Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’
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#1: Discoveries from ancient Egypt
Personally I conduct them over Zoom, and use my own picture materials combined with free to use video's and pictures from sources like Wikipedia.
What I find the most interesting question about the development of writing is the origin of Chinese writing. We know that Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley were in fairly close contact throughout ancient times. For example, with Sanskrit, we can find very similar languages in Syria with the Mitanni.
However, written Chinese as far as I know, seems it was not part of that milieu and seems to be developed completely independently.
It's possible that the Egyptians got the idea of writing from Mesopotamia and commissioned a clean-room implementation though there's little evidence of intellectual property law being a major concern in those days.
"Wot's it all about, Org?" asked Maka.
"Intellectual property versus progress and betterment for all," replied Org.
The hypothesis is that our hominin cousins may have been different from us psychologically. In particular, they may not have thought about abstractions as homo sapiens does.
In other words, they may have thought us mad. I look at the world and I think I can agree!
For what it's worth, pretty much every major invention involved in developing civilization seems to have been developed multiple times.
• Sumerian cuneiform was undisputedly the first writing system to be invented.
• Egyptian hieroglyphics was probably made with knowledge of cuneiform, but could have been an independent invention. All Western writing systems (Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin etc.) are ultimately descended from hieroglyphics.
• All native writing systems of India, SE Asia and Oceania are descended from Brāhmī. I believe the current theory is that Brāhmī was descended from Aramaic script and hence also from hieroglyphics, but there are disputes.
• Chinese characters (hànzì) were an independent invention. Descended from them are Japanese hanja and kana, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm, Sawndip and some others.
• The writing systems of Mesoamerica (most notably that for Mayan) are of course a completely independent invention.
And then of course there are Hangeul, Cherokee, CAS etc., which were scripts consciously designed under the influence of other scripts. These tend to have rather unique structures compared to other writing systems of the world.
So while writing was indisputably multiply invented, the alphabet (i.e., representing all phonemes instead of syllables) itself appears to have been independently invented only once (excluding perhaps Hangul, which is somewhat closer to a rigorously-construct syllabary than an alphabet).
If you're unfamiliar with terminology:
* Alphabet = Every phoneme (consonant and vowel) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Latin, Greek, Cyrillic.
* Abiguda = Every consonant has a distinct glyph. Vowels are indicated by systematic modification of the glyph. Examples include Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Devanagari, Ethiopian.
* Abjad = Every consonant has a distinct glyph. Vowels are indicated by (optional) diacritic marks. Examples include Arabic, Hebrew.
* Syllabary = Every syllable (or, more often, Consonant-Vowel cluster) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Japanese kana, Mayan.
* Logograph = Every word (/morpheme) has a distinct glyph. Examples include Chinese, although Japanese and Mayan also include logographic components. Arguably modern English with emoji. ;-)
> So while writing was indisputably multiply invented, the alphabet (i.e., representing all phonemes instead of syllables) itself appears to have been independently invented only once (excluding perhaps Hangul, which is somewhat closer to a rigorously-construct syllabary than an alphabet).
Sure, I agree with this; I had thought that GP was using ‘alphabet’ in the informal sense of ‘any writing system’ rather than as a technical term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script
The only reason one might consider it a syllabary according to these definitions is that the way the letters are arranged into a block form syllabic glyphs, but that’s more similar to writing direction (e.g. English left to right).
That's not really true of the Latin alphabet as used in English, is it?
"f" and "ph" could be pronounced the same, as in "fox" and "phone".
"c" and "k" could be pronounced the same, as in "cow" and "kiss".
So a multiple glyphs could represent the same phoneme.
* At first, people just draw representations of whatever they want to refer to.
* These evolve to symbols.
* Then, using the "rébus principle", you use the _sounds_ of each symbol to be able to represent things for which you had no symbols. This is the step where, say, the chinese and mayan systems are.
* Then, and this is the "reduced" part I'm referring to: you simply forget the original meaning of your symbol, and only take it for a basic sound. If I understand correctly, this happened when some people wanted to adapt hieroglyphs to their (spoken) language: they dropped the hieroglyph as symbolic representations, and only used them for their sound. The documentary I watched seemed to imply that all alphabets with this property (symbols have no meaning) descend from this moment.
It does sound a bit much. I may be totally misunderstanding it all, so any correction is more than welcome!
This is usually known as the ‘acrophonic principle’, and indeed, all alphabetic scripts — and most of the other ones as well — are descended from Proto-Sinaitic, the first script to utilise the acrophonic principle.
