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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

What is interesting is that Chinese is not I this superfamily.

For me, ancient Chinese civilization is so interesting in large part because of how isolated it is. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia and even India were in regular communication with each other. Empires such as the Persians and Alexander the Great fought across all these civilizations. The Romans had direct trade with India via the Indian Ocean.

However, Chinese civilization is located far away from those ones. I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer.

At the same time, even though it was so distant, China still had a very advanced civilization (and in many ways was more advanced than those of the Middle East and Europe for much of history)

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But ancient China wasn't isolated at all. Contact with Persia was extensive. Contact with India was significant. Han China interacted with Greeks left behind by Alexander's conquests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayuan . The Japanese days of the week today are clearly a cultural transmission from the West, mediated through China.

> I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer.

I'm not aware of a theory that says Chinese writing was influenced by Sumer. It's generally felt to be its own thing. (Though note that Sumerian is about 2,000 years earlier than our oldest Chinese records, so as a theoretical matter there's no real way to rule it out. There just isn't any evidence of influence.)

> For me, ancient Chinese civilization is so interesting in large part because of how isolated it is.

For the Europeans this might be true, but not for the Indians. There was lot of exchange between Indus and Chinese civilisations. How do you think Buddhism reached China?

> How do you think Buddhism reached China?

Bodhidharma, iirc.

History and society in western countries is absurdly Euro-centric, it sounds like an oxymoron but it should not be. You must be aware enough to realize what is an absolute truth and what it is just relative from your POV. The other day I had a discussion online mocking the concept that "Aboriginal Australians are so unique because they split from the Europeans first" as if they cannot say exactly the same.

At least in the English language, many, many subjects are less Euro-centric and more Anglo-centric: everything is seen from the vantage of the south-eastern part of a tiny island in the North Atlantic. What's so dark about the Dark Ages? Outside of the north-western boundaries of the Roman empire, not much.

> everything is seen from the vantage of the south-eastern part of a tiny island in the North Atlantic.

Iceland? :)

Thanet?

Buddhism reaching China was in the 1st century CE.

The Persians ruling over Egypt, the Punjab, and Mesopotamia was 509 years before that.

And a 1000 years before that (1500 BC) the Mittani who had very similars gods and royal names that are very similar to Sanskrit had an Empire in the Middle East.

Also, the Maury Empire had close links with the Seleucid Empire (the war elephants used in many of the Seleucid campaigns came from India)

The Indo-Chinese links as can be seen from history are not nearly as old or as well attested.

If we're comparing European contact to Indo-Chinese contact, your sense of when Europe was integrated with the Middle East/Mediterranean culture seems a bit off. The Persia, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea had a lot of contact prior to the 1st Century but "Europe" as a whole did not. For example, England was not Christianized until the 7th Century, Kievan Rus was the 9th Century, Scandinavia was started in the 10th Century, and the Baltic Crusades lasted until the 16th Century. Cultural exchange in "Europe" absolutely is newer than contact between India and China.

Bronze age Britain was involved in the Bronze age trade networks.

The above comment is explicitly talking about spread of religion, not trade networks.

Are you claiming that there was zero cultural transfer along with the material trade happening in the Bronze age?

No, I'm saying one comment is saying contact can be seen by spreading of religion, and therefore Chinese and Indian contact were later than European spread. So, looking at the criteria of the above comments, taking them post at their own standards, which is spread of religion, Europe as an entity did not have "contact" in its entirety until a thousand years after China and India.

Everyone everywhere is involved in the global trade network. It's no less true of the ancient past than it is today.

The only reason Chinese is not in this superfamily is that the authors didn't bother to feed their algorithm with any Sino-Tibetan data. If they had done so, it would've been placed somewhere in the "family tree".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations might be relevant to your interests.

That's a bit too late. We're talking long before the Romans existed...

>I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer.

Hardly. There's no discernable relationship in that respect between China and the Near East. As far as anybody's aware, China's writing is indigeneous.

If you want a real isolated and independent civilisation core, look at central America.

