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Comment by txru | Hacker News Reader

It's not impossible that there's something here, but I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists.

I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.

I would prefer to see pictures of these symbols, and their in-situ neighbors, and a corresponding symbol across a wide distance that's within at most 2-300 years.

We want to feel that language has commonalities, that people traveled long distances and times and kept some common bond. It might even make intuitive sense, if the people share cultural similarities. But it often results in linguists making motivated decisions without enough evidence, like happened with the "Altaic"[1] language family.

[0] https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/m... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Weakness_of_l...

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"I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists." Speaking as a linguist... you're right, it doesn't convince me. Nearly all languages have more sounds (phonemes) than the symbols shown in most of those infographics--more consonants, even (many early writing systems only represented consonants). All languages have more distinct syllables than any of those symbol systems (many early writing systems were syllabic). And obviously all languages have far more words (or morphemes) than any of those systems.

What would be more convincing? A sequence of a few dozen symbols in some particular location, and likely to have been written at the same time (rather than centuries or millennia apart), by the same person (so if there were handprints, the handprints would be the same person's hand(s)), where the number of recognizable symbols is twenty or more. I don't say that would be all that would be needed to convince linguists, but it would be a start.

Can we say "language representation that is not a transcription of a spoken one"? A sequence of symbols could have meaning without mapping to sound, and taken at face value the separation on the map would seem to imply that any spoken language could have evolved dramatically out of sync with any physical representation. I can't think of any reason to think that - if you assume a phonetic interpretation - a symbol shared between North America and southern Africa would be pronounced at all similarly in both locations when the marks were made. The distances alone argue against a phonetic interpretation to me.

Do hobo signs count as a language? That seems intuitively much closer to what this might be. How much structure do you need?

"Can we say 'language representation that is not a transcription of a spoken one'?" Of course: sign languages. But sign languages have even more "phonemes" than spoken languages do, so this doesn't help the hypothesis.

And yes, "A sequence of symbols could have meaning without mapping to sound": that's what hieroglyphic writing systems were, more or less. Again, more distinct symbols, not fewer.

"Do hobo signs count as a language?" Depends on how you define "language". As most linguists would define language, though, the answer is no. All normal spoken or signed languages have oodles of structure (grammar). Pidgin languages probably do not, but that's just the first generation or so, after which they gain structure and are technically creoles. (Some creoles have the word "pidgin" in their names, like Tok Pisin of New Guinea, and Hawaiian Pidgin, but they're complex enough to justify the term "creole.")

Odd that you say “nearly all languages have”, which would include that other languages you yourself can think of, do not have “more sounds[…]symbols…”

The problem I have with “experts” when it comes to this kind of dogma challenging thing is that they are usually extremely biased and limited by that dogma.

Let me put it this way, if you saw those symbols on Mars, would you not consider them a form of communication or language. Ironically, to me at least, the limited ands relatively consistent nature of the symbols itself actually qualifies it as language, not disqualifies it.

Two languages I can think of that have approximately the number of phonemes that some of those sign lists have are Hawai'ian (at least 13 phonemes, depending on how you analyze vowel length and diphthongs) and Central Rotokas (11 phonemes). But that low a number is extremely rare among languages.

"...if you saw those symbols on Mars, would you not consider them a form of communication or language" Communication, yes. Language? Knowing nothing about Martians, I'd have to withhold judgement. On Earth, language is much more than just communication.

The problem I have with people who put "experts" in quotes is that they are usually extremely biased and are limited by dogma, arrogance, and ignorance.

I’d also need to see statistics - without any selection bias introduced by what the researcher finds interesting.

There may be 30 or so “common” patterns that appear globally - that would be very interesting if the total pool of symbols was say 50 but much less so if there are thousands of different symbols.

You don't understand. The other 99,970 symbols are just random doodles. It's the 30 common ones that aren't.

There are instances in South America, North Africa, and Australia, where some prehistoric person took the foot of an animal such as a large bird or lizard, with feet that resemble human hands, and stenciled round it onto a wall. Is the repetition of this trope over wide distances just a freaky coincidence? Yes.

