do _strikingly_ resemble is later
| alphabetic signs, to the point where the author, one of the
| foremost experts on Semitic epigraphy, really wanted the
| dating to be wrong.
|
| Now the blog post doesn't go into much detail on these
| items but Schwartz's 20+ page 2021 paper (I had no trouble
| getting a free, legal copy) does (not always a lot more
| detail but also covers more possible alternatives). But,
| like the blog post says, the case Schwartz 2021 makes is
| still extremely cautious and he basically concludes that we
| just have to hope we can find more examples to confirm what
| kind of system they are from, and to increase the chance of
| deciphering them.
| unscaled wrote:
| How is it better than the alternative "we have a set of
| symbol and we don't know what it means"? I really think
| there is a merit in saying "with this sample size, every
| theory we put out has low confidence level".
|
| With 12 signals in total, it's very hard to show patterns
| that are in line with an alphabet. I don't think that
| with this sample size you can make a very strong claim
| that the chance that this is an alphabet is higher than
| the chance is that these symbol serve any other kind of
| purpose (including being a non-language). The main claim
| seems to be that repetition (what kind? I'm a quite
| disappointed the blog post has no transcritions,
| considering it's just 12 symbols we're talking about!)
| makes the chance that this is an alphabet higher. The
| rest of the claims (it doesn't resemble cuneiform,
| doesn't seem to be derived from hieroglyphs and doesn't
| seem related to any other script) are meaningless. The
| resemblence for later Canaanite alphabetic signs is
| interesting, and could probably be more convincing if we
| had a larger sample size.
|
| So in the end, if we are convinced by these claims, we're
| basically saying something like "We have at most 1%
| confidence for every other theory, but we've got 2%
| confidence that this is an independent development of the
| alphabet that may have inspired the Canaanite alphabet
| we've seen 500 later". Higher confidence that is still
| far below the threshold doesn't cut it.
|
| Now, I'm pretty sure the original article did not put the
| theory in these terms, but the headline is somewhat
| sensationalist, and the way it was picked up in
| newspapers is even worse, for instance:
|
| Scientific American: World's Oldest Alphabet Found on an
| Ancient Clay Gift Tag
|
| Stopping the press from misreporting science is a bit
| like trying to stop space rockets in midair with your
| bare hands, but even "Evidence of oldest known alphabetic
| writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city". The popular
| understanding of the word evidence is assumed to be
| "hard" evidence by default, not a weak evidence that
| bumps up the probability of a certain theory a little bit
| more.
|
| I'll actually be quite excited if this turns out to be
| truly an alphabet encoding a Semitic language (it opens a
| lot of interesting questions and possibilities), but I'm
| not holding my breath for it.
| mcswell wrote:
| > Egypt didn't have these clay cigars
|
| Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
|
| I'll escort myself out now...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| How do they know when the writing is pictographic (an idea
| expressed as an image, like a big predator showing teeth), or
| syllabic (an image of a bestial grunt, basically, like 'ugh' or
| 'caw' or what not) or alphabetic (the breakdown of syllabic
| utterances into, at first, the hard consantants and the vowels)?
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Basically, the number of symbols and the repeating patterns.
| But it seems that in this particular case, they also relied on
| the shapes of the "letters" to conclude the alphabetic nature
| of the script.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Some informed speculation about this on languagehat, in the
| comments: https://languagehat.com/oldest-alphabet/
| mcswell wrote:
| And some comments at Language Log here:
| https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67023
| joshdavham wrote:
| Alphabetic writing really is incredible.
|
| Despite the fact that I personally prefer syllabaries. I can't
| discount the fact that alphabets have done an incredible job of
| being adopted by other languages that didn't previously have any
| sort of writing system. Alphabets are really flexible like that.
|
| The latin alphabet alone is used in all sorts of languages from
| English to Tukish, Indonesian and Swahili. Having this many
| diverse languages follow a single writing system is only really
| possible with alphabets. You couldn't do this with Chinese
| characters or Korean hangul, for example.
| sneak wrote:
| Hangeul is an 24 character alphabet, with 14 consonants and 10
| vowels. Each little square is a syllable made up of consonants
| and vowel combinations.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Curious: why do you prefer syllabaries? I think about Chinese
| writing systems, which additionally don't have clear word
| boundaries. Now you can argue that this is an independent issue
| (which is true) but why does this complication seemingly show
| up in such writing systems?
|
| Anyway, alphabets have been profoundly successful. You bring up
| Turkish. It's a good example. I'm sure most here know that
| prior to 1929 or so Turkish used the Arabic writing system.
| This is also an alphabet but a more complicated one (eg vowels
| aren't typically written) and didn't necessarily fit the
| Turkish language.
|
| So they designed a Latin writing system that is entirely
| phonetic it was was profoundly successful at increasing
| literacy rates. A completely illiterate person could be taught
| to read and write Turksih in a matter of months.
|
| I compare this to Taiwan that has high school competitions to
| see who can find a word the fastest in a dictionary because
| knowledge is required of the roots and symbols. There are
| thousands of characters to learn in Chinese languages. As a
| foreigner, this will often take a decade or more. I've seen
| accounts of people who have spent a decade learning Chinese
| that still struggle to read books intended for 12 year olds.
|
| Literacy is so transformative to one's life that I'm so on
| board with anything that makes that easier.
| talideon wrote:
| The Arabic writing system is an abjad, not an alphabet. The
| two kinds of system are closely related (the Phoenician
| script was the origin of both the Greek alphabet and the
| various Semitic abjads and was itself an abjad) but are not
| the same thing. Abjads are well-suited to Semitic languages
| where the vowels are less important for morphological
| reasons, but in Indo-European languages (like Greek) and
| Turkic languages (like Turkish) vowels are important in
| writing for comprehension. It's no surprise that switching to
| an alphabet aided literacy in Turkey.
|
| Abjads are no more or less complicated than alphabets though.
| They're just a bad fit for Turkish.
| teleforce wrote:
| Alphabet writing is probably the most important invention
| perhaps even more so than the invention of wheel. It's truly
| the original "bicycle of the mind".
|
| Syllable based writing are not intuitive for human, Korean
| found it the hard way by relatively recently by inventing
| Hangul alphabets despite had been using the Chinese characters
| for several thousands of years previously with majority of the
| people remained illiterate.
| koolala wrote:
| Logographic seems fine for the mind? Thinking in speech is
| the default and most people talk before they read.
| teleforce wrote:
| I am talking about literacy. For reading Chinese newspaper
| headlines you probably need around 50,000 basic character
| recognition.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| You're off by a factor of 20+.