There was travel and commerce between far out regions in that period (1,500-3,500 BCE). The connection between the three old-world starts of writing (Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese) is, AFAIK, not 100% clarified yet. It's widely accepted that American writing was a separate original invention, it makes sense. I believe these days the accepted understanding is that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is an independent development that may, or may not, have been inspired by Sumerian writing. Not hard to believe: "you know son, these peoples far far away know magic, they're able to make dents in a table containing a story, and then pass on the tablet to someone else and they can retell the story!" Chinese writing may, or may not, have also come up the same way.

It's generally accepted that writing was independently invented at least 4 times - in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and southern Mexico.

Fun fact: most writing systems in use today are descended from Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

Yes, and even more fun in that direction, the shape of the letter O descends directly from the hieroglyph of the eye.

I have a theory that if the East and West are ever going to reconcile their differences, we must find a way to retrace how these two great civilizations separated in the first place. What caused our societies to drift apart? Was it primarily circumstantial factors, like geography and competition for limited resources? Did religion play a role, like the recent East-West schism, where early societies self-segregated according to monotheist and polytheist beliefs? Was it driven by language, where the East and West favored certain modes of expression, eventually manifesting as logographs or alphabets? Did it originate in primordial social contracts, where early famers and shepherds drove nomadic hunter gatherers further to the North and East? Probably the original motive lies buried in the sands of time, but I think these are fascinating questions and would be curious to know what answers future historians might come up with.

Take a look at a globe. Where does east and west start and stop?

When you find yourself in a binary quandary, you are nearly always going to be arguing yourself into complete twaddle. Think: East:West, Black:White, North:South, Man:Woman, "Normal": ... . That way lies madness.

It is trivial to slide into exclusiveness. I try to be inclusive. Back in the day I was the fat child left on the sidelines when picking footie teams. Then I went to a different school that also offered rugby as well as football. That's an odd form of inclusivity but I found my place for a while: I had quite a lot of extra inertia and kinetic energy and discovered how to apply it quite efficiently.

Back to your comment, which I don't think needs down votes but questioning. Where do you perceive East and West colliding? Turkey?

> That way lies madness.

Perhaps. I think a clearer understanding could also give us a better appreciation of our common values and unique differences. There is something we all share in common: a desire for peace, order, stability. And there is something qualitatively different between how Eastern and Western societies are structured to achieve those goals. By studying our historical differences, we can build a better understanding of how our societies are uniquely equipped to handle future challenges.

> I had quite a lot of extra inertia and kinetic energy.

That is an interesting story, thank you for sharing! I agree with you that physical differences are definitely worth celebrating. Fat people have an advantage in many arenas (can survive much longer in famine and are good at physical sports like rugby), just like people who live in high altitudes or chase food to survive. More importantly, humans also have ideological differences and it would seem those differences, real or perceived, are the source of our current tensions.

> Where do you perceive East and West colliding?

Historically, friction has arisen in two places: the Middle East, and the Pacific. The first seems more religiously motivated, which could be a reflection of different cultural values but I think those waters are too muddy to tell. The recent cross-Pacific tension seems like a more direct clash between individualism and collectivism. Studying the environmental factors that gave rise to our differences could help us navigate where each society is better adapted, or how they can complement each other to achieve our common goals.

I also find the Chinese writing system fascinating in that it's the only one that didn't evolve from representing concepts to representing sounds. Maybe there is a connection there?

> I also find the Chinese writing system fascinating in that it's the only one that didn't evolve from representing concepts to representing sounds.

It did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCshu

China has had enough cultural continuity to maintain its own writing system over time.

The same thing happened in Japanese but both countries refrained from taking the next logical step and throw away the ideograms. Much of it has to do with the educated elite wanting to restrict access to knowledge, but it's still curious that the same thing didn't happen in other cultures.

Seriously, it's about cultural continuity. Its not about wanting to restrict access to knowledge; in general the educated elite wishes the illiterate masses would be more educated, not less.

But for example, there is a period in Egyptian history when royal inscriptions start being written exclusively in vernacular Egyptian rather than the (incredibly old) classical form. And that period just happens to be when the Egyptian throne is taken over by Libyans.

