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Comment by dachris | Hacker News Reader

Exactly - there's probably a fluent transition between symbols and painting and writing and then alphabetic writing.

Territorial animals that we are, I'd add "here starts the territory of the Saber-Toothed Tiger Clan" signs to path markings as likely candidates for earliest symbolic communication.

Nice to see that the earliest examples of writing are still somewhat recognizable (as opposed to modern alphabets) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing - a hand, a foot, a goat or sheep.

Fun thing is, with modern technology we have regressed (advanced?) to a massive use of pictograms - a modern smartphone wielding human, in addition to the alphabet, knows at least a few hundreds or even thousands of pictograms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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> there's probably a fluent transition between symbols and painting and writing and then alphabetic writing

I'm with you until we get to alphabetic writing, which has (to our knowledge) only been invented once. To get from other writing systems to an alphabet requires a few conceptual leaps which are much more challenging and, I would suggest, not fluent.

If it were a smooth path, we ought to have seen alphabetic scripts arise independently multiple times (as we have other forms of writing).

Alphabets may only have been invented once, but writing systems that have a (roughly, it's never perfect) 1:1 correspondence with the sounds of the language have been invented several times independently, e.g. in syllabaries (Japanese Kana are derived from Kanji) and abugidas. I would suggest that that conceptual leap is a much bigger one than the one of treating consonants and vowels as independent.

Syllabaries have been invented multiple times independently and an alphabet only once, which to me would suggest the alphabetic step is the harder one to make.

Why would you suggest the opposite? I'm a complete layperson in this area, so I understand my view might be quite limited.

The alternative possibility is that alphabets lend themselves much more naturally to adaptation for other languages, and so, once invented, they spread extremely fast - faster than it would take for another one to appear naturally.

Yes, that's a nice point - this adds censoring to our "data" on other writing systems. My intuition is that even if you accounted for exposure to an existing alphabet, the time-to-develop alphabet would still be much longer than for syllabaries or other writing systems, but that's a guess.

Not sure, but I think Hangul counts as a second invention of alphabetic writing.

If you count syllabic writing systems (which are not technically alphabetic, but are more so than Chinese, or Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics), there are more: Japanese hiragana and katakana, Cherokee syllabics, Pahawh Hmong, Vai (West Africa), and Linear B (and presumably Linear A).

There's also Thaana, the script used for Maldivian, which uses some Arabic script symbols, as well as Indic digits. So while it's semi-alphabetic (partly abugida), and it's derived from existing writing systems, it uses the borrowed symbols in unique ways.

There are other syllabic writing systems as well, like Inuktitut and Cree, but those were created by missionaries familiar with other writing systems.

> Not sure, but I think Hangul counts as a second invention of alphabetic writing.

It is my understanding that Hangul is believed to have been influenced by other alphabetic writing (e.g. Phagspa) which themselves descended from the original alphabet. Though it was a distinct creation, the core alphabetic idea was not independently discovered.

> If you count syllabic writing systems (which are not technically alphabetic, but are more so than Chinese, or Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics), there are more: Japanese hiragana and katakana, Cherokee syllabics, Pahawh Hmong, Vai (West Africa), and Linear B (and presumably Linear A).

Syllabic writing systems are significantly less powerful than the alphabet (hence why they have generally been superceded by alphabetic ones).

They have been invented multiple times, so you can argue the smooth slope goes up to syllabic writing, sure. But only once has that led to an alphabet.

> There's also Thaana

I hadn't heard of this, but Wikipedia seems to suggest it's descended from Phoenician like everything else (although it has made the step from abjad -> alphabet).

I'm so old that we didn't even have Emojis, not even letters yet, and we had to communicate with punctuation alone! ;)

You had punctuation? We had to to with empty spaces and silence! I once read an entire poem just using silence!

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