| throwthrowee wrote:
| My understanding is that the average Chinese dictionary
| has 20,000 characters. The full set is somewhere around
| 50,000. The average educated adult knows about 8000. The
| number of characters to read a Chinese newspaper is about
| 2500 to 3500.
|
| This is based on multiple sources online. Here is one
| example source (BBC): https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chi
| nese/real_chinese/mini_gu...
| teleforce wrote:
| Regardless the number of characters required for
| understanding the headlines, I think my points are still
| valid. After several thousands years of using Chinese
| characters Korean found that it's not intuitive for
| literacy hence they invented their very own alphabet
| namely Hangul, and voila the literacy increased
| considerably.
|
| Fun facts, as a foreigner, you can learn to read Hangul
| in one single day, and then you can read the Korean
| written words for names, sign boards, etc but to
| understand them you need to learn the Korean language.
| However, if your mother tongue is Korean, you can
| understand them intuitively. That's the reason I
| considered alphabet is more important than invention of
| the wheels and it's truly the original "bicycle of the
| mind".
| mcswell wrote:
| Speech is far more like alphabetic writing than it is like
| logographic writing. Spoken words are not single units,
| rather they're made up of phonemes.
| cenamus wrote:
| Not intuitive? Why would that be?
|
| From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
|
| "Around 1809, impressed by the "talking leaves" of European
| written languages, Sequoyah began work to create a writing
| system for the Cherokee language. After attempting to create
| a character for each word, Sequoyah realized this would be
| too difficult and eventually created characters to represent
| syllables. He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before
| completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he
| originally created."
|
| "After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it
| achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly
| throughout Cherokee society. By 1825, the majority of
| Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed
| orthography."
|
| They literally achieved higher literacy than the european
| settlers
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > They literally achieved higher literacy than the european
| settlers
|
| Is there any hard evidence behind that claim? (Not
| necessarily questioning it, it would just be very
| fascinating to read it)
| talideon wrote:
| When some form of phonetic writing is developed, it's almost
| invariably syllabic. If anything, the very intuitiveness of
| syllabaries is why all alphabets, abjads, and abugida
| originate from a single source while there are many
| syllabaries that have developed independently.
|
| Further, Hangul is not "syllabic". It's an alphabet. It
| happens to organise its letters into syllable blocks, but
| that's it.
| teleforce wrote:
| That's what I'm saying, after several thousands years of
| using Chinese characters Korean found that it's not
| intuitive for literacy hence they invented their very own
| alphabet, and voila the literacy increased considerably.
| Actually as a foreigner, you can learn to read Hangul in
| one single day, and then you can read the Korean for names,
| sign boards, etc but to understand them is another story.
| However, if your mother tongue is Korean, you can
| understand them intuitively. That's the reason I considered
| alphabet is more important than invention of the wheels and
| it's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
| aragonite wrote:
| The low literacy rates in pre-Hangul Korea had less to do
| with phonological vs. logographic writing systems and more to
| do with the fact that in Korea at the time Chinese played the
| role Latin played in medieval Europe: it was the language of
| scholars and officials, but most ordinary people couldn't
| read it because, well, they didn't speak Latin. The same
| thing happened with Hanja in Korea. When you're trying to get
| people literate in a writing system designed for a language
| they don't use in daily life, you're fighting an uphill
| battle from the start.
|
| What _is_ true that unlike the Latin alphabet, which European
| languages could adopt /adapt for their own use (or think the
| way Cyrillic was adapted for Mongolian), Chinese characters,
| being logographic, couldn't simply be repurposed to represent
| sounds of the Korean tongue -- that's why Hangul had to be
| invented from scratch. That's one important difference
| between phonological and logographic writing systems, but it
| has little do with the question which system is better at
| spreading literacy.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Hangul is a very new alphabet. The Koreans didn't have their
| own script until something like a century ago. Swahili has its
| own alphabet too.
| dhosek wrote:
| A bit less recent than that. More like the 15th century for
| Hangul.
|
| Swahili uses either modified Latin or modified Arabic for
| writing. Are you perhaps thinking of one of the invented
| scripts for indigenous American languages, e.g., Cree
| syllabics or Inuktitut?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I was thinking of the Ge'ez script but that's for Amharic
| not Swahili.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Hangul is a 'syllabic alphabet'- it is a combination of
| alphabetic and syllabic and as such probably the
| clearest/simplest writing system invented.
| dhosek wrote:
| Although it has some weirdnesses of its own, such as having
| jamo that change their sound based on context (e.g., is
| silent if it's an initial consonant but has the sound ng at
| the end of a syllable). Nearly every consonant has a
| different sound between initial and final position, although
| many of these are inaudible to English ears. On the other
| hand, having been a consciously designed writing system, it
| does have a rationality that most traditional writing systems
| lack, such as the fact that all vowels are based on either eu
| or i with additional strokes added as appropriate to modify
| the base vowel (the fact that a double stroke, e.g., ya or yo
| represents the single stroke vowel with a y- sound prefixed
| seems just brilliant to me).
| unscaled wrote:
| Consonants changing their sound based on position is not
| such an abnormality -- that's just basic phonology. This
| phenomenon (allophony [1]) is found in virtually every
| language, but it remains a bit obscure to laymen, since it
| is mostly undetectable to the language's own speaker.
|
| For instance, the phoneme /t/ is always rendered by the
| English letter /t/, but that phoneme can be rendered in so
| many different ways. In an initial position it would be
| rendered as an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive [tk],
| equivalent to the Korean Jamo t in initial or intervocalic
| positions. An English /t/ in other positions is generally
| not aspirated, but besides that the rendition is highly
| dependent on the speaker's accent. MRP ("BBC English")
| speakers render a "final" /t/ (i.e. after a vowel or
| consonant, but not before another vowel) as as [?t] ([t]
| sound preceded by a glottal stopped) or even just as a pure
| glottal stop [?]. In intervocalic position RP speakers
| would keep /t/ as a simple [t] sound, but most Americans
| would change this sound into a voiced alveolar flap [r].
| Cockney speakers famously change an intervocalic /t/ into a
| glottal stop (so you'd get something that sounds like "woh-
| ah" for "water") and I didn't even get into how /t/ behaves
| when it follows other consonants such as the elided /t/ in
| "listen" or the way some American speakers pronounce
| "winter".
|
| In all honesty, this is probably just as messy as what
| happens in Korean, it's just that the Korean allophones are
| more foreign to us. Besides , all the variations are
| regular allophones. As far as I understand was indeed just
| reused for two different purposes (there is no /NG/ phoneme
| that transforms to an empty sound in initial position).
