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Comment by 0x1ceb00da | Hacker News Reader

As a language matures, it moves away from concrete things towards abstract things. Eg cave paintings -> pictorial scripts -> modern languages which are very detached from pictorial/phonetic meaning (even modern chinese). These days we have programming languages which do not have any phonetic or pictorial representation. And this trend will keep going on. I think I still stand by my point that this script isn't as refined as a modern language. Just like the great pyramids aren't as refined as burj khalifa.

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No, you are confusing different aspects of writing systems. Pictoral scripts are often very divorced from the pictoral meaning. Moving away for pictoral scripts is mostly a question about ease of writing which is why the hieroglyphs survived for monuments but more efficient scripts were used for every day writing. Hieroglyphs, outside some very early versions, could express everything spoken Egyptian could.

Some proto-writing systems (e.g. Australian message sticks), which could not express all ideas, were just very simple dots and lines. Going from being able to express only certain things to the full spoken language and going from complex symbols to simple ones which are easy to write are two different processes. So while we can suspect that a pictoral system is from an early stage of a writing system we cannot say that it is necessarily primitive in ability to express all ideas. Plus it might be, like hieroglyphs, only used for fancy texts for monuments and similar.

> Just like the great pyramids aren't as refined as burj khalifa.

I'd wager the Great Pyramids will still be around in 1000 years and the Burj Khalifa will not, if anyone wants to take bets.

I dont think this chnages anything. The writing was less convenient than modern alphabets but still capable of expressing all things necessary.

The closest analogy might be: modern alebraic notation is compact and clean but this doesnt mean algebra didnt exist much, much earlier.

To make this claim, wouldn't you need to understand the meaning of the script? It's probably not about monads, but you don't know for sure.

The mental image of an ancient Mesoamerican civilization writing about monads thousands of years before the rest of us, only for it to go unappreciated because we can't comprehend their script, is a great one.

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