14th
A brief history of writing
(Photo: Babylonian legal tablet from Alalakh in its clay envelope, British Museum)
“True writing, or phonetic writing, records were developed independently in four different civilizations in the world. Writing systems developed from neolithic writing in the Early Bronze Age (4th millennium BC). The invention of the phonetic system is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC.
The history of human communication dates back to the earliest era of humanity. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago, and writing about 7,000. The early writing systems of the late 4th millennium BC are not considered a sudden invention. Rather, they were based on ancient traditions of symbol systems that cannot be classified as writing proper, but have many characteristics strikingly similar to writing. These systems may be described as proto-writing. They used ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbols to convey information yet were probably devoid of direct linguistic content. These systems emerged in the early Neolithic period, as early as the 7th millennium BC.” — (Wiki History of writing)
The world’s three main writing traditions: Afro-Asiatic, East Asian and American
(Click image to enlarge)
— from Steven R. Fischer, A History of Writing (pdf), Reaktion Books, 2001, p. 296-297.
(Video: Early History of the Alphabet by Jennifer Ordonez & Tatiana Mirzaian)
“Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it. There is no genetic basis for writing. Writing is not like seeing or talking, which are innate. Writing must be taught. (…)
About 6,000 years ago, the Sumerians created the first schools, called tablet houses, to teach writing. They trained children in Sumerian cuneiform by having them copy the symbols on one half of a soft clay tablet onto the other half, using a stylus. When children did this — and when the Sumerians invented a system of representation, a way to make one thing symbolize another — their brains changed. In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf explains the neurological developments writing wrought: “The brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: The visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words …; and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meaning, function and connections.”
The Sumerians did not have an alphabet — nor did the Egyptians, who may have gotten to writing earlier. Which alphabet came first is debated; many consider it to be the Greek version, a system based upon Phoenician. Alphabets created even more neural pathways, allowing us to think in new ways (neither better nor worse than non-alphabetic systems, like Chinese, yet different nonetheless). (…)
— Anne Trubek, Handwriting Is History, Miller-McCune Online, December 17, 2009.
“The invention of writing is only thousands of years old. In addition, for most of us, our grandparents, great grandparents or great great grandparents didn’t read at all. Writing is much too recent for our brains to have evolved to have reading mechanisms. (…)
The solution is that culture made writing easy on the eye, by shaping letters to be what the eye likes. The idea that culture shapes our artifacts to be good for us is not new. What’s new here is a specific hypothesis for what writing should look like in order to be good for us.
To be easy on the eye, writing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illiterate visual systems are fantastically competent at processing. The trick of that research direction was making this “writing looks like nature” idea rigorous, and coming up with ways of testing it. I show that there are certain signature visual patterns found in nearly any natural environment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these signature patterns are found in human writing. In short, writing has evolved so that written words look like visual objects.”
— Mark Changizi, Everything We Knew About Human Vision is Wrong. Mark Changizi Tells Us Why, N e u r o n a r r a t i v e, May 5, 2010.
“Language isn’t just an internal process. Rather, linguistic components overflow their boundaries in the mind and become concretized as artifacts. Writing is the most obvious of these boundary overflows, but every technology represents some sort of material fixation of a linguistic concept. In that sense, the materiality of human history is a story of how homo sapiens learned to speak with their hands, translate their language into artifact, and then engage in a conversation with these artifacts. This sets up a very interesting feedback loop, because the exteriorized linguistic object – the technology – produces ramifications of language, which in turn produce new technologies, etc., until the whole thing spirals completely out of control. And we’re already well past that point.”
— Mark Pesce, The Progressive Ingression of Intelligence into Matter | h+ Magazine
Stephen Fry on the science of language | BBC
“Stephen Fry explores linguistic achievements and how our skills for the spoken word have developed in a new five-part series for BBC Two. In Planet Word, Stephen dissects language in all its guises with his inimitable mixture of learning, love of lexicon and humour. He analyses how we use and abuse language and asks whether we are near to beginning to understand the complexities of its DNA.
From the time when man first mastered speech to the cyber world of modern times with its html codes and texting, Planet Word takes viewers on a journey across the globe to discover just how far humans have come when it comes to the written and spoken word.”
See also:
☞ Mark Changizi on how we read
☞ Mark Changizi, The Topography Of Language, Science 2.0, Sep 17, 2009.
☞ The world’s three main writing traditions: Afro-Asiatic, East Asian and American (diagram)
☞ Maria Popova, A Visual History of the Alphabet, The Atlantic, Jun 21, 2011
☞ Mark Changizi, Are We “Meant” to Have Language and Music? How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man