|
| I'd say that one thing that still makes Hangul hard, is
| that a lot of consonant clusters sounds sound the same when
| they come in final position. It makes pronunciation
| regular, but it's a bit hard to know how to transcribe many
| words. The vowels ae and e are also pronounced the same in
| most (perhaps all?) modern Korean dialects, but that's a
| small irregularity compared to the redundancies of many
| other alphabetic writing systems.
|
| In short, Hangul is much more regular than most alphabets.
| I wouldn't say it is the most regular though -- it's hard
| to beat new writing systems designed by professional
| linguists for small language that didn't have an alphabet
| before. Hangul is still an relatively older system that had
| to go through writing reforms, but still retrains some
| spelling complexities. And if you compare Korean to
| Polynesian languages like Hawaiian, with their extremely
| simple phonology and phonotactics (they have very few
| vowels and consonants and generally don't allow consonant
| clusters and final consonants at all) - then the writing
| system of these languages is much simpler -- and almost all
| of them use the Latin alphabet with a highly regular
| orthography.
|
| I think there is a more impressive trait of Hangul, that is
| highly underappreciated. It's an alphabetic writing system
| that blends very well with traditional Chinese characters.
| Chinese characters are all monosyllabic (i.e. they
| represent a single syllable) and while that property is not
| maintained in Japanese (due to its vastly different
| phonology), it has been maintained in Korean and
| Vietnamese. Hangul lets you write each syllable with a
| single graphic block (even if that block contains multiple
| "Jamo" letters). All other alphabet systems that have been
| developed in languages that used Chinese characters (Such
| as Pinyin, Zhuyin or the Vietnamese alphabet) do not share
| this property. This means that when you try to add some
| alphabet letters into a document written Chinese
| characters, the result is extremely unpleasant
| typographically. It is not only harder to typeset nicely,
| but it's also quite painful to read.
|
| Although Modern Korean doesn't blend Hangul and Hanja
| (Chinese characters) very often, I think this property made
| Hangul quite a lot more palatable as a replacement for
| Chinese characters in Korea compared to Pinyin or Zhuyin.
| Koreans didn't have to throw your entire typographic and
| calligraphic tradition in order to adopt Hangul: A block is
| fixed-size (not proportional), the writing is easier to
| read both vertically and horizontally and you can keep
| writing it with brush strokes using traditional Chinese
| calligraphic methods and practices. It can even be mixed
| nicely with Chinese characters like Japanese Kana (and it
| would be more compact than Japanese Kana). Eventually
| Korean language reformers have chosen to mostly drop Hanja
| altogether, but when you still do need to mix Hanja in a
| Korean text, you can do it seamlessly.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Sadly, we are unwinding thousands of years of progress by
| reverting to picture writing.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| :(
| WalterBright wrote:
| Case in point: Susan Kare's trash can icon is slowly being
| replaced by [delete] as people discover that words for
| actions are better than pictures.
| riffraff wrote:
| Many years ago I had a designer friend do some interface
| for me and I pointed out we should be using a couple icons
| for actions like "post", "delete", etc.
|
| He replied something like "I don't believe in the
| thaumaturgical power of icons" and that has stayed with me
| forever since. Words may he worth 1/1000th of a picture but
| at least you understand them.
| fragmede wrote:
| you hover your mouse over the icon and a tooltip appears
| with words. Also the menu item shows the icon next to the
| word.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Needing to hover over an icon is already a failure in UI
| design
| WalterBright wrote:
| > the menu item shows the icon next to the word
|
| Proof that icons don't work.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Not convincing to me. The world of UI design is too
| agitated with copycat and fads to be a solid reference.
| openrisk wrote:
| That seems only partly true. We did already have punctuation
| marks (like !?) that are a form of picture writing to
| modulate the underlying alphabetic meaning.
|
| The smiley was invented because a pure alphabetic script does
| not do a good job expressing emotions, especially in short
| isolated sentences.
|
| Emojis are overused in some current contexts
| (smartphone/messaging addiction) but some sort of
| standardization along with "emoji" literacy is, in principle,
| an evolution of the alphabet towards more sophistication and
| nuance.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Emojis are not quite the same thing as picture writing
| (icons).
|
| I used emojis for a while, then got kinda sick of them.
|
| > a pure alphabetic script does not do a good job
| expressing emotions
|
| Instead of a smiley emoji, I'll write "haha". Instead of a
| barf emoji, I write "barf". English has a million words in
| it. I'm sure you can find a variety of words that express
| emotions just fine.
|
| ?! being a form of picture writing? I don't see it.
| mcswell wrote:
| I blame Microsoft for that--in particular, the Ribbon (and
| before that, toolbars).
| consf wrote:
| They're simple enough to learn and reproduce, yet powerful
| enough to capture the nuances of different languages
| joshdavham wrote:
| Correction to my comment: Korean Hangul is actually an
| alphabetic writing system.
|
| Thank you to the commenters who pointed this out!
| af3d wrote:
| They could also be descriptions of musical scales, or maybe
| weaving patterns, base-encoded numbers perhaps....who knows,
| really? Also Egyptian writing goes back perhaps 5000 years. That
| is a Semitic language so it stands to reason that it too would
| likely fall in the same category. Anyway I do love these kinds of
| archeological finds nonetheless. Interesting to see if Gobekli
| Tepe yields even older instances of written script? (If they ever
| get around to a proper excavation, that is! IIRC the site is
| currently not open to researchers.)
| alpinisme wrote:
| Egyptian writing is old but it is not (primarily) alphabetic.
| af3d wrote:
| Yes kind of a hybrid, isn't it?
| kleton wrote:
| Egyptian is afro-asiatic but not semitic, like Berber, somali
| and others
| novateg wrote:
| The article is not complete. I could not find any comparison of
| the new alphabet to the known ones. Is this close to Phoenician
| or Aramaic?
| lisp2240 wrote:
| Wooden structures 476,000 BCE
|
| Sailing 100,000 BCE
|
| Drawing 73,000 BCE
|
| Counting 60,000 BCE
|
| Medicine 40,000 BCE
|
| ...
|
| Writing 3,200 BCE
|
| Alphabet 2,400 BCE
|
| I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting
| pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years
| without inventing writing. I think we just haven't found any of
| it that survived.
| danielheath wrote:
| We find lots of non-alphabetic writing from earlier periods
| that does survive, though. Surely if they had alphabetic
| writing, we'd find that when we find writing?
