Some claim that standard Arabic has been intentionally made more complicated because writers were paid well by rulers back in old days, and there were more incentives to make grammar hard for the ordinary folks, so that you need "craftsmen" to write according to an Arabic linguist.Until the 80s in many Arab countries you needed clerks to produce documents from governments.
(Comedy sketch on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtloJgMgFho)
Arabic linguist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0
'Category V – It usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach S-3/R-3 proficiency in these languages. This small group of “super-hard languages” includes Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic.'
(Arabic linguist)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0&t=3645s
I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
Agriculture started around 12k years ago. Prior to that, all of humanity lived in hunter-gatherer tribal bands. Why would you need writing, when you could just talk to the person who knew the thing you wanted to learn? Not to mention that prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale.
Even as recently as the 1800s, nearly 90% of the world was illiterate [1]. We live in a hyper-literate society, so it's almost unimaginable, but it's really how the world worked!
I think you have to assume that there's kind of an ambiguous continuum between art and writing. Obviously hunter-gatherer bands likely had reasons to communicate with band members, whether by sounds or visual signals. And obviously they made art, and humans being humans, presumably a lot of the art hat some kind of meaning. I think there are uses for using symbols to communicate well before you need ledgers or anything similar. But I don't know exactly where art turns into writing: Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy. And in some places that symbol literacy gets so dense you have Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. And maybe in others you maybe have something similar but less preserved.
Practically all painting or drawing includes some sort of symbolism. Sometimes it’s so obvious that we don’t recognise it as symbolism (picture of cow = cow), but other things aren’t (spiral = ?).
> prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale.
Imagine having to engrave anything you write in clay, stone, wood, etc. One reason runic alphabets are shaped that way is because it's easier to carve in straight lines (iirc).
How many comments would there be on a HN page if that was required?
I agree that there must have been earlier writing, likely written on wood. Early systems could have evolved from markings on trees, like we still use on the Appalachian Trail, and other trails. Warnings for bears or tigers, symbols for different tribes on different paths. If you've hiked much then you're aware that even experienced woodsmen can get lost as the season changes and a valley changes, or after a hard storm washes away evidence of a trail. Children, in particular, would have been at risk, but would have almost certainly needed to do work over distances, in particular fetching water, which is something that even today children as young as 5 are asked to do. Notches on trees would have been a likely starting point for a system of symbols to communicate.
When I was much younger I used to work as a hike leader for a summer camp in Virginia. We would take a small group of teenagers out for 7 day hikes, during which we could cover something between 70 to 90 miles (112 to 145 kilometers). At one time I knew that stretch of trail so well I thought I could walk it blindfolded. And yet, I only knew it in the summer. One year I went in the fall and I was astonished how different it was. I was helped by the markings on the trees. (This was before cell phones and GPS.)
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)_/¯
Many cultures never invent writing. From well-known 1969 research on 186 pre-industrial societies: [0]
* 39.2%: No writing
* 37.1%: Pictures only
* 23.7%: Writing
Also of interest (but also a bit dated): "... the making and reading of two dimensional maps is almost universal among mankind whereas the reading and writing of linear scripts is a special accomplishment associated with a high level of social and technical sophistication." [1]
> I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
It's an interesting question, but do I think that? That's the thing about science - we need evidence. Otherwise, what we think turns out to be especially unreliable.
[0] George P. Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Ethnology (1969)
[1] Edmund Leach. Culture and Communication. Cambridge U. Press (1976)
This whole mode of thinking you demonstrate shows exactly what is so inane about trying to use empirical methods (best employed in deciding what thickness of paper clip to use in the Records department of an aquarium) to try to understand human beings.
Bandying about complete drivel that doesn't cohere with the perception that any living person with a pulse has of the world, and hiding behind percentages and mumbles about them coming from a well known study.
There are about one hundred thousand questions I can think of that anyone brandishing such figures would have to answer before even being able to interpret what it is they just said, let alone make any decisions about whether or not it is relevant in adjudicating any other question, I'll leave you with one, in two forms, feel free to copy and paste a dictionary style response that you haven't even read:
What is a culture?
What is a culture?
Show me a single "evidence-based" claim about human beings this approach has brought to the surface and I'll throw Dostoevsky and Cervantes at your head.
There's an old quote among lawyers: If you have the facts on your side, hammer on the facts. If you have the law, hammer on the law. If you have neither, hammer on the table.
If I understand you correctly: You have no claim of your own or argument for it, so you are using what you do know, insults.
Greek society switched alphabets between 750 and 950 BC, and adopted a number system. There were writing collapses. There is still a lot of history to uncover from the end of the Bronze Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
This is more an artifact of how we typically define writing than anything meaningful about the act of communication itself. Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of years older than what the article discusses. Writing as typically defined is a complete system for encoding verbal language using specific, formalized symbols. That's much more sophisticated and largely unnecessary for "most" human activities prior to the invention of large, hierarchical societies.
Proto-writing is still quite far along on the spectrum I'm talking about of contextually defined symbols. Lascaux and chauvet have plenty of examples generally agreed to be partially symbolic, just off the top of my head.
We find lots of non-alphabetic writing from earlier periods that does survive, though. Surely if they had alphabetic writing, we'd find that when we find writing?
Virtually all of the writing we find from earlier periods has been carved in stone. Without finding the rare monument or well-preserved grave stone, a traveler that arrived here 10,000 years in the future would find just as little evidence that we knew how to write.
I've heard this argument before, and generally don't buy it. It really comes down to how hard they're looking.
We have found many dinosaur bones that are hundreds of millions of years old. We have an Australopithecus skeleton (Lucy) from 3.2 million years ago. We have many examples of writing that would be similarly durable. Even if most things wither or decay or erode or get scavenged or build over, so 99% of it is gone in 10,000 years, there's still plenty that'd get buried and preserved. You give the example of monuments. They're not all that rare though. Every town has a few, usually right at the center, right where excavation would be most likely. I'm thinking of the world war memorials that every little English town seems to have, with the names of all their fallen soldiers. They're not ALL just going to turn to dust, right? There are temples in Egypt where you can still see not just what they carved in the stone thousands of years ago, but even the paint that they put on it.
So if we're all gone in 10,000 years and that traveller just buzzes by and doesn't scratch the surface or even look very hard, sure. But if they're excavating at the level that humans are today, it will be hard to miss that we had writing.
Humans are able to pass on an incredible amount of knowledge without the use of writing. There are oral, epic traditions 100s of years old that we only know about because they were eventually written down. People were able to do things like recite the Iliad from memory. I don't know about other ancient languages but the oldest Greek texts of significant length are all metrical poetry. We know and have scientific works that were written in meter. There are probably all sorts of things that were passed don't orally that we can't even imagine.
Counter example: until relatively recently you had large segments of the population who didn't know how to read and write, but were very skilled at whatever their trade was.
Even within the last millennium powerful and accomplished civilizations like the Inca survived and excelled without writing. I think a better lesson to take from this is that though humans are inherently communicative and inventive, these characteristics don’t depend upon written communication, and that writing is not an obvious invention even if we can see elements of it in similar inventions like quipu.