Well, there's probably something mimetic going on, like the idea of stenciling round your hand at all. "Neat! I'm gonna do that too! I'm gonna get my little brother to do it! And my chicken! And this leftover lizard foot!" Memes spread easily. Kilroy was here, nobody writes that one on walls any more, and hands were stenciled over thousands of years, but we have an evolving culture now.

> Kilroy was here, nobody writes that one on walls any more, and hands were stenciled over thousands of years, but we have an evolving culture now.

Not in the relevant sense. Nobody writes Kilroy was here anymore, but we continue to do hand outlines. That's not a practice that has changed over the last 50,000 years.

I think these cave drawings are a global written language, not a universal spoken language.

- Smushed oval is water, because it looks like a water drop from the side.

- Hand is a person or family or tribe.

- Hand surrounded by circle is what is around us, water around us, swim.

- Jagged line is danger. Having to dart back-and-forth to get away from a predator or rough sharp rocks.

- Small filled circles are rocks.

- Large circle is large body of water.

- Group of open circles is area that gets rain or is wet.

- Vertical lines are a penetrable forest.

- Crosshatch is an impenetrable area.

- Three lines up to point are a place to gather/sleep/have a fire.

- Four lines coming up is fire/dry brush to make fire.

- Horizontal line is a plain/flat area.

- U-shape is a significant valley or dip.

- Tree-branch looking thing means a place to get wood for fire.

- Snake symbol is snake/going around obstacles/not a direct path.

- Lines covered by line at top is a hut/shelter, because it's made with trees.

- The spiral is home/where to go/journey.

- The X is a rest spot or a place where things are put. People had to be on top of each other for warmth, and spears/tools may go in a pile.

- The rectangle with bent top is ocean, deep water, or pit with water.

This is retrofitting. It's not what these references mean.

These are entoptics. We've tested their neural sources for 40 years.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395

Google entoptics and look at the graphic array.

Tested what, exactly?

I suggest the symbols are morospiles. That's a term from Greek meaning "stupid blemish". This too can be tested: get a bunch of stupid people together to paint on a wall, see what marks they make, measure the degree of similarity to cave art, write a paper about it titled "Maybe They Were Stupid?". Repeat this a hundred times and you've got a field of study to cite authoritatively.

Matching occipital and retinal/purkinje patterns and mapped them to these at scale.

The human mind is so oriented towards pattern matching that we perceive patterns in random noise.

Your statement is a narrative illusion. Science is about pattern seeking and then correlating data about those patterns. They have zilch to do with one another.

> These are entopics

Without a time machine, that opinion is no more valid than people keeping a consistent mapping and storytelling language by drawing in the dirt. There is evidence on both sides.

For example, the picture of the entrance stone on this page uses spirals:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art

The spirals from Newgrange. Those are indeed claimed to "resemble phosphenes" in Does the Nervous System Have an Intrinsic Archaic Language? which this person posted in another comment. They are neolithic, which is a very long way from paleolithic, not just in time but in development of ideas. The paper has another montage of images with the Gundestrup cauldron in it! That was made in the small hundreds AD. It's just a grab-bag of anything that looks shamanic to support the thesis "maybe they were tripping", about everybody everywhere throughout time, and yes, fair point, maybe they were tripping, it's worth bearing in mind. Also, maybe they were stupid. So what? Is this a solution to any problem?

Not so. As these are isolated occurring form constants popping up outside of any possible diffusion, their universality prior to symbolic or pictographic coherences indicate an interim state between expression and symbol.

The rush to claim these are a language is unsupported and is quite suspicious of a retrofitting that's prone to pseudoscience.

I would read Paleoperformance and Paleopoetics for discussions about pre-literate, pre-symbolic cultures from the archeological evidence.

Imposing intent or causality onto these is a bit bizarre.

“ I think these cave drawings are a global written language”

Any particular evidence to back up that claim?

Your explanations sound arbitrary and about as likely as anything else.

The people who made the symbol once may have had a sense of meaning they wanted to communicate.

You sir is pissing all over it.

