
The Evolution of Writing - scott_s
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/
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dzhshnacct
while this tries to present a nice tidy picture and dump all progress and
technological development to somewhere near the holy land of certain peoples
even a wikipedia lookup would reveal serious flaws

indus script dates back to nearly the same as sumerian and egyptian around
3200 bc with some potsherd markings dated further back to 3500 bc

if indus script was related to sumerian it wouldnt be undeciphered till now

the first evidence of brahmi is from lanka which is probably as far from
levant as china

it is funny that the intrusive nature of the alphabet amidst the syllabaries
is not remarked upon but just accepted especially since the other intrusive
party of the time 1500 bc are indo europeans and most likely indo aryans in
the mitanni and kassite eras

the near complete further non development of the alphabet to better fit the
languages indicating the borrowed nature of it

as opposed to say brahmi or chinese

no mention of the tale that the phoenicians gave greeks the alphabet or
dicussion of their origin which is still unknown herodotus or someone said
they were of the african coast i believe ie not native but everyone pretends
this is just fake

the strained efforts to relate everything back to egyptian heiroglyphs because
europeans want that heritage too

~~~
jcranmer
The Indus Valley Script is a really tough thing to place because there's so
little evidence to go on, and India has a particularly nasty problem with
nationalistic cultural appropriation.

Deciphering unknown scripts is insanely difficult. In fact, all of the big
scripts started with use of a bilingual inscription: Egyptian via the Rosetta
Stone, cuneiform via a bilingual Akkadian/Persian inscription, and Mayan via a
(botched) bilingual alphabet. There's nothing of the sort for Indus Valley
Script, and the texts themselves are too short for even cryptology to be of
much use. It's not even clear that Indus Valley Script is true writing as
opposed to proto-writing, i.e., if it was capable of encoding full utterances
within the language spoken of the time.

The link between the Phoenician abjad and the Greek alphabet is quite well-
attested, not least of which is the order, shape, and phonetic correspondence
between the letters is damn near perfect. Compare the correspondence of
Phoenician and Greek versus Linear B and Greek, say. It takes pretty big
blinders to say the Greek alphabet couldn't have come from Phoenicians.

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vorg
The article mentions how writing evolved through several stages: (a) clay
tokens, (b) replaced with 2-D signs, (c) evolving into phonetic signs, (d)
settling into two dozen letters each representing a single sound.

Over the past 50 years, another stage has occurred via the keyboard. They
allow the 95 Ascii symbols to be entered easily, and control keys enable
changes to the fonts, sizes, colors, or even tokens displayed. The pinnacle of
this change is the IME's for Chinese and Japanese, enabling people to type in
spoken sounds (pinyin or kana) with a selector, but allow Hanzi or Kanji to be
displayed. Quite useful for tiny smartphone screens.

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jcranmer
The point I expected this page to say that it doesn't really mention is that
there's a fairly clear progression in the development of writing. Early
writing systems all seem to start with some sort of pictography. This runs
into the problem that not every word can be represented with a clear
pictogram, and the solution ends up being some sort of phonetic punning
mechanism (i.e., the rebus principle). Even Chinese hanzi evidences these sort
of mechanism, as the vast majority of its characters are based on combining a
phonetic component with a semantic component.

After you start phonetic punning, most writing systems drop the pictographic
portion and become solely based on phonetic constituents (Chinese being the
major exception, although Japanese did evolve the next step into kana). These
constituents are usually roughly based on a consonant-vowel pair and writing
systems in this phase are called syllabries, but they're often not really full
syllables, and there are tricks for representing more complex syllables (for
example, Mayan uses the principle that the syllable pattern CVC is represented
with CV-CV, where the vowel is the same in both characters.).

Now, in Phoenician or thereabouts, an interesting turn happened. Because of
the nature of Semitic languages, the syllabry form dropped all of the vowels
and just represented the consonants (what's now termed an abjad). The Indo-
European speakers (principally Etruscan and Greek) who borrowed from this
alphabet repurposed some of the letters which corresponded to missing
consonants (such as the glottal stop in 'aleph) to represent vowels instead,
as vowels are rather more important in those languages. Other languages that
borrowed from abjads indicated vowels with systematic vowel marks, such as
Devanagari or Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics; these are known as abugidas.
Virtually every alphabet, abjad, and abugida known to exist is believed to
derive originally from this first "wrong" turn when developing syllabaries.

An interesting point when discussing the history of writing systems is the
development of the Cherokee script. The Cherokee script was invented by
Sequoyah, who developed it entirely on the basis that he knew that the white
settlers had a writing system that could be reliably read and a copy of the
Bible but without any other knowledge of writing. He originally attempted to
develop a mapping of word => character, but realized that the mapping is too
complex, especially since the text he had got by with much fewer characters.
Instead, he chose a syllabary, borrowing some of the letter forms from Latin
script but not their phonetic mappings (which is why ᏣᎳᎩ is actually
pronounced "tsalagi").

~~~
tabtab
With regard to vowel-centric versus consonant-centric languages, English tends
to be consonant-centric, and that's partly why our spelling is difficult. For
example, "flutter" could be spelled "fluttr": we don't need the 2nd vowel and
thus wouldn't have to guess whether it's spelled "fluttur", "fluttor", etc.
English could use a refactoring. Examples:
[http://wiki.c2.com/?RefactorEnglish](http://wiki.c2.com/?RefactorEnglish)

~~~
jcranmer
What you're referring to is essentially schwa-reduction. Unstressed vowels in
English get reduced to a neutral vowel sound (represented by schwa, an upside-
down e), and different letters are used to represent that vowel depending more
or less on linguistic history.

But vowels do matter in English. Consider the following words that differ only
in the vowel they use: bat, bait, bit, bot, bite, boat, boot, butt, bet, beat,
bout. Furthermore, all of those words refer to very different things. Semitic
languages are based on a triconsonantal scheme, where three consonants define
a root, and the choice of vowels implies inflection. Dropping the vowels in
Semitic languages does not impair meaning all that much.

~~~
tabtab
I didn't intend to imply _all_ vowels can be dropped or wild-carded in
English. As far as schwa, if we do refactor English, we should probably stick
to _existing_ "normal" letters rather than introduce symbols such as an
explicit schwa. I agree this risks either ambiguity, or some potentially non-
obvious rules to remember.

As it is, I feel sorry for non-native English learners; English's spelling is
a mess. The only saving grace is that being semi-phonetic means one can often
make a decent guess.

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tabtab
Re: _With state formation, new regulations required that the names of the
individuals who generated or received registered merchandise were entered on
the tablets. The personal names were transcribed by the mean of
logograms...pictures of words with a sound close to that desired (for example
in English the name Neil could be written with a sign showing bent knees
'kneel')._

Seems like a chicken-or-egg conundrum here. How can you create a regulation
for something that nobody knows how to do? (No jokes about a dysfunctional
Congress, please.) Somebody must have realized the logogram technique BEFORE
suggesting or making an edict.

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nine_k
> _clay tokens representing units of goods were used for accounting (8000–3500
> BC). ... The token system had little in common with spoken language except
> that, like a word, a token stood for one concept. Unlike speech, tokens were
> restricted to one type of information only, namely, real goods. Unlike
> spoken language, the token system made no use of syntax._

That is, for 4.5ky Sumerians had a form of abstracted accounting record very
unlike a writing system proper, and it was used on a large territory where
people likely spoke different languages / dialects.

(In a sense, it was an early era of digital communication.)

~~~
techbio
These symbols are non-unique identifiers for physical objects. More like a
digital trading floor: price _is_ syntax.