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
What's so hard to believe? Everything you can write you can say, and you can show quite a lot that's difficult to describe in writing.
That's easy to say if you've never written C++ or Perl.
One of the unique golden rules of FORTH is that every word definition must have a well defined pronunciation in the documentation, so you can discuss FORTH code over the telephone without confusion.
That's because FORTH words have no syntax except space as a delimiter, so can mix arbitrary punctuation with letters in any way, so you have many weird words like @ (fetch) ! (store) +! (plus store) ' (tick) ['] (bracket tick) >R (to r) R> (r from) etc.
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing.
Exactly. It seems that alphabet development is closely related to the regions more focused on international trading (the region we know as Phoenicia) rather than war and conquest of the neighbours. Maybe a system that represent sounds was useful to write words from sounds in multiple languages that were never heard before, unlike pictograms, hieroglyphs or cuneiform, that had to be adapted to each language.
I take it you've never interacted with people who build houses, make rope or administer medicine then? They don't read, even today. They learn their trade by watching others. We are quite exceptional in that reading is usually the most efficient way to learn stuff, but it's not like that in other areas. If you needed to change a spark plug or plumb in a washing machine would you be reaching for the books or YouTube?
Paper was only one written medium. All of the cultures you've listed constructed stone stelae with writing, like the Rosetta stone. South Asian cultures used palm leaves instead of paper. Maya used fig bark. Europeans and Nahuatl often used animal hides instead of paper. There's a long list.
Ok. Maybe I should have been more generic. Organic thin sheet material... velum, parchment, papyrus. The bulk of writing is done on material that is gone in a few thousand years at most.
Which still leaves stelae as already mentioned. There's also petroglyphs, ceramics, and paints. The point I'm trying to convey is that writing has never been limited solely to paper or even organic materials.
There is a matter of definition. IIRC, if you lookup some cave paintings from ~30,000 years ago, there is/was a debate whether marks near animals were intended to represent quantities.
Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
> Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids.
The first Egyptian pyramid known was built ~2780 BCE, the alphabetic writing in this article was from ~2500 BCE. That’s a gap of ~250 years, not ~2,500.
> How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
The Egyptians at the time of the Pyramids had writing, but it was logographic (symbols directly represent a word/concept), not alphabetic (a small inventory of symbols are combined in different ways to represent words/concepts.)
An alphabetic – and also phonetic – script is a big advance not because of what you communicate with it, but because if you know a fairly small set of symbols and their phonetic interpretation, you can encode a spoken language in it in a reasonably intelligible way to anyone who knows the same script (and you can even encode different spoken languages in the same script intelligibly, if they have a similar-enough phonetic inventory.)
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Coptic made use of hieroglyphs as an alphabet, and co-existed with their use for Egyptian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language
The article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more widely used.
It's clumsy and inconvenient to have writing without paper and pen. There wasn't a whole lot of writing before the printing press.
I've sometimes idly wondered if I was transported back in time to the stone age, could I help the tribe by teaching them to read and write? Sadly, nope.
If I was transported to Roman times, I'd try to invent paper and a printing press. I bet it would catch on fast.
They had paper though not as durable as the modern one. Papyrus had the same function, but it decays over few decades and things written on it should be rewritten. If you have a few centuries of war and low literacy like in the western parts of the Roman empire, there is noone to renew the pagan texts and they get lost. The eastern empire bothered only with the texts compatible with christianity while the arabs kept those compatible with islam.
I sometimes wonder if the development of the printing press relied on technology that hadn't been available previously - like many/most innovations. But what?
Paper? There were ink-retaining sheets long before the printing press. A durable mechanism for the roller? They made wagon axles, I assume, that supported much more weight. Durable letters? Even sans metal, I'd guess that carving wood letters would still be worth the effort.
Why? The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don’t think I could come up with on my own. I could see myself coming up with structures, drawing, counting etc. on my own given enough free time.
Book burning has been a major issue many times by people trying to control history. The library of Alexandria, one of the oldest known book burnings, may have had some of the evidence your expecting. Then there are the cretins like folks trying to unroll the Dead Sea Scrolls. The modern day equivalent are the internet censors deleting our comments and posts on social media.
Despite the fact that I personally prefer syllabaries. I can't discount the fact that alphabets have done an incredible job of being adopted by other languages that didn't previously have any sort of writing system. Alphabets are really flexible like that.
The latin alphabet alone is used in all sorts of languages from English to Tukish, Indonesian and Swahili. Having this many diverse languages follow a single writing system is only really possible with alphabets. You couldn't do this with Chinese characters or Korean hangul, for example.
Although it has some weirdnesses of its own, such as having jamo that change their sound based on context (e.g., ᄋ is silent if it’s an initial consonant but has the sound ng at the end of a syllable). Nearly every consonant has a different sound between initial and final position, although many of these are inaudible to English ears. On the other hand, having been a consciously designed writing system, it does have a rationality that most traditional writing systems lack, such as the fact that all vowels are based on either ㅡ or ㅣ with additional strokes added as appropriate to modify the base vowel (the fact that a double stroke, e.g., ㅑ or ㅛ represents the single stroke vowel with a y- sound prefixed seems just brilliant to me).
Consonants changing their sound based on position is not such an abnormality — that's just basic phonology. This phenomenon (allophony [1]) is found in virtually every language, but it remains a bit obscure to laymen, since it is mostly undetectable to the language's own speaker.
For instance, the phoneme /t/ is always rendered by the English letter /t/, but that phoneme can be rendered in so many different ways.
In an initial position it would be rendered as an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive [tʰ], equivalent to the Korean Jamo ㅌ in initial or intervocalic positions. An English /t/ in other positions is generally not aspirated, but besides that the rendition is highly dependent on the speaker's accent. MRP ("BBC English") speakers render a "final" /t/ (i.e. after a vowel or consonant, but not before another vowel) as as [ʔt] ([t] sound preceded by a glottal stopped) or even just as a pure glottal stop [ʔ]. In intervocalic position RP speakers would keep /t/ as a simple [t] sound, but most Americans would change this sound into a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ]. Cockney speakers famously change an intervocalic /t/ into a glottal stop (so you'd get something that sounds like "woh-ah" for "water") and I didn't even get into how /t/ behaves when it follows other consonants such as the elided /t/ in "listen" or the way some American speakers pronounce "winter".
In all honesty, this is probably just as messy as what happens in Korean, it's just that the Korean allophones are more foreign to us. Besides ᄋ, all the variations are regular allophones. As far as I understand ᄋ was indeed just reused for two different purposes (there is no /ŋ/ phoneme that transforms to an empty sound in initial position).
I'd say that one thing that still makes Hangul hard, is that a lot of consonant clusters sounds sound the same when they come in final position. It makes pronunciation regular, but it's a bit hard to know how to transcribe many words. The vowels ㅐ and ㅔ are also pronounced the same in most (perhaps all?) modern Korean dialects, but that's a small irregularity compared to the redundancies of many other alphabetic writing systems.