I’m not an expert on the matter but, from what I know about Korea and Japan, literacy was a priviledge granted to a small minority. Having a complex script that takes years to learn was a tremendous advantage to them. Maybe it was different in China, and things have certainly changed in modern times, but low literacy has often been beneficial to those in power.

Cultural continuity is questionable, even old texts in European languages often need to be adapted for contemporary readers.

All that said, Chinese ideograms are incredibly cool so maybe that is a good reason to keep them.

> but, from what I know about Korea and Japan, literacy was a priviledge granted to a small minority.

I have heard that a contemporary objection to Hangul was that it would allow anyone to learn to read. I don't know all that much about it either -- in particular, I don't know how much force that objection ended up having compared to other objections -- but it certainly supports your view.

There are two conflicting principles here, which we can observe within the Western European tradition:

- The elites are interested in keeping the masses under control.

- The elites are interested in ensuring that the masses' idea of virtue matches that of the elites.

Education promotes that second goal while arguably undermining the first one. So e.g. we see some Christian traditions that perform religious services in Latin and some that perform them in the local vernacular; we see some traditions that perform services in the vernacular but discourage reading the Bible; and so forth. There is a tension that different traditions resolve in different ways.

But writing systems are mostly about conservatism. To change the writing system, you need an explicit reform effort to succeed. Otherwise it will just keep going the way it is for no other reason than that that's how you write.

> Chinese ideograms

As a side note, Japanese kanji are much closer to being ideograms than Chinese characters are. The first and most important thing you can know about a Chinese character is its pronunciation. The semantics are present to a much greater degree than in most other languages, but they are not dominant. In Japanese, a character doesn't really have a pronunciation by itself, only readings that are specific to particular words.

Cultural continuity isn't just about old texts, but also recent texts in the old style, that people learning to read today want to be able to understand.

> in general the educated elite wishes the illiterate masses would be more educated, not less

Literate masses are more likely to challenge the dominance of the educated elites. In Korea, for example, the yangban pushed back against Hangul primarily for this reason.

The word "ideogram" has fallen out of fashion because it's a very poor description of Chinese characters. A Chinese character doesn't describe an idea: it describes a concrete word, with a definite pronunciation. It's just that the relation between the shape of the character and its sound is much more obscure than most scripts.

An example of an actual ideogram is the exit sign (you know, a green man running out of a door) - it conveys the idea without having a canonical associated word.

> it conveys the idea without having a canonical associated word.

You could make a pretty good case that the associated word is "EXIT".

The case is not that strong: for example, nobody writes "It's hard to find out how to <exit icon> vim." The icon represents the concept of "a door used for emergency exit", not the word "exit".

I think we're talking about different things. I found an image of the sign you're talking about by searching for "exit sign", but I wouldn't have called it an exit sign and wouldn't really understand what it's supposed to mean.

To me, an exit sign is mounted on the ceiling and just says "EXIT".

Best not let any linguists hear you say "representing concepts to representing sounds". All languages represent sounds as far as I've ever heard from them, and the idea of "representing concepts" is regarded as a remnant of some very broken ideas. :-)

As far as I (a non-linguist, although I've read a bit) know, there are roughly three ways of writing: alphabets, syllabaries, and whatever Chinese is (logosyllabic?).

Alphabets have one grapheme per (roughly) phoneme and have(AFAIK) developed once: Proto-Siniatic, which led to Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), Phoenician (which developed into Greek, Latin, etc.) and a few others. Every other alphabet is a direct or indirect descendant. They typically have <50 graphemes.

Chinese is kinda-sorta syllabic, but the language has a great many one syllable words which have a grapheme mapped directly to that use. On the other hand there's things like "coral" (IIRC) which is two syllables and is written with two characters each of which are not used anywhere else. It, its descendants, and any other similar languages if there are any, has some many thousands of graphemes.

Syllabaries have one grapheme per syllable and are the most common form of writing, to the extent that it's pretty clear that they're the normal version of human writing. They typically have a few hundred graphemes.