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Virtually all of the writing we find from earlier periods has
| been carved in stone. Without finding the rare monument or
| well-preserved grave stone, a traveler that arrived here
| 10,000 years in the future would find just as little evidence
| that we knew how to write.
| bjt wrote:
| I've heard this argument before, and generally don't buy
| it. It really comes down to how hard they're looking.
|
| We have found many dinosaur bones that are hundreds of
| millions of years old. We have an Australopithecus skeleton
| (Lucy) from 3.2 million years ago. We have many examples of
| writing that would be similarly durable. Even if most
| things wither or decay or erode or get scavenged or build
| over, so 99% of it is gone in 10,000 years, there's still
| plenty that'd get buried and preserved. You give the
| example of monuments. They're not all that rare though.
| Every town has a few, usually right at the center, right
| where excavation would be most likely. I'm thinking of the
| world war memorials that every little English town seems to
| have, with the names of all their fallen soldiers. They're
| not ALL just going to turn to dust, right? There are
| temples in Egypt where you can still see not just what they
| carved in the stone thousands of years ago, but even the
| _paint_ that they put on it.
|
| So if we're all gone in 10,000 years and that traveller
| just buzzes by and doesn't scratch the surface or even look
| very hard, sure. But if they're excavating at the level
| that humans are today, it will be hard to miss that we had
| writing.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This is more an artifact of how we typically define writing
| than anything meaningful about the act of communication itself.
| Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of years
| older than what the article discusses. Writing as typically
| defined is a complete system for encoding verbal language using
| specific, formalized symbols. That's much more sophisticated
| and largely unnecessary for "most" human activities prior to
| the invention of large, hierarchical societies.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of
| years older than what the article discusses.
|
| This article says that the earliest proto-writing is 10,000
| years old - 3-d clay counters used for accounting. What was
| earlier?
|
| https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-
| writing...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Proto-writing is still quite far along on the spectrum I'm
| talking about of contextually defined symbols. Lascaux and
| chauvet have plenty of examples generally agreed to be
| partially symbolic, just off the top of my head.
| consf wrote:
| And that distinction is crucial
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Can't say I agree, and I suspect you probably don't agree
| with the implications of that definition either. As a
| hypothetical example, do you think any of the following
| aren't writing:
|
| * a script which can represent taxes, histories, and
| religious texts but not the full range of verbal expression
|
| * programming languages
|
| * emojis
|
| The first of these is an actual scholarly debate about
| whether Aztec script can be considered "full" writing or
| merely proto-writing.
| gregschlom wrote:
| Counter example: until relatively recently you had large
| segments of the population who didn't know how to read and
| write, but were very skilled at whatever their trade was.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Agriculture started around 12k years ago. Prior to that, all of
| humanity lived in hunter-gatherer tribal bands. Why would you
| need writing, when you could just talk to the person who knew
| the thing you wanted to learn? Not to mention that prior to the
| invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to
| produce at scale.
|
| Even as recently as the 1800s, nearly 90% of the world was
| illiterate [1]. We live in a hyper-literate society, so it's
| almost unimaginable, but it's really how the world worked!
|
| 1: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/reading-writing-
| glob...
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Enter the hypothetical ice age civilization that was
| destroyed 13k years ago in a global cataclysm.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I think you have to assume that there's kind of an ambiguous
| continuum between art and writing. Obviously hunter-gatherer
| bands likely had reasons to communicate with band members,
| whether by sounds or visual signals. And obviously they made
| art, and humans being humans, presumably a lot of the art hat
| some kind of meaning. I think there are uses for using
| symbols to communicate well before you need ledgers or
| anything similar. But I don't know exactly where art turns
| into writing: Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it
| seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol
| literacy. And in some places that symbol literacy gets so
| dense you have Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. And maybe in
| others you maybe have something similar but less preserved.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear
| than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy.
|
| Interesting - where is that from?
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Practically all painting or drawing includes some sort of
| symbolism. Sometimes it's so obvious that we don't
| recognise it as symbolism (picture of cow = cow), but
| other things aren't (spiral = ?).
|
| The Wikipedia article on Rock Art contains a lot of
| discussion on the meaning of ancient drawings, for
| example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art
|
| More recently, medieval painting has a lot of symbolism
| modern audiences can no longer "read".
| irrational wrote:
| I read about an American professor that was visiting the
| various cathedrals in France and started noticing that
| the stained glass windows were interweaving the parable
| of the good samaritan with the story of the garden of
| eden in a fairly consistent manner. He didn't understand
| why they were doing that until he found records of
| medieval sermons explaining why they were combining these
| two stories. It was a symbolic message that would have
| made sense to medieval peoples, but had been lost over
| the intervening centuries.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think it's a trivial observation. For example, it's
| clear illiterate people in Europe still knew what a cross
| meant when on a building, there is no doubt about that.
| There are many more religious symbols that were also well
| known. Flags and official seals similarly had well known
| meanings in their own areas, as did various military
| symbols.
| mannykannot wrote:
| OK, but symbol literacy, at least in this sense, is a
| long way from literacy in a language having the grammar
| of the spoken language of these people (or a grammar
| equally as expressive, as we see, for example, in the
| case of scholars who read and wrote in Latin while
| conversing in the vernacular of their time and place.)
| phire wrote:
| There is reasonably strong evidence that writing actually
| evolved out of accounting. These early agricultural city-
| states needed to track the seasonal collection of harvests
| from the farmers, and continual distribution of food back
| to everyone.
|
| What started as a ad-hoc system of tellies, eventually
| evolved into a fully-fledged writing system. And once the
| accountants had a functioning writing system, it would have
| been obviously useful, and moved into other parts of
| society. Tax records, laws, contracts, long-distance
| messages, recording history.
|
| Art was probably one of the last places in society actually
| take advantage of this new writing technology.
|
| Hunter-gatherer societies didn't develop writing because
| they didn't need accountants.
| arcbyte wrote:
| Or... we've found the most evidence of writing connected
| to an activity that would have naturally made the most
| effort to ensure it's preservation.
| int_19h wrote:
| Thing is, we have plenty of evidence of writing connected
| to other activities from later periods.
|
| As for the effort, the most would be expanded on
| preserving monumental projects glorifying the rulers etc.
| But, again, in the historical record, this shows up
| _later_ than accounting records.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I don't believe that agriculture only started then. It's just
| the earliest evidence we have. Everything always gets pushed
| earlier
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah, you can do a lot of agriculture just by planting some
| plants and comming back later which would have looked
| basically the same as hunter gathering to archeologists.
| Similar stuff is done to this day for cannabis
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/meet-the-gangster-free-
| weed-...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It doesn't actually look the same to archaeologists. One
| of the things we'll do is look for subtle changes in seed
| morphology as a sign of domestication. There are also
| methods of seeing what types of plants are growing in a
| region, which changes when humans begin selectively
| cultivating certain plants. We can also get a rough
| estimate of how many people were in an area and in what
| seasons.