In short, Hangul is much more regular than most alphabets. I wouldn't say it is the most regular though — it's hard to beat new writing systems designed by professional linguists for small language that didn't have an alphabet before. Hangul is still an relatively older system that had to go through writing reforms, but still retrains some spelling complexities. And if you compare Korean to Polynesian languages like Hawaiian, with their extremely simple phonology and phonotactics (they have very few vowels and consonants and generally don't allow consonant clusters and final consonants at all) - then
the writing system of these languages is much simpler — and almost all of them use the Latin alphabet with a highly regular orthography.
I think there is a more impressive trait of Hangul, that is highly underappreciated. It's an alphabetic writing system that blends very well with traditional Chinese characters. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic (i.e. they represent a single syllable) and while that property is not maintained in Japanese (due to its vastly different phonology), it has been maintained in Korean and Vietnamese. Hangul lets you write each syllable with a single graphic block (even if that block contains multiple "Jamo" letters). All other alphabet systems that have been developed in languages that used Chinese characters (Such as Pinyin, Zhuyin or the Vietnamese alphabet) do not share this property. This means that when you try to add some alphabet letters into a document written Chinese characters, the result is extremely unpleasant typographically. It is not only harder to typeset nicely, but it's also quite painful to read.
Although Modern Korean doesn't blend Hangul and Hanja (Chinese characters) very often, I think this property made Hangul quite a lot more palatable as a replacement for Chinese characters in Korea compared to Pinyin or Zhuyin. Koreans didn't have to throw your entire typographic and calligraphic tradition in order to adopt Hangul: A block is fixed-size (not proportional), the writing is easier to read both vertically and horizontally and you can keep writing it with brush strokes using traditional Chinese calligraphic methods and practices. It can even be mixed nicely with Chinese characters like Japanese Kana (and it would be more compact than Japanese Kana). Eventually Korean language reformers have chosen to mostly drop Hanja altogether, but when you still do need to mix Hanja in a Korean text, you can do it seamlessly.
Alphabet writing is probably the most important invention perhaps even more so than the invention of wheel. It's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
Syllable based writing are not intuitive for human, Korean found it the hard way by relatively recently by inventing Hangul alphabets despite had been using the Chinese characters for several thousands of years previously with majority of the people remained illiterate.
My understanding is that the average Chinese dictionary has 20,000 characters. The full set is somewhere around 50,000. The average educated adult knows about 8000. The number of characters to read a Chinese newspaper is about 2500 to 3500.
Curious: why do you prefer syllabaries? I think about Chinese writing systems, which additionally don't have clear word boundaries. Now you can argue that this is an independent issue (which is true) but why does this complication seemingly show up in such writing systems?
Anyway, alphabets have been profoundly successful. You bring up Turkish. It's a good example. I'm sure most here know that prior to 1929 or so Turkish used the Arabic writing system. This is also an alphabet but a more complicated one (eg vowels aren't typically written) and didn't necessarily fit the Turkish language.
So they designed a Latin writing system that is entirely phonetic it was was profoundly successful at increasing literacy rates. A completely illiterate person could be taught to read and write Turksih in a matter of months.
I compare this to Taiwan that has high school competitions to see who can find a word the fastest in a dictionary because knowledge is required of the roots and symbols. There are thousands of characters to learn in Chinese languages. As a foreigner, this will often take a decade or more. I've seen accounts of people who have spent a decade learning Chinese that still struggle to read books intended for 12 year olds.
Literacy is so transformative to one's life that I'm so on board with anything that makes that easier.
Many years ago I had a designer friend do some interface for me and I pointed out we should be using a couple icons for actions like "post", "delete", etc.
He replied something like "I don't believe in the thaumaturgical power of icons" and that has stayed with me forever since. Words may he worth 1/1000th of a picture but at least you understand them.
A bit less recent than that. More like the 15th century for Hangul.
Swahili uses either modified Latin or modified Arabic for writing. Are you perhaps thinking of one of the invented scripts for indigenous American languages, e.g., Cree syllabics or Inuktitut?
It should also be noted that a difference is often made between alphabets in the strict sense, where consonants and also vowels are represented by distinct symbols, and alphabets in the wider sense, where this is not the case (vowels are not represented at all or occasionally by certain consonant symbols typically when clarification is necessary). A writing system where symbols denote larger units of speech is not called an alphabet, but a syllabary. If it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units, it is called a logographic script. There are of course all kinds of mixed forms ("I ♥ NY").
Technically, a syllabary only refers to writing systems where the symbol represents the specific consonant and vowel pair, such as Japanese's Hiragana. For example, in a syllabary, the syllables "ka" and "ki" are two different symbols.
If the vowels are optional or not present, e.g. there's one "k" symbol regardless of the vowel, it's an Abjad. The archetypal Abjad is the Hebrew writing system.
If the vowels are written by adding them to the consonant symbol (similar to diacritics), it's called an Abugida. One example of this is the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia.
I did not want to make it too technical, so "Abjad" falls under "alphabets in the wider sense" and "Abugida" under "mixed forms". My comment was based on the assumption that the article in question does not necessarily refer to an alphabet in the strict sense. To make this clear, I did not think it was necessary to go into too much detail.
There are many specialized terms for different types of writing system, but those distinctions are generally of very little interest unless you're compiling a table of different writing systems.
Generally you look at what concepts are embodied in the script, and at the form of the glyphs. So:
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to phonemes. ("Language is made of sounds.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to consonants and doesn't bother to represent vowels. ("Language is made of sounds, and some of them are more important than others.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to syllables. ("Language is made of things you can say.")
You might have a script in which the glyphs assigned to syllables are composed of recognizable and conceptually distinct parts, but those parts have no independent representation. (Compare the glyphs ሀ ለ ሐ with the related glyphs ሄ ሌ ሔ.) ("Language is made of things you can say, but there are patterns.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to words, though in almost all cases you don't. The label "logographic script", applied to a script the labeler doesn't know well, is infinitely more popular than the concept "logographic script". I don't think any script has ever existed meeting the criterion of "it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units". But there are some, and used to be more, that leaned more or less strongly in that direction.
It's common to think of alphabetic writing as all writing. I assume that the author is asserting that the characters represent individual phonemes as opposed to pictograms or syllables because those have been around much earlier. There's not much information though and I have no idea how they can make such a radical claim with 4 finger-sized cylinders.
Alphabets have symbols that represent sounds which are strung together to make words. Other types of writing might include symbols that represent words or phrases, with an example being like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters.
Normally researcher will make a statistical distribution and compared it with the existing deciphered alphabets for example the most popular is the yet to be deciphered Indus script against the popular Egyption script or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Indus script research findings on it being a script was so controversial that the researcher had a death threat upon him based on the discovery.
I think the OP article author is wrong by claiming it's the oldest while it should be the Indus script but perhaps they considered the latter as symbols like Chinese characters not strictly alphabets [1].
Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing: it's four cylinders with some markings on them, supposedly in an unknown language (convenient!), that appears to have had zero influence on and zero influence from its surrounding region. For the two claimants to the oldest alphabets — the Indus script [1], and the Proto-Sinaitic script [2] — there is ample evidence of broad usage and influence from existing cultures: the Proto-Sinaitic script developed as simplified hieroglyphics used to communicate with Canaanite slaves [3] in Egypt and was the origin of (probably) all modern alphabetic systems, and the Indus script developed from earlier potter's marks over hundreds of years and has nearly a thousand years of archeological evidence, although there is some debate as whether it qualifies as an alphabet. This appears unrelated to any existing writing system in the region, and — if it was an alphabet — appears to have had no subsequent influence on any other writing system ever made. If archeologists are suspicious of even the Indus script, how on earth do these qualify?
We have plenty of examples of pottery with markings on it that aren't alphabets. Cuneiform obviously, but also simply tradesman marks like the predecessors to the Indus script. What makes this "seem like alphabetic writing" as opposed to any of the other kinds of clay markings we've seen at the time? There are only four objects bearing the markings, with nothing else to compare against, in a supposedly "unknown" language!
If this really is an alphabet: what did it develop from? Where are the cultures who used it? And why did no one in the region ever use anything like it again?
The skeptics also provided similar arguments as yours against the idea of Egyption hieroglyphics as syllabic/alphabets until they found the venerable Rosetta Stone, and the rest is history. We just need another Rosetta Stone but for Indus script.
The tldr is that they don't know it's alphabetic for sure (see below quote). The main scholar (Glenn Schwartz) who co-oversaw the '94-'10 excavation isn't an expert in writing. He put it out there around 2010 and said "maybe it's alphabetic, idk" and there was not much followup from the community. So he consulted with some writing experts who helped him with the 2021 paper where he goes over the evidence for different possibilities and suggests that the strongest argument is for alphabetic. The dating seems to be on firmer ground but the error bands on this and Wadi el-Hol can probably knock a century or two off the "500 years".
A decent summary is the blog post below from another researcher who briefly was part of the same dig and a former student of Schwartz (so not entirely independent):
It is worth noting that in the past Schwartz has been reluctant to affirm that the four inscribed clay cylinders from Tomb 4 of Umm el-Marra are alphabetic (Schwartz 2010). Thus, he certainly did not rush to this conclusion. Moreover, his most recent article about these is also very cautious (Schwartz 2021), as he moves through various possibilities (as discussed above). But it is clear that he is now willing to state that this is the most reasonable position (i.e., it is Early Alphabetic). And I concur. That is, the most reasonable conclusion is that the Umm el-Marra clay cylinders are inscribed with signs that are most readily understood as Early Alphabetic letters (graphemes). Moreover, since the Early Alphabetic alphabet was used to write Semitic, it is logical to conclude that this is the language of the Umm el-Marra inscriptions (the fact that they were found in Syria would also augment this conclusion, of course).
The full blog post is worth reading and summarizes the case for various non-alphabetic possibilities.
Right. 4 clay cylinders inch-long, perforated, with geometric symbols on the outside, are not jewelry (otherwise found in the same tomb) but ... labels with a new form of writing because... they were found next to the pottery?
The article is brilliantly written to lead with the significance of such a find before providing evidence.
> I will convey my own perspective regarding these four inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters), the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14 dates).
> My initial thought (because of the graphemic shapes of the signs on the cylinders and the clear similarity to Early Alphabetic letters) was that these cylinders might be intrusive
So, the major argument that they're writing is that they look very similar to other writing that we can read. Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
"乇乂ㄒ尺卂" looks like "EXTRA", but it's (meaninglessly-arranged) Chinese characters with a purely coincidental relationship to the Latin.
Did they find a bunch of these artifacts, with a variety of inscriptions? If so then sure, I buy it. If it's just the "CHON" fragment - that could well be coincidence.
Depends; your example (乇乂ㄒ尺卂) would be a truly stupendous coincidence if it were the only extant example of something and the Chinese characters just happened to be arranged in that way, but would be much weaker evidence if you had gone mining through thousands of characters and cherry-picked one five-character string that happened to match something. It would be an even bigger coincidence if those five characters, in sequence, were found, by themselves, on a document created in an English-speaking or Latin-alphabet-writing region.
So if all of the handful of fragments have marks that look like actual alphabetic symbols that were actually used in that area (later), that's substantially stronger evidence than you're giving credit for.
Is it worth inquiring whether people who acquired PhDs and have spent lifetimes studying this subject, and (I think) years studying these particular objects, would overlook and be fooled by the most obvious issue?
ahmedfromtunis's comment was killed, presumably because he attributed it to Gemini, but it was correct on the facts. Here's the response I wrote to him:
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Count of symbol types is what you'd look at. You have a bunch of unknown symbols, so there's nothing else you can look at.
[*] Many Japanese syllables are spelled with digraphs ("sh", if the "h" appeared in a special combining form) or diacritics ("è", if è and e were completely distinct sounds, as they are in French), which lowers the memory burden. I've counted diacritics as creating new symbols and digraphs as not doing so.
Wow, this is impressive if actually true. I wonder how accurate their dating methodology is, since they have to do carbon dating on something in that layer, and not on the clay tablet itself.
It does seem strange that the alphabet would have remained isolated for so many hundreds years, and not spread out somewhere else.
Statistical analysis, more or less. Alphabets have a couple dozen characters, syllabaries have a couple hundred, and logographic scripts have thousands to tens of thousands.
How do they know when the writing is pictographic (an idea expressed as an image, like a big predator showing teeth), or syllabic (an image of a bestial grunt, basically, like 'ugh' or 'caw' or what not) or alphabetic (the breakdown of syllabic utterances into, at first, the hard consantants and the vowels)?
Basically, the number of symbols and the repeating patterns. But it seems that in this particular case, they also relied on the shapes of the "letters" to conclude the alphabetic nature of the script.
They could also be descriptions of musical scales, or maybe weaving patterns, base-encoded numbers perhaps....who knows, really? Also Egyptian writing goes back perhaps 5000 years. That is a Semitic language so it stands to reason that it too would likely fall in the same category. Anyway I do love these kinds of archeological finds nonetheless. Interesting to see if Gobekli Tepe yields even older instances of written script? (If they ever get around to a proper excavation, that is! IIRC the site is currently not open to researchers.)
Some claim that standard Arabic has been intentionally made more complicated because writers were paid well by rulers back in old days, and there were more incentives to make grammar hard for the ordinary folks, so that you need "craftsmen" to write according to an Arabic linguist.Until the 80s in many Arab countries you needed clerks to produce documents from governments. (Comedy sketch on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtloJgMgFho) Arabic linguist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0
'Category V – It usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach S-3/R-3 proficiency in these languages. This small group of “super-hard languages” includes Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic.' (Arabic linguist)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0&t=3645s
Wooden structures 476,000 BCE
Sailing 100,000 BCE
Drawing 73,000 BCE
Counting 60,000 BCE
Medicine 40,000 BCE
…
Writing 3,200 BCE
Alphabet 2,400 BCE
I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
Agriculture started around 12k years ago. Prior to that, all of humanity lived in hunter-gatherer tribal bands. Why would you need writing, when you could just talk to the person who knew the thing you wanted to learn? Not to mention that prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale.