Mayan and cuneiform are a couple of weird cases. They (AFAIK) are mostly syllabic, but with some logographic-ish parts like Chinese. But the number of graphemes are pretty firmly in the syllabary range.

Tl;dr: Writing is weird and the writing I'm doing now is very much so.

I’m not sure I understand your comment. Granted, I’m not a linguist but there is certainly something unique about the Chinese script.

I don’t know a single word of Chinese, but I followed a link in a sibling post and came across this: 女書 - which my meager knowledge of Japanese allowed me to understand that it means “women’s writing”.

What is the proper name for the ability to read text without knowing how to pronounce it?

> What is the proper name for the ability to read text without knowing how to pronounce it?

"literate". A person can be literate in a language without being able to speak it or understand the spoken form, it's the ability to read or write.

This is starting to sound like that debate between Dennett and Chomsky about whether recursion is a universal feature of languages. Linguistics is a strange field.

There are three undisputed independent developments of writing: Sumerian, Mayan, and Chinese. Egyptian may or may not have been influenced by Sumerian; Indus Valley Script may or may not be writing; and Andean quipus (essentially knotted strings) raises interesting questions about what writing even is. All other (known) writing systems developed out of knowledge of these priors.

The development of writing systems seems to be pretty clear, especially because we can use Sequoyah's documented development of Cherokee script as a check. Writing seems to start as logographic: each character starts out as representing a word, often as a stylized representation of that word (for example, draw an eye to represent the word 'eye'). To represent words that don't have easy representation, a rebus system develops: you use homophonic puns (so an eye might also stand for 'I'). This lends itself to a simplification to a syllabic representation, one word for each possible syllable. And usually, it stops there (although note that 'syllable' usually comes out in writing as a consonant-vowel pair, rather than a full syllable).

It's with the Semitic languages that things took an interesting turn. Semitic languages have an interesting feature in that you can get most of the sense of a word even if you drop the vowels. And the writing ended up switching from consonant-vowel pairs to just consonants (what we now call an 'abjad'). Greek opted to adapt this by adding letters for vowels and formed the first 'true alphabet'. Sanskrit opted instead to use reliable markings on consonants to make an 'abugida'.

Chinese never developed their logographic system into a syllabary, although this was probably partially driven by the fact that Chinese itself had most of its words become monosyllabic at the same time. Japanese did continue Chinese script into two full syllabaries.

Korean is the other independent invention of an alphabet: Hangul. Although Hangul is arranged as a succession of blocks representing full syllables, so it can also be viewed as a systemic construction of a syllabary rather than an alphabet.

I mentioned Sequoyah's development of Cherokee script: he knew of writing from the Americans at the time, and even had access to a Bible (although he couldn't read it at all). And his own documentation of his development does expressly indicate that he started trying to build a logography, realized that there were too many symbols that had to be created, and instead simplified it into a syllabary, which was much more conservative in its character count. (And the influence of several character shapes came from that Bible, which is why Cherokee script looks like someone started with Latin script but had no idea had it worked--here is its character set: ᎠᎡᎢᎣᎤᎥᎦᎧᎨᎩᎪᎫᎬᎭᎮᎯᎰᎱᎲᎳᎴᎵᎶᎷᎸᎹᎺᎻᎼᎽᎾᎿᏀᏁᏂᏃᏄᏅᏆᏇᏈᏉᏊᏋᏌᏍᏎᏏᏐᏑᏒᏓᏔᏕᏖᏗᏘᏙᏚᏛᏜᏝᏞᏟᏠᏡᏢᏣᏤᏥᏦᏧᏨᏩᏪᏫᏬᏭᏮᏯᏰᏱᏲᏳᏴᏵᏸᏹᏺᏻᏼᏽ)

There are (at least) a couple other languages where some local genius saw writing and developed a syllabic writing system: Vai (West Africa) and a language of Southeast Asia whose name I can't remember (the invention was fairly recent). Maybe also Yi (spoken in China, but written in an entirely different script).

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