* It seemed to me from that same documentary that pretty much all writing systems appeared independently from spoken language: In a sense, written and spoken appeared independently, and then the Rébus principle, and then this "acrophonic principle" made the writing system, and thus "language", sort of subdued to the spoken language. Is that true? It would intuitively seem to me that a written language is easier to organize into clean rules and principles, contrasted to a spoken language. Did "putting things in writing" help formalize such languages, or did it have no impact?
* Any good reference on these questions?
Thanks!
I must admit to being confused as to what you’re asking here. What exactly do you mean by ‘appearing independently’, and writing systems being ‘subdued to the spoken language’?
> Did "putting things in writing" help formalize such languages, or did it have no impact?
Hmm… not sure. I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘formalise’, and even then this isn’t really an area I’ve looked into. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the presence of a writing system assists in the preservation of archaic forms (not that this affects the rate of language change, mind you).
> Any good reference on these questions?
For writing systems in general, a good place to start is Omniglot (https://www.omniglot.com/), but I can’t think of anything more relevant to your specific questions.
>I must admit to being confused as to what you’re asking here. What exactly do you mean by ‘appearing independently’, and writing systems being ‘subdued to the spoken language’?
I meant that the writing system appeared at first, not as a way to "write down" spoken language, but as a language of its own (hence independent) with no relation to the already present spoken language. By "subdued", I meant that (again, from what I understood), the Rébus principle is the first "interaction" between the spoken and written language, and the "acrophonic principle" goes a step further in a sense, so that the written language is not anymore an independent system, but a symbolic representation of the spoken language (sounds -> symbols).
This is quite counter-intuitive to me, hence my asking about it.
This is incorrect, though an easy mistake to make. Though the symbols for words had no relation to pronunciation in the very first logographic scripts, written language was always connected to spoken language. At the very least, written language always utilised the same grammar as the spoken language: the written form of a spoken sentence was formed by taking each spoken word (or morpheme, if you prefer) and writing down the corresponding symbol(s) in turn.
Also, you seem to think that the rebus principle was a rather late invention. In fact, all known logographic writing systems utilise this principle. (You could even make the case that any writing system which does not use the rebus principle is not a ‘true’ writing system, in the sense that it cannot represent all words.) Even the earliest proto-cuneiform Sumerian texts utilised rebuses to some extent (https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/...):
> Phonetic writings generated via the rebus principle played a remarkably minor role in proto-cuneiform. More certain examples of phonetic writings include: the writing of the name of the moon god, Nanna, which is written URI₃+NA, where NA is the phonetic complement with the value na indicating that the graph URI₃ is to be pronounced nanna; PIRIG+NUNUZ, where the complement NUNUZ, has the value za, indicating that the composite graph has the phonetic value az(a); the aforementioned sign designating a reed, GI₄, pronounced gi, is used to express the homophonous verb gi “to return”; and the syllabic, that is phonetic, spellings of the city names Ša₃-bu and Gir₂-su (Englund 2009, pp. 9–10; Krebernik 2007, p. 43).
I'm confused about your quote though: is "remarkably minor" meant to mean "less important than expected"? Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play? If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"?
Yes.
> Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play?
At the time that quote was talking about? No, since at that time, proto-cuneiform (as they call it) would have been the only writing system in existence. Go forward a bit, though, and several forms of “phonetic writing” begin to appear frequently: rebuses (as in the quote), syllabic characters (e.g. [baʼugeš] was written BA-UG₇-GE, Edzard 2003), and characters for individual consonants (unattested in Sumerian, but Egyptian used them extensively).
> If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"?
Exactly. (Even my earlier quote has examples of that.)
Also on the Chinese family are Khitan large and small script, and the Jurchen large and small script, where some of the characters seem to be phonograms grouped in syllabic blocks as in Korean Hangul!
> Also on the Chinese family are Khitan large and small script, and the Jurchen large and small script, where some of the characters seem to be phonograms grouped in syllabic blocks as in Korean Hangul!
Also the deeply weird Tangut (the only rGyalrongic language with an indigenous writing system). I didn’t know that about Jurchen, though; I’ll have to look into it.
I haven't looked into it, but the convention may descend from the German, which language dominates studies of those regions—aside from English and Arabic, now, but for much of the 19th and 20th centuries it eclipsed all other Western languages as the language of Near East studies, generally. (it also comes up more than one might expect in social science concerning South America, in that time period)