Even as recently as the 1800s, nearly 90% of the world was illiterate [1]. We live in a hyper-literate society, so it's almost unimaginable, but it's really how the world worked!
1: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/reading-writing-glob...
I think you have to assume that there's kind of an ambiguous continuum between art and writing. Obviously hunter-gatherer bands likely had reasons to communicate with band members, whether by sounds or visual signals. And obviously they made art, and humans being humans, presumably a lot of the art hat some kind of meaning. I think there are uses for using symbols to communicate well before you need ledgers or anything similar. But I don't know exactly where art turns into writing: Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy. And in some places that symbol literacy gets so dense you have Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. And maybe in others you maybe have something similar but less preserved.
> Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy.
Interesting - where is that from?
Practically all painting or drawing includes some sort of symbolism. Sometimes it’s so obvious that we don’t recognise it as symbolism (picture of cow = cow), but other things aren’t (spiral = ?).
The Wikipedia article on Rock Art contains a lot of discussion on the meaning of ancient drawings, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art
More recently, medieval painting has a lot of symbolism modern audiences can no longer “read”.
> prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale.
Imagine having to engrave anything you write in clay, stone, wood, etc. One reason runic alphabets are shaped that way is because it's easier to carve in straight lines (iirc).
How many comments would there be on a HN page if that was required?
Enter the hypothetical ice age civilization that was destroyed 13k years ago in a global cataclysm.
I don’t believe that agriculture only started then. It’s just the earliest evidence we have. Everything always gets pushed earlier
I agree that there must have been earlier writing, likely written on wood. Early systems could have evolved from markings on trees, like we still use on the Appalachian Trail, and other trails. Warnings for bears or tigers, symbols for different tribes on different paths. If you've hiked much then you're aware that even experienced woodsmen can get lost as the season changes and a valley changes, or after a hard storm washes away evidence of a trail. Children, in particular, would have been at risk, but would have almost certainly needed to do work over distances, in particular fetching water, which is something that even today children as young as 5 are asked to do. Notches on trees would have been a likely starting point for a system of symbols to communicate.
When I was much younger I used to work as a hike leader for a summer camp in Virginia. We would take a small group of teenagers out for 7 day hikes, during which we could cover something between 70 to 90 miles (112 to 145 kilometers). At one time I knew that stretch of trail so well I thought I could walk it blindfolded. And yet, I only knew it in the summer. One year I went in the fall and I was astonished how different it was. I was helped by the markings on the trees. (This was before cell phones and GPS.)
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)_/¯
I'm so old that we didn't even have Emojis, not even letters yet, and we had to communicate with punctuation alone! ;)
Many cultures never invent writing. From well-known 1969 research on 186 pre-industrial societies: [0]
Also of interest (but also a bit dated): "... the making and reading of two dimensional maps is almost universal among mankind whereas the reading and writing of linear scripts is a special accomplishment associated with a high level of social and technical sophistication." [1]> I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
It's an interesting question, but do I think that? That's the thing about science - we need evidence. Otherwise, what we think turns out to be especially unreliable.
[0] George P. Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Ethnology (1969)
[1] Edmund Leach. Culture and Communication. Cambridge U. Press (1976)
This whole mode of thinking you demonstrate shows exactly what is so inane about trying to use empirical methods (best employed in deciding what thickness of paper clip to use in the Records department of an aquarium) to try to understand human beings.
Bandying about complete drivel that doesn't cohere with the perception that any living person with a pulse has of the world, and hiding behind percentages and mumbles about them coming from a well known study.
There are about one hundred thousand questions I can think of that anyone brandishing such figures would have to answer before even being able to interpret what it is they just said, let alone make any decisions about whether or not it is relevant in adjudicating any other question, I'll leave you with one, in two forms, feel free to copy and paste a dictionary style response that you haven't even read:
What is a culture? What is a culture?
Show me a single "evidence-based" claim about human beings this approach has brought to the surface and I'll throw Dostoevsky and Cervantes at your head.
There's an old quote among lawyers: If you have the facts on your side, hammer on the facts. If you have the law, hammer on the law. If you have neither, hammer on the table.
If I understand you correctly: You have no claim of your own or argument for it, so you are using what you do know, insults.
Greek society switched alphabets between 750 and 950 BC, and adopted a number system. There were writing collapses. There is still a lot of history to uncover from the end of the Bronze Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
This is more an artifact of how we typically define writing than anything meaningful about the act of communication itself. Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of years older than what the article discusses. Writing as typically defined is a complete system for encoding verbal language using specific, formalized symbols. That's much more sophisticated and largely unnecessary for "most" human activities prior to the invention of large, hierarchical societies.
> Graphical symbolic communication is tens of thousands of years older than what the article discusses.
This article says that the earliest proto-writing is 10,000 years old - 3-d clay counters used for accounting. What was earlier?
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
Proto-writing is still quite far along on the spectrum I'm talking about of contextually defined symbols. Lascaux and chauvet have plenty of examples generally agreed to be partially symbolic, just off the top of my head.
Why not? People lived ok without being able to read and write until a couple generations ago. Passing knowledge orally and by example is easy.
We find lots of non-alphabetic writing from earlier periods that does survive, though. Surely if they had alphabetic writing, we'd find that when we find writing?
Virtually all of the writing we find from earlier periods has been carved in stone. Without finding the rare monument or well-preserved grave stone, a traveler that arrived here 10,000 years in the future would find just as little evidence that we knew how to write.
I've heard this argument before, and generally don't buy it. It really comes down to how hard they're looking.
We have found many dinosaur bones that are hundreds of millions of years old. We have an Australopithecus skeleton (Lucy) from 3.2 million years ago. We have many examples of writing that would be similarly durable. Even if most things wither or decay or erode or get scavenged or build over, so 99% of it is gone in 10,000 years, there's still plenty that'd get buried and preserved. You give the example of monuments. They're not all that rare though. Every town has a few, usually right at the center, right where excavation would be most likely. I'm thinking of the world war memorials that every little English town seems to have, with the names of all their fallen soldiers. They're not ALL just going to turn to dust, right? There are temples in Egypt where you can still see not just what they carved in the stone thousands of years ago, but even the paint that they put on it.
So if we're all gone in 10,000 years and that traveller just buzzes by and doesn't scratch the surface or even look very hard, sure. But if they're excavating at the level that humans are today, it will be hard to miss that we had writing.
Humans are able to pass on an incredible amount of knowledge without the use of writing. There are oral, epic traditions 100s of years old that we only know about because they were eventually written down. People were able to do things like recite the Iliad from memory. I don't know about other ancient languages but the oldest Greek texts of significant length are all metrical poetry. We know and have scientific works that were written in meter. There are probably all sorts of things that were passed don't orally that we can't even imagine.