| mmooss wrote:
| > prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was
| very laborious to produce at scale.
|
| Imagine having to engrave anything you write in clay, stone,
| wood, etc. One reason runic alphabets are shaped that way is
| because it's easier to carve in straight lines (iirc).
|
| How many comments would there be on a HN page if that was
| required?
| dghughes wrote:
| I agree runes like Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Irish were straight
| lines for the most part since they were easy to make. Irish
| Ogrham runes were just basic lines literally just lines.
| Norse Futhark was more complex but still all angles.
|
| Ancient Sumerians in modern Iraq area used cuneiform. The
| cut tip of a reed was used to make marks in in wet clay
| which was quite a rapid way to write. There are even old
| practice tablets with scribblings of children in school
| learning to write.
|
| The reason they still exist is fire. A wood building burned
| at some point and the fire caused the clay tablets to
| harden like in a kiln preserving them.
|
| In modern Inda/Pakistan region Harappan culture also used
| clay Indus script but it was more elaborate and not as
| "wordy". It seems mainly clay tags to attach to goods to
| identify them.
| int_19h wrote:
| Those are not the only options, though. Papyrus is very
| ancient tech, as are palm leaves and similar. Parchment is
| more recent, but still predates the runic alphabets by many
| centuries. Some trees have bark soft enough to write on a
| sharp stylus - birch was notably used for that purpose.
| Then you have wax tablets etc.
|
| The problem is that many of these options are expensive in
| a pre-industrial society. In places where the writing
| material _was_ cheap and readily available, and where
| writing was socially beneficial, you see much more
| "mundane" writing show up - e.g. in the Novgorod merchant
| republic, birch bark was apparently cheap enough for kids
| to doodle on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim).
| thordenmark wrote:
| "nearly 90% of the world was illiterate" I've never believed
| statistics like this. Humans have a remarkable ability to
| grasp symbols.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Try to learn a script you don't know without any kind of
| instruction whatsoever. Maybe you'd have some chance with
| the Latin alphabet, but most writing systems are more
| complex than it, some far more complex. I would bet no one
| could learn Chinese writing for example without
| instruction, even if they knew spoken Mandarin to
| perfection.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Cultivation began around 20kya.
| rcdwealth wrote:
| Majority of this world is still not literate, just be happy
| to be there
| int_19h wrote:
| That is plainly incorrect - even in the least literate
| areas of the world, which are mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa
| at this point, literacy rates are over 50%. Taken in
| aggregate, only 1 in 8 people worldwide is illiterate.
| raincole wrote:
| How do we know humans did "counting" when there weren't no
| written text? Just a few marks on the stone? Does it not count
| as writing?
| mmooss wrote:
| There is a matter of definition. IIRC, if you lookup some
| cave paintings from ~30,000 years ago, there is/was a debate
| whether marks near animals were intended to represent
| quantities.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Quipu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
|
| I remember an article about credit in stores in tiny towns in
| Spain. It was just a rod of wood with some simbol as a
| signature of the store. Each time you buy something ?big?
| they add a mark, and when you get all the ?10? marks you have
| to pay with real money.
|
| IIRC, the oldest number recorded was some kind of lunar
| calendar in a bone, wit marks like IIIIIII
| IIIIIII IIIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII
| IIIIIII
|
| Coincidence? (I don't remember the details, but the article
| was convincing.)
| griffzhowl wrote:
| You're probably referring to the Ishango bone
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Why? The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don't think I
| could come up with on my own. I could see myself coming up with
| structures, drawing, counting etc. on my own given enough free
| time.
| philipswood wrote:
| A is for apple, B is for bear, ...
|
| And then you use the picture of an apple, bear, etc.
|
| It's one of those simple solutions that anyone could have,
| but not often do.
| mmooss wrote:
| > The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don't think I
| could come up with on my own.
|
| Given how many humans did come up with it, over all those
| millennia, I think we all can safely say that!
| bentley wrote:
| Even within the last millennium powerful and accomplished
| civilizations like the Inca survived and excelled without
| writing. I think a better lesson to take from this is that
| though humans are inherently communicative and inventive, these
| characteristics don't depend upon _written_ communication, and
| that writing is not an obvious invention even if we can see
| elements of it in similar inventions like quipu.
| philipswood wrote:
| The Inca had Quipu.
| mmooss wrote:
| Quipo are amazing, but mostly accounting records?
| bentley wrote:
| Yes, I mentioned that.
| mcswell wrote:
| The Quipu were definitely not an alphabetic system, and
| probably not a system for transcribing words.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's clumsy and inconvenient to have writing without paper and
| pen. There wasn't a whole lot of writing before the printing
| press.
|
| I've sometimes idly wondered if I was transported back in time
| to the stone age, could I help the tribe by teaching them to
| read and write? Sadly, nope.
|
| If I was transported to Roman times, I'd try to invent paper
| and a printing press. I bet it would catch on fast.
| gostsamo wrote:
| They had paper though not as durable as the modern one.
| Papyrus had the same function, but it decays over few decades
| and things written on it should be rewritten. If you have a
| few centuries of war and low literacy like in the western
| parts of the Roman empire, there is noone to renew the pagan
| texts and they get lost. The eastern empire bothered only
| with the texts compatible with christianity while the arabs
| kept those compatible with islam.
|
| The printing press might've been useful though.
| mmooss wrote:
| > I'd try to invent ... a printing press
|
| I sometimes wonder if the development of the printing press
| relied on technology that hadn't been available previously -
| like many/most innovations. But what?
|
| Paper? There were ink-retaining sheets long before the
| printing press. A durable mechanism for the roller? They made
| wagon axles, I assume, that supported much more weight.
| Durable letters? Even sans metal, I'd guess that carving wood
| letters would still be worth the effort.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Gutenberg's press was a modified wine press that was based
| on a screw. The Romans had screw wine presses. The
| precursors were available to the Romans.
|
| He used lead letters. Lead was readily available in Roman
| times - after all, the water pipes were made of lead (and
| poisoned the people who used them).
|
| The lead letters would quickly wear out, but it was easy to
| melt and recast them as needed. I've seen a demonstration
| of it.
|
| I think the Chinese did wood block printing, but it didn't
| get very far.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It would be dangerous to transport you back to Roman times,
| because you might teach them to write C++ and compile it into
| cellular automata, and then program Empire with a 30 million
| soldier human computer, like the "human abacus" scene in
| "Three Body Problem"!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFgRNY6fpOc
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of course you're right!
|
| After much thinking about it, providing a printing press
| would be the most effective invention to bootstrap a modern
| society. And, well, that's exactly what happened after
| Gutenberg invented it. The greatest inventions in history
| are:
|
| 1. writing
|
| 2. phonetic alphabet
|
| 3. paper
|
| 4. printing
|
| 5. networks
|
| And the pattern is obvious!