I'm interested to know if the top left character in both Europe and North America actually looks like that. It's the radical for roof in Chinese. Chinese characters are known to have persisted unchanged for thousands of years.

> Chinese characters are known to have persisted unchanged for thousands of years.

Are you kidding? Two thousand years ago they would have looked like seal script.

That radical is known today as the 宝盖 ("cover of 宝"), so here's the character 宝 itself. The roof is prominently featured: https://img.zdic.net/zy/jinwen/32_F420.svg

( You can see other instances from the same period at http://zdic.net/zd/zx/jw/%E5%AE%9D )

Would you be able to recognize the radical? Would you be able to recognize the character?

You really need to add a heavy usage of the conditional in your descriptions.

There is no world in which any of those symbols can ever be known, except time travel - and even then there will be a communication problem.

> I think these cave drawings are a global written language

And yet they aren't.

I loved the infographic, although it's clearly overly simplistic it does suggest a sense of where there is no claimed extent of a symbol-type, which might in some cases support broad patterns of domains of exchange. It generates interest.

The real linguistic question is not whether the art had representational value and thus was a form of communication: this is known and clear, simply through the frequent nature of pictographic forms of recognizable elements of the environment.

Rather, it is more to what extent there was a systematization of the pictographs through phonetic or phonosyllabic use, and to what extent any such symbol repetition indicates a depth of shared culture across spatiotemporal divides. At what point does it count as 'writing'?

In general, there was clearly shared culture (technology meant that options were somewhat limited, and we have traced major changes such as the ingress of dingoes from Asia to Australia). What we are learning recently is the hitherto dismissed extent to which disparate branches of hominids survived and persisted in pockets across time, how we mixed with them and adopted their features. IMHO grand colonial theories of migration (often patriarchic/single-event/unidirectional) are falling away as novel evidence such as mtDNA shows far longer admixture and pluralistic bidirectional flows of culture, genes and technology.

Personally, having seen some ancient cave paintings near the northern Burmese and Vietnamese borders as well as in Australia and most recently in a book on Baja California, the similarities are striking, but this does not mean people teleported across the globe. It seems early peoples globally worked a broadly similar techno-social palette to leave marks across time, persisting their identity and expression in ways which probably marked social presence, status, ritual and interpretation. Stories became written and illustrated, but only in summary. Usually we cannot recover the actual content because all that is left are cues, other times modern anthropology preserved traditional interpretation. We often see presumed or literal figures, animals (spirits? gods? prey? food?), weapons, abstract markings, celestial bodies. Things that would be notable in such a society. 20th century anthropology has shelves of studies on this stuff. Here in Sydney, a city of 4+ million people, there are many aboriginal sites with engravings of people, emu, fish, dolphins, turtles, whales, kangaroos, reptiles, etc. Further north, even far inland, there exists rock art of early European ships sighted on the coast, suggesting use for record, story-telling, teaching.

Perhaps quite a bit more not impossible?

We only know of the symbol use (if they were symbols) that happened on media that lasted tens of millennia. If they even painted symbols on deeply underground cave walls, they likely had them on many less durable surfaces as well. There could have been a huge oral tradition augmented by drawn memorization aids on durable but not that durable media. That augmented oral tradition would then occasionally, every few dozen generations or so, due to some exceptional circumstances, spill over to the near-eternal medium of a cave wall.

A lot of these are so simple its not unbelievable to think that people simply came up with the same things as everyone else inna similar time without ever meeting. Im not seeing swastikas or equilateral triangles, just shapes that look to be simple representations of natural things perhaps.

> I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.

That infographic has bigger problems.

>> The similarities suggest the marks are more than just random scribbles

Except here are some of "the marks":

    x # |||| * 一 (hand)

OK, a hand is a complex shape. It does suggest there's more going on than random scribbles. It suggests...

...

...that the people who drew a hand had hands.

Every single one of the other marks -- and the hand mark, too -- are things you could expect to find if you gave a small child some paper and crayons.

Worth noting that the hand “mark” is actually just a handprint—put hand on wall, spit pigment, done. To continue your comparison, it is essentially finger painting.

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