A book that gives a nice view of these some of these memory technologies is The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly
I can't get myself to link to the marketing blurb inspired summaries, but I love the book. This wikipedia heading gives a less breathless overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Kelly_(science_writer)#R...
I think this was on here in prior story but Australian Aboriginal stories about changes in ocean level were shown to reflect conditions about 10000 years ago. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-...
Counter example: until relatively recently you had large segments of the population who didn't know how to read and write, but were very skilled at whatever their trade was.
Even within the last millennium powerful and accomplished civilizations like the Inca survived and excelled without writing. I think a better lesson to take from this is that though humans are inherently communicative and inventive, these characteristics don’t depend upon written communication, and that writing is not an obvious invention even if we can see elements of it in similar inventions like quipu.
The Inca had Quipu.
Quipo are amazing, but mostly accounting records?
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
What's so hard to believe? Everything you can write you can say, and you can show quite a lot that's difficult to describe in writing.
>Everything you can write you can say
That's easy to say if you've never written C++ or Perl.
One of the unique golden rules of FORTH is that every word definition must have a well defined pronunciation in the documentation, so you can discuss FORTH code over the telephone without confusion.
That's because FORTH words have no syntax except space as a delimiter, so can mix arbitrary punctuation with letters in any way, so you have many weird words like @ (fetch) ! (store) +! (plus store) ' (tick) ['] (bracket tick) >R (to r) R> (r from) etc.
So you could define an emoticon in FORTH like:
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing.
Egyptian Pyramids - 3,800 BCE
They were writing just not with an alphabet
Exactly. It seems that alphabet development is closely related to the regions more focused on international trading (the region we know as Phoenicia) rather than war and conquest of the neighbours. Maybe a system that represent sounds was useful to write words from sounds in multiple languages that were never heard before, unlike pictograms, hieroglyphs or cuneiform, that had to be adapted to each language.
It's easy to believe when you learn that there are still parts of the world that struggle with literacy.
I take it you've never interacted with people who build houses, make rope or administer medicine then? They don't read, even today. They learn their trade by watching others. We are quite exceptional in that reading is usually the most efficient way to learn stuff, but it's not like that in other areas. If you needed to change a spark plug or plumb in a washing machine would you be reaching for the books or YouTube?
Written on what? There are very few materials that will last 10s of millennia.
Aztec, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and their contemporaries all used some type of paper. Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing.
Paper was only one written medium. All of the cultures you've listed constructed stone stelae with writing, like the Rosetta stone. South Asian cultures used palm leaves instead of paper. Maya used fig bark. Europeans and Nahuatl often used animal hides instead of paper. There's a long list.
Ok. Maybe I should have been more generic. Organic thin sheet material... velum, parchment, papyrus. The bulk of writing is done on material that is gone in a few thousand years at most.
Which still leaves stelae as already mentioned. There's also petroglyphs, ceramics, and paints. The point I'm trying to convey is that writing has never been limited solely to paper or even organic materials.
How do we know humans did "counting" when there weren't no written text? Just a few marks on the stone? Does it not count as writing?
There is a matter of definition. IIRC, if you lookup some cave paintings from ~30,000 years ago, there is/was a debate whether marks near animals were intended to represent quantities.
Literacy is a modern phenomenon.
I find it totally believable. There weren't that many humans living in comfort to create institutions and innovate.
the distinction between writing and drawing seems to be a bit gray to be honest
Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
> Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids.
The first Egyptian pyramid known was built ~2780 BCE, the alphabetic writing in this article was from ~2500 BCE. That’s a gap of ~250 years, not ~2,500.
> How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
The Egyptians at the time of the Pyramids had writing, but it was logographic (symbols directly represent a word/concept), not alphabetic (a small inventory of symbols are combined in different ways to represent words/concepts.)
An alphabetic – and also phonetic – script is a big advance not because of what you communicate with it, but because if you know a fairly small set of symbols and their phonetic interpretation, you can encode a spoken language in it in a reasonably intelligible way to anyone who knows the same script (and you can even encode different spoken languages in the same script intelligibly, if they have a similar-enough phonetic inventory.)
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Coptic made use of hieroglyphs as an alphabet, and co-existed with their use for Egyptian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language
The article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more widely used.
It's clumsy and inconvenient to have writing without paper and pen. There wasn't a whole lot of writing before the printing press.
I've sometimes idly wondered if I was transported back in time to the stone age, could I help the tribe by teaching them to read and write? Sadly, nope.
If I was transported to Roman times, I'd try to invent paper and a printing press. I bet it would catch on fast.
They had paper though not as durable as the modern one. Papyrus had the same function, but it decays over few decades and things written on it should be rewritten. If you have a few centuries of war and low literacy like in the western parts of the Roman empire, there is noone to renew the pagan texts and they get lost. The eastern empire bothered only with the texts compatible with christianity while the arabs kept those compatible with islam.
The printing press might've been useful though.
> I'd try to invent ... a printing press
I sometimes wonder if the development of the printing press relied on technology that hadn't been available previously - like many/most innovations. But what?
Paper? There were ink-retaining sheets long before the printing press. A durable mechanism for the roller? They made wagon axles, I assume, that supported much more weight. Durable letters? Even sans metal, I'd guess that carving wood letters would still be worth the effort.
Why? The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don’t think I could come up with on my own. I could see myself coming up with structures, drawing, counting etc. on my own given enough free time.
> The alphabet seems like a huge abstraction I don’t think I could come up with on my own.
Given how many humans did come up with it, over all those millennia, I think we all can safely say that!
A is for apple, B is for bear, ...
And then you use the picture of an apple, bear, etc.
It's one of those simple solutions that anyone could have, but not often do.
Book burning has been a major issue many times by people trying to control history. The library of Alexandria, one of the oldest known book burnings, may have had some of the evidence your expecting. Then there are the cretins like folks trying to unroll the Dead Sea Scrolls. The modern day equivalent are the internet censors deleting our comments and posts on social media.
Alphabetic writing really is incredible.
Despite the fact that I personally prefer syllabaries. I can't discount the fact that alphabets have done an incredible job of being adopted by other languages that didn't previously have any sort of writing system. Alphabets are really flexible like that.
The latin alphabet alone is used in all sorts of languages from English to Tukish, Indonesian and Swahili. Having this many diverse languages follow a single writing system is only really possible with alphabets. You couldn't do this with Chinese characters or Korean hangul, for example.
Hangul is a 'syllabic alphabet'- it is a combination of alphabetic and syllabic and as such probably the clearest/simplest writing system invented.
Although it has some weirdnesses of its own, such as having jamo that change their sound based on context (e.g., ᄋ is silent if it’s an initial consonant but has the sound ng at the end of a syllable). Nearly every consonant has a different sound between initial and final position, although many of these are inaudible to English ears. On the other hand, having been a consciously designed writing system, it does have a rationality that most traditional writing systems lack, such as the fact that all vowels are based on either ㅡ or ㅣ with additional strokes added as appropriate to modify the base vowel (the fact that a double stroke, e.g., ㅑ or ㅛ represents the single stroke vowel with a y- sound prefixed seems just brilliant to me).
