The Evolution of Writing

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

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.

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").

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.

> 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.)