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| Humans are able to pass on an incredible amount of knowledge
| without the use of writing. There are oral, epic traditions
| 100s of years old that we only know about because they were
| eventually written down. People were able to do things like
| recite the Iliad from memory. I don't know about other ancient
| languages but the oldest Greek texts of significant length are
| all metrical poetry. We know and have scientific works that
| were written in meter. There are probably all sorts of things
| that were passed don't orally that we can't even imagine.
| philipswood wrote:
| A book that gives a nice view of these some of these memory
| technologies is The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly
|
| I can't get myself to link to the marketing blurb inspired
| summaries, but I love the book. This wikipedia heading gives
| a less breathless overview:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Kelly_(science_writer)#R.
| ..
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I think this was on here in prior story but Australian
| Aboriginal stories about changes in ocean level were shown to
| reflect conditions about 10000 years ago.
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-
| rise-...
| webdoodle wrote:
| Book burning has been a major issue many times by people trying
| to control history. The library of Alexandria, one of the
| oldest known book burnings, may have had some of the evidence
| your expecting. Then there are the cretins like folks trying to
| unroll the Dead Sea Scrolls. The modern day equivalent are the
| internet censors deleting our comments and posts on social
| media.
| tivert wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe humans were building houses,
| painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of
| thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just
| haven't found any of it that survived.
|
| What's so hard to believe? _Everything_ you can write you can
| say, and you can _show_ quite a lot that 's difficult to
| describe in writing.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >Everything you can write you can say
|
| That's easy to say if you've never written C++ or Perl.
|
| One of the unique golden rules of FORTH is that every word
| definition must have a well defined pronunciation in the
| documentation, so you can discuss FORTH code over the
| telephone without confusion.
|
| That's because FORTH words have no syntax except space as a
| delimiter, so can mix arbitrary punctuation with letters in
| any way, so you have many weird words like @ (fetch) !
| (store) +! (plus store) ' (tick) ['] (bracket tick) >R (to r)
| R> (r from) etc.
|
| So you could define an emoticon in FORTH like:
| : ;-) WINK NOSE SMILE ; // Pronounced "winkie".
| ehecatl42 wrote:
| Writing Perl is easy; reading it a few weeks later is the
| hard part. CPP I don't know much about... I was a sysadmin,
| not a programmer <@:) # clown-hat-curly-hair-smiley-face...
| or, part of a regex
| v8xi wrote:
| Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after
| construction of the pyramids. How do you coordinate something
| that massive without any form of writing?
| jaco6 wrote:
| The article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to
| alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and
| characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more
| widely used.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after
| construction of the pyramids.
|
| The first Egyptian pyramid known was built ~2780 BCE, the
| alphabetic writing in this article was from ~2500 BCE. That's
| a gap of ~250 years, not ~2,500.
|
| > How do you coordinate something that massive without any
| form of writing?
|
| The Egyptians at the time of the Pyramids had writing, but it
| was logographic (symbols directly represent a word/concept),
| not alphabetic (a small inventory of symbols are combined in
| different ways to represent words/concepts.)
|
| An alphabetic - and also phonetic - script is a big advance
| not because of what you communicate with it, but because if
| you know a fairly small set of symbols and their phonetic
| interpretation, you can encode a spoken language in it in a
| reasonably intelligible way to anyone who knows the same
| script (and you can even encode _different_ spoken languages
| in the same script intelligibly, if they have a similar-
| enough phonetic inventory.)
| timschmidt wrote:
| I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Coptic made use
| of hieroglyphs as an alphabet, and co-existed with their
| use for Egyptian:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Written on what? There are very few materials that will last
| 10s of millennia.
|
| Aztec, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and their contemporaries all
| used some type of paper. Sumerians seem to be alone in their
| use of clay for writing.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Paper was only one written medium. All of the cultures you've
| listed constructed stone stelae with writing, like the
| Rosetta stone. South Asian cultures used palm leaves instead
| of paper. Maya used fig bark. Europeans and Nahuatl often
| used animal hides instead of paper. There's a long list.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Ok. Maybe I should have been more generic. Organic thin
| sheet material... velum, parchment, papyrus. The bulk of
| writing is done on material that is gone in a few thousand
| years at most.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Which still leaves stelae as already mentioned. There's
| also petroglyphs, ceramics, and paints. The point I'm
| trying to convey is that writing has never been limited
| solely to paper or even organic materials.
| lkrubner wrote:
| I agree that there must have been earlier writing, likely
| written on wood. Early systems could have evolved from markings
| on trees, like we still use on the Appalachian Trail, and other
| trails. Warnings for bears or tigers, symbols for different
| tribes on different paths. If you've hiked much then you're
| aware that even experienced woodsmen can get lost as the season
| changes and a valley changes, or after a hard storm washes away
| evidence of a trail. Children, in particular, would have been
| at risk, but would have almost certainly needed to do work over
| distances, in particular fetching water, which is something
| that even today children as young as 5 are asked to do. Notches
| on trees would have been a likely starting point for a system
| of symbols to communicate.
|
| When I was much younger I used to work as a hike leader for a
| summer camp in Virginia. We would take a small group of
| teenagers out for 7 day hikes, during which we could cover
| something between 70 to 90 miles (112 to 145 kilometers). At
| one time I knew that stretch of trail so well I thought I could
| walk it blindfolded. And yet, I only knew it in the summer. One
| year I went in the fall and I was astonished how different it
| was. I was helped by the markings on the trees. (This was
| before cell phones and GPS.)
| dachris wrote:
| Exactly - there's probably a fluent transition between
| symbols and painting and writing and then alphabetic writing.
|
| Territorial animals that we are, I'd add "here starts the
| territory of the Saber-Toothed Tiger Clan" signs to path
| markings as likely candidates for earliest symbolic
| communication.
|
| Nice to see that the earliest examples of writing are still
| somewhat recognizable (as opposed to modern alphabets) - see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing - a hand, a
| foot, a goat or sheep.
|
| Fun thing is, with modern technology we have regressed
| (advanced?) to a massive use of pictograms - a modern
| smartphone wielding human, in addition to the alphabet, knows
| at least a few hundreds or even thousands of pictograms
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I'm so old that we didn't even have Emojis, not even
| letters yet, and we had to communicate with punctuation
| alone! ;)
| choeger wrote:
| You had punctuation? We had to to with empty spaces and
| silence! I once read an entire poem just using silence!