Consonants changing their sound based on position is not such an abnormality — that's just basic phonology. This phenomenon (allophony [1]) is found in virtually every language, but it remains a bit obscure to laymen, since it is mostly undetectable to the language's own speaker.
For instance, the phoneme /t/ is always rendered by the English letter /t/, but that phoneme can be rendered in so many different ways. In an initial position it would be rendered as an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive [tʰ], equivalent to the Korean Jamo ㅌ in initial or intervocalic positions. An English /t/ in other positions is generally not aspirated, but besides that the rendition is highly dependent on the speaker's accent. MRP ("BBC English") speakers render a "final" /t/ (i.e. after a vowel or consonant, but not before another vowel) as as [ʔt] ([t] sound preceded by a glottal stopped) or even just as a pure glottal stop [ʔ]. In intervocalic position RP speakers would keep /t/ as a simple [t] sound, but most Americans would change this sound into a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ]. Cockney speakers famously change an intervocalic /t/ into a glottal stop (so you'd get something that sounds like "woh-ah" for "water") and I didn't even get into how /t/ behaves when it follows other consonants such as the elided /t/ in "listen" or the way some American speakers pronounce "winter".
In all honesty, this is probably just as messy as what happens in Korean, it's just that the Korean allophones are more foreign to us. Besides ᄋ, all the variations are regular allophones. As far as I understand ᄋ was indeed just reused for two different purposes (there is no /ŋ/ phoneme that transforms to an empty sound in initial position).
I'd say that one thing that still makes Hangul hard, is that a lot of consonant clusters sounds sound the same when they come in final position. It makes pronunciation regular, but it's a bit hard to know how to transcribe many words. The vowels ㅐ and ㅔ are also pronounced the same in most (perhaps all?) modern Korean dialects, but that's a small irregularity compared to the redundancies of many other alphabetic writing systems.
In short, Hangul is much more regular than most alphabets. I wouldn't say it is the most regular though — it's hard to beat new writing systems designed by professional linguists for small language that didn't have an alphabet before. Hangul is still an relatively older system that had to go through writing reforms, but still retrains some spelling complexities. And if you compare Korean to Polynesian languages like Hawaiian, with their extremely simple phonology and phonotactics (they have very few vowels and consonants and generally don't allow consonant clusters and final consonants at all) - then the writing system of these languages is much simpler — and almost all of them use the Latin alphabet with a highly regular orthography.
I think there is a more impressive trait of Hangul, that is highly underappreciated. It's an alphabetic writing system that blends very well with traditional Chinese characters. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic (i.e. they represent a single syllable) and while that property is not maintained in Japanese (due to its vastly different phonology), it has been maintained in Korean and Vietnamese. Hangul lets you write each syllable with a single graphic block (even if that block contains multiple "Jamo" letters). All other alphabet systems that have been developed in languages that used Chinese characters (Such as Pinyin, Zhuyin or the Vietnamese alphabet) do not share this property. This means that when you try to add some alphabet letters into a document written Chinese characters, the result is extremely unpleasant typographically. It is not only harder to typeset nicely, but it's also quite painful to read.
Although Modern Korean doesn't blend Hangul and Hanja (Chinese characters) very often, I think this property made Hangul quite a lot more palatable as a replacement for Chinese characters in Korea compared to Pinyin or Zhuyin. Koreans didn't have to throw your entire typographic and calligraphic tradition in order to adopt Hangul: A block is fixed-size (not proportional), the writing is easier to read both vertically and horizontally and you can keep writing it with brush strokes using traditional Chinese calligraphic methods and practices. It can even be mixed nicely with Chinese characters like Japanese Kana (and it would be more compact than Japanese Kana). Eventually Korean language reformers have chosen to mostly drop Hanja altogether, but when you still do need to mix Hanja in a Korean text, you can do it seamlessly.
Alphabet writing is probably the most important invention perhaps even more so than the invention of wheel. It's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
Syllable based writing are not intuitive for human, Korean found it the hard way by relatively recently by inventing Hangul alphabets despite had been using the Chinese characters for several thousands of years previously with majority of the people remained illiterate.
Logographic seems fine for the mind? Thinking in speech is the default and most people talk before they read.
I am talking about literacy. For reading Chinese newspaper headlines you probably need around 50,000 basic character recognition.
My understanding is that the average Chinese dictionary has 20,000 characters. The full set is somewhere around 50,000. The average educated adult knows about 8000. The number of characters to read a Chinese newspaper is about 2500 to 3500.
This is based on multiple sources online. Here is one example source (BBC): https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_gu...
You’re off by a factor of 20+.
Hangeul is an 24 character alphabet, with 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Each little square is a syllable made up of consonants and vowel combinations.
Curious: why do you prefer syllabaries? I think about Chinese writing systems, which additionally don't have clear word boundaries. Now you can argue that this is an independent issue (which is true) but why does this complication seemingly show up in such writing systems?
Anyway, alphabets have been profoundly successful. You bring up Turkish. It's a good example. I'm sure most here know that prior to 1929 or so Turkish used the Arabic writing system. This is also an alphabet but a more complicated one (eg vowels aren't typically written) and didn't necessarily fit the Turkish language.
So they designed a Latin writing system that is entirely phonetic it was was profoundly successful at increasing literacy rates. A completely illiterate person could be taught to read and write Turksih in a matter of months.
I compare this to Taiwan that has high school competitions to see who can find a word the fastest in a dictionary because knowledge is required of the roots and symbols. There are thousands of characters to learn in Chinese languages. As a foreigner, this will often take a decade or more. I've seen accounts of people who have spent a decade learning Chinese that still struggle to read books intended for 12 year olds.
Literacy is so transformative to one's life that I'm so on board with anything that makes that easier.
Sadly, we are unwinding thousands of years of progress by reverting to picture writing.
Case in point: Susan Kare's trash can icon is slowly being replaced by [delete] as people discover that words for actions are better than pictures.
Many years ago I had a designer friend do some interface for me and I pointed out we should be using a couple icons for actions like "post", "delete", etc.
He replied something like "I don't believe in the thaumaturgical power of icons" and that has stayed with me forever since. Words may he worth 1/1000th of a picture but at least you understand them.
:(
Hangul is a very new alphabet. The Koreans didn’t have their own script until something like a century ago. Swahili has its own alphabet too.
A bit less recent than that. More like the 15th century for Hangul.
Swahili uses either modified Latin or modified Arabic for writing. Are you perhaps thinking of one of the invented scripts for indigenous American languages, e.g., Cree syllabics or Inuktitut?
I was thinking of the Ge’ez script but that’s for Amharic not Swahili.
To clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing, cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older.