| truculent wrote:
| > there's probably a fluent transition between symbols and
| painting and writing and then alphabetic writing
|
| I'm with you until we get to alphabetic writing, which has
| (to our knowledge) only been invented once. To get from
| other writing systems to an alphabet requires a few
| conceptual leaps which are much more challenging and, I
| would suggest, not fluent.
|
| If it were a smooth path, we ought to have seen alphabetic
| scripts arise independently multiple times (as we have
| other forms of writing).
| Tainnor wrote:
| Alphabets may only have been invented once, but writing
| systems that have a (roughly, it's never perfect) 1:1
| correspondence with the sounds of the language have been
| invented several times independently, e.g. in syllabaries
| (Japanese Kana are derived from Kanji) and abugidas. I
| would suggest that that conceptual leap is a much bigger
| one than the one of treating consonants and vowels as
| independent.
| mcswell wrote:
| Not sure, but I think Hangul counts as a second invention
| of alphabetic writing.
|
| If you count syllabic writing systems (which are not
| technically alphabetic, but are more so than Chinese, or
| Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics), there are more:
| Japanese hiragana and katakana, Cherokee syllabics,
| Pahawh Hmong, Vai (West Africa), and Linear B (and
| presumably Linear A).
|
| There's also Thaana, the script used for Maldivian, which
| uses some Arabic script symbols, as well as Indic digits.
| So while it's semi-alphabetic (partly abugida), and it's
| derived from existing writing systems, it uses the
| borrowed symbols in unique ways.
|
| There are other syllabic writing systems as well, like
| Inuktitut and Cree, but those were created by
| missionaries familiar with other writing systems.
| nunez wrote:
| It's easy to believe when you learn that there are still parts
| of the world that struggle with literacy.
| momoschili wrote:
| the distinction between writing and drawing seems to be a bit
| gray to be honest
| asdff wrote:
| Literacy is a modern phenomenon.
| foogazi wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe humans were building houses,
| painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of
| thousands of years without inventing writing.
|
| Egyptian Pyramids - 3,800 BCE
|
| They were writing just not with an alphabet
| otherme123 wrote:
| Exactly. It seems that alphabet development is closely
| related to the regions more focused on international trading
| (the region we know as Phoenicia) rather than war and
| conquest of the neighbours. Maybe a system that represent
| sounds was useful to write words from sounds in multiple
| languages that were never heard before, unlike pictograms,
| hieroglyphs or cuneiform, that had to be adapted to each
| language.
| mmooss wrote:
| Many cultures never invent writing. From well-known 1969
| research on 186 pre-industrial societies: [0] *
| 39.2%: No writing * 37.1%: Pictures only * 23.7%:
| Writing
|
| Also of interest (but also a bit dated): "... the making and
| reading of two dimensional maps is almost universal among
| mankind whereas the reading and writing of linear scripts is a
| special accomplishment associated with a high level of social
| and technical sophistication." [1]
|
| > I think we just haven't found any of it that survived.
|
| It's an interesting question, but do I think that? That's the
| thing about science - we need evidence. Otherwise, what we
| think turns out to be especially unreliable.
|
| [0] George P. Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural
| Sample (SCCS). Ethnology (1969)
|
| [1] Edmund Leach. Culture and Communication. Cambridge U. Press
| (1976)
| cogman10 wrote:
| In fact, there are used languages today that are not written!
|
| I have family that just returned from a 2 year religious
| mission in pohnpei. The native language there is just barely
| starting to be written. One of the challenges to learning it
| is because of it's mostly unwritten nature, the language
| evolves rapidly. That fast evolution is part of what makes
| turning the language into a written language difficult.
| simmerup wrote:
| This reminded me of how cyrillic was invented.
|
| The Byzantines created the cyrillic alphabet in the 9th
| century so that they could write a bible for Slavic
| countries.
|
| Blew my mind that they didn't have an alphabet before that.
| unscaled wrote:
| How is that different from the thousands of different
| languages that did not have alphabet until recently but
| then got one created by linguists or missionaries (or
| often someone who is a little bit of both[1])?
|
| Cyril and Methodius (who created the Glagolithic
| Alphabet, not the Cyrillic alphabet) weren't even the
| first Chritian missionaries who created a new alphabet
| for a language that didn't have on in order to spread
| Christianity. I believe the first one was Armenian (in
| the early 5th century).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_International
| simmerup wrote:
| Does it have to be different?
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| It similarly blows my mind how far back many languages go
| with written accounts. My own native language wasn't
| written down until the 16th century, so its earlier forms
| are basically unattested. And the 16th writing is just a
| few sentences in official records and translations of
| certain Christian prayers. It took until the late 17th
| century to have a translated Bible, and for the first
| non-religious texts to appear. Meanwhile some other
| languages spoken next door had centuries old literature
| by then.
| cogman10 wrote:
| That's what's mind-blowing to me about pohnpei. It's an
| island with an airport and internet. English is the
| official language but according to my relative the native
| language is what everyone uses day to day. It has about
| 40k residents. Literacy is 98%.
|
| Yet with all that, the spoken language remains unwritten.
| That's just wild to me.
| asveikau wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the two most spoken indigenous
| languages on Pohnpei are written with the Latin alphabet.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohnpeian_language
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuukese_language
|
| See the "phonology" and "orthography" sections of the
| respective articles. It seems like both have a standard
| orthography.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Very interesting.
|
| Perhaps my family member confused the fact that the
| religion had no training materials for the language with
| there being no written version of the language. (I'm
| admittedly ignorant about this, I just had a conversation
| with them on Saturday)
|
| I wonder if the language isn't as commonly written as it
| is spoken?
| mmooss wrote:
| > The Byzantines created the cyrillic alphabet in the 9th
| century so that they could write a bible for Slavic
| countries.
|
| A bit similarly: English uses the Latin alphabet mainly
| because, as I recall, after the fall of Rome the
| Christian church was doing much of the writing in
| (England? Wales? British Isles?), and they adapted the
| Latin alphabet to the local languages.
| int_19h wrote:
| To be more precise, Glagolitic was the originally created
| script, with wholly original letter shapes.
|
| Cyrillic was a later iteration by the Slavs themselves -
| Bulgarians, to be precise - where those new shapes were
| mostly replaced with Greek letters (except where there
| was no direct equivalent), presumably because those guys
| were translating a _lot_ of Greek books, and having
| similar alphabets for both Greek and Church Slavonic made
| things easier.
| riffraff wrote:
| Why not? People lived ok without being able to read and write
| until a couple generations ago. Passing knowledge orally and by
| example is easy.
| mcswell wrote:
| People still survive that way.
| nurettin wrote:
| I find it totally believable. There weren't that many humans
| living in comfort to create institutions and innovate.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I take it you've never interacted with people who build houses,
| make rope or administer medicine then? They don't read, even
| today. They learn their trade by watching others. We are quite
| exceptional in that reading is usually the most efficient way
| to learn stuff, but it's not like that in other areas. If you
| needed to change a spark plug or plumb in a washing machine
| would you be reaching for the books or YouTube?
| Hilift wrote:
| Greek society switched alphabets between 750 and 950 BC, and
| adopted a number system. There were writing collapses. There is
| still a lot of history to uncover from the end of the Bronze
| Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
| watwut wrote:
| Why would it be so hard to believe that people "would build
| houses, painting pictures, making rope" without writing?
| Illiteracy was high 2-3 hundred years ago, in Russia even
| longer. And all those illiterate villages and areas would build
| houses, draw, craft ropes and clothing.
|
| You need writing for organizing large groups of people and
| such. You dont need it for survival necessities.
| tim333 wrote:
| It makes you think how rapidly things are changing with the
| petabytes we are leaving these days.
| lou1306 wrote:
| Clearly, almost every time we find an ancient artifact, it is
| fair to assume that the technology it displays was common and
| established by the time the artifact was created.
|
| However, (and adding to the other replies here which also have
| a point) in Plato's _Phaidros_ Socrates places the invention of
| writing in Egypt [1], not in some mind-blowingly past aeon, and
| the undertone of the tale is that civilization can (and reach)
| pretty interesting levels of sophistication before writing
| becomes a necessity.
|
| [1] https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Language is a powerful human talent. It's reasonable to assume
| that there have been many variants of writing systems
| throughout human evolution.
|
| However, such systems would need to be widely adopted and
| durably preserved to survive millennia and eventually be
| rediscovered.
|
| Which is how we happen to know the precious little that we do
| know about past writing systems.
| consf wrote:
| Even widely adopted systems face challenges
| griffzhowl wrote:
| > It's reasonable to assume that there have been many
| variants of writing systems throughout human evolution.
|
| I don't find it that reasonable an assumption. As far as I
| know, there is no hunter-gatherer society that has developed
| writing, except societies who have had contact with a
| sedentary agricultural civilisation with writing.
|
| Given that all human societies for which there's evidence
| were hunter-gatherers until about 10k years ago, to me it
| seems more reasonable to conclude they had no writing.
|
| Now, you might say that agriculture and civilisation were
| around earlier, but we dhaven't found the evidence. But we do
| have evidence of plenty of human groups at those earlier
| times, and they're all hunter-gatherers.
| consf wrote:
| The timeline of human innovation isn't linear; it's likely
| there were many steps we just haven't uncovered
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe humans were building houses,
| painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of
| thousands of years without inventing writing.
|
| Why?
| canjobear wrote:
| Consider the many cultures that Europeans discovered in the
| Americas. Of them, only one had a real writing system (the
| Maya). The Aztecs wrote down history in a sort of comic book
| form, and the Inca did accounting with qhipu, but only the Maya
| had a conventional system of written forms that correspond
| systematically with verbal language.
|
| You can communicate and remember a lot orally. The Polynesian
| navigators encoded information about how to navigate from
| island to island in oral poems passed down generation to
| generation. A lot of these traditions seem to vanish once a
| culture gets writing, leaving it unclear how they used to pass
| on so much information before.
| contingencies wrote:
| The age of sailing is additionally potentially under-specified
| because the majority of materials used were either wood or
| animal skin. I have a few books on the subject which are very
| good, chiefly _The Sea-craft of Prehistory_ by Paul Johnstone.
|
| Also, sailing without counting doesn't get you very far,
| because for instance you may run out of food or water. While
| early sailing was predominantly coastal, that doesn't mean an
| easy pit-stop whenever you get hungry or thirsty (due to rocky
| coastlines, dangerous currents and waves, and prevailing
| winds). Probably a lot of early boats were destroyed coming
| ashore.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Honest question, why do you think any of that wouldn't be
| possible without writing?
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| They also built massive structures without algebra.
| tivert wrote:
| > Schwartz said. "Without a means to translate the writing, we
| can only speculate."
|
| If you can't translate it, how do they know it's alphabetic?
| philipov wrote:
| Statistical analysis, more or less. Alphabets have a couple
| dozen characters, syllabaries have a couple hundred, and
| logographic scripts have thousands to tens of thousands.
| olalonde wrote:
| Carbon-14 dating can't be used directly on clay right? I assume
| the dating is inferred from some organic material found nearby?
| Sam6late wrote:
| Some claim that standard Arabic has been intentionally made more
| complicated because writers were paid well by rulers back in old
| days, and there were more incentives to make grammar hard for the
| ordinary folks, so that you need "craftsmen" to write according
| to an Arabic linguist.Until the 80s in many Arab countries you
| needed clerks to produce documents from governments. (Comedy
| sketch on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtloJgMgFho) Arabic
| linguist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0
|
| 'Category V - It usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach
| S-3/R-3 proficiency in these languages. This small group of
| "super-hard languages" includes Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese,
| Japanese, Korean and Arabic.' (Arabic
| linguist)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0&t=3645s
| newsclues wrote:
| Sounds like our laws and lawyers.
| mrkeen wrote:
| Likewise with keeping science and Catholicism in Latin.
| mcswell wrote:
| I don't think anyone has seriously claimed that Modern Standard
| Arabic has been _intentionally_ made complicated. It 's clearly
| related to a lot of other Semitic languages (including the
| regional varieties of spoken Arabic). And the Category V thing
| is only about learning Arabic (any variety, not just MSA) as a
| _second_ language, an in particular a second language for
| native speakers of English.
| openrisk wrote:
| > Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to
| people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing
| changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they
| communicated
|
| Thousands of years later (with few cultural diffusion barriers)
| billions of people do not use alphabets. So there is probably
| something missing from this picture.
|
| E.g., the large Chinese society is notoriously competitive and
| you would think that if the use of alphabet is an obvious enabler
| it would have been adopted by some segment?
|
| Maybe there is a tradeof in a phonetic system: if the spoken
| language cannot be properly captured it negates the combinatorial
| benefits of an alphabet.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Given that most signs on the cylinders are unique it's much more
| likely that they represent just another syllabary of it's time,
| no?
| consf wrote:
| How practical and functional early writing systems were, far
| before they became the monumental tools of record-keeping we
| often associate with ancient civilizations
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