It should also be noted that a difference is often made between alphabets in the strict sense, where consonants and also vowels are represented by distinct symbols, and alphabets in the wider sense, where this is not the case (vowels are not represented at all or occasionally by certain consonant symbols typically when clarification is necessary). A writing system where symbols denote larger units of speech is not called an alphabet, but a syllabary. If it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units, it is called a logographic script. There are of course all kinds of mixed forms ("I ♥ NY").
Technically, a syllabary only refers to writing systems where the symbol represents the specific consonant and vowel pair, such as Japanese's Hiragana. For example, in a syllabary, the syllables "ka" and "ki" are two different symbols.
If the vowels are optional or not present, e.g. there's one "k" symbol regardless of the vowel, it's an Abjad. The archetypal Abjad is the Hebrew writing system.
If the vowels are written by adding them to the consonant symbol (similar to diacritics), it's called an Abugida. One example of this is the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia.
I did not want to make it too technical, so "Abjad" falls under "alphabets in the wider sense" and "Abugida" under "mixed forms". My comment was based on the assumption that the article in question does not necessarily refer to an alphabet in the strict sense. To make this clear, I did not think it was necessary to go into too much detail.
There are many specialized terms for different types of writing system, but those distinctions are generally of very little interest unless you're compiling a table of different writing systems.
Generally you look at what concepts are embodied in the script, and at the form of the glyphs. So:
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to phonemes. ("Language is made of sounds.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to consonants and doesn't bother to represent vowels. ("Language is made of sounds, and some of them are more important than others.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to syllables. ("Language is made of things you can say.")
You might have a script in which the glyphs assigned to syllables are composed of recognizable and conceptually distinct parts, but those parts have no independent representation. (Compare the glyphs ሀ ለ ሐ with the related glyphs ሄ ሌ ሔ.) ("Language is made of things you can say, but there are patterns.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to words, though in almost all cases you don't. The label "logographic script", applied to a script the labeler doesn't know well, is infinitely more popular than the concept "logographic script". I don't think any script has ever existed meeting the criterion of "it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units". But there are some, and used to be more, that leaned more or less strongly in that direction.
Just a fun fact: some later forms of cuneiform were alphabets. Like Old Persian Cuneiform:
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm
If you wanted to tell people you "learned cuneiform" you could memorize this in an afternoon!
> To clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing, cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older.
That’s literally in the title of both the post and the article. What are you “clarifying”?
It's common to think of alphabetic writing as all writing. I assume that the author is asserting that the characters represent individual phonemes as opposed to pictograms or syllables because those have been around much earlier. There's not much information though and I have no idea how they can make such a radical claim with 4 finger-sized cylinders.
Yes, however, I was still left wondering about the writing that existing from earlier; and was hoping the article would explain it.
I am still not fully clear actually -- Alphabet being a finite set of symbols, how did pre-alphabetic writing work?
Alphabets have symbols that represent sounds which are strung together to make words. Other types of writing might include symbols that represent words or phrases, with an example being like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters.
Also, in some, symbols represent syllables. It's significant because there are many more syllables than individual sounds.
Well it helped me, I didn’t put two and two together.
I'm curious how they arrived at the conclusion it's an alphabet without deciphering it.
Normally researcher will make a statistical distribution and compared it with the existing deciphered alphabets for example the most popular is the yet to be deciphered Indus script against the popular Egyption script or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Indus script research findings on it being a script was so controversial that the researcher had a death threat upon him based on the discovery.
I think the OP article author is wrong by claiming it's the oldest while it should be the Indus script but perhaps they considered the latter as symbols like Chinese characters not strictly alphabets [1].
[1] Indus script:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing: it's four cylinders with some markings on them, supposedly in an unknown language (convenient!), that appears to have had zero influence on and zero influence from its surrounding region. For the two claimants to the oldest alphabets — the Indus script [1], and the Proto-Sinaitic script [2] — there is ample evidence of broad usage and influence from existing cultures: the Proto-Sinaitic script developed as simplified hieroglyphics used to communicate with Canaanite slaves [3] in Egypt and was the origin of (probably) all modern alphabetic systems, and the Indus script developed from earlier potter's marks over hundreds of years and has nearly a thousand years of archeological evidence, although there is some debate as whether it qualifies as an alphabet. This appears unrelated to any existing writing system in the region, and — if it was an alphabet — appears to have had no subsequent influence on any other writing system ever made. If archeologists are suspicious of even the Indus script, how on earth do these qualify?
We have plenty of examples of pottery with markings on it that aren't alphabets. Cuneiform obviously, but also simply tradesman marks like the predecessors to the Indus script. What makes this "seem like alphabetic writing" as opposed to any of the other kinds of clay markings we've seen at the time? There are only four objects bearing the markings, with nothing else to compare against, in a supposedly "unknown" language!
If this really is an alphabet: what did it develop from? Where are the cultures who used it? And why did no one in the region ever use anything like it again?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
> Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing
What is their evidence and argument for it?
The skeptics also provided similar arguments as yours against the idea of Egyption hieroglyphics as syllabic/alphabets until they found the venerable Rosetta Stone, and the rest is history. We just need another Rosetta Stone but for Indus script.
The tldr is that they don't know it's alphabetic for sure (see below quote). The main scholar (Glenn Schwartz) who co-oversaw the '94-'10 excavation isn't an expert in writing. He put it out there around 2010 and said "maybe it's alphabetic, idk" and there was not much followup from the community. So he consulted with some writing experts who helped him with the 2021 paper where he goes over the evidence for different possibilities and suggests that the strongest argument is for alphabetic. The dating seems to be on firmer ground but the error bands on this and Wadi el-Hol can probably knock a century or two off the "500 years".
A decent summary is the blog post below from another researcher who briefly was part of the same dig and a former student of Schwartz (so not entirely independent):
http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
It is worth noting that in the past Schwartz has been reluctant to affirm that the four inscribed clay cylinders from Tomb 4 of Umm el-Marra are alphabetic (Schwartz 2010). Thus, he certainly did not rush to this conclusion. Moreover, his most recent article about these is also very cautious (Schwartz 2021), as he moves through various possibilities (as discussed above). But it is clear that he is now willing to state that this is the most reasonable position (i.e., it is Early Alphabetic). And I concur. That is, the most reasonable conclusion is that the Umm el-Marra clay cylinders are inscribed with signs that are most readily understood as Early Alphabetic letters (graphemes). Moreover, since the Early Alphabetic alphabet was used to write Semitic, it is logical to conclude that this is the language of the Umm el-Marra inscriptions (the fact that they were found in Syria would also augment this conclusion, of course).
The full blog post is worth reading and summarizes the case for various non-alphabetic possibilities.
Right. 4 clay cylinders inch-long, perforated, with geometric symbols on the outside, are not jewelry (otherwise found in the same tomb) but ... labels with a new form of writing because... they were found next to the pottery?
The article is brilliantly written to lead with the significance of such a find before providing evidence.
The article is well cited. They handily beat out newspapers by providing links to earlier blog posts on the research.
You might want this one: http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
> I will convey my own perspective regarding these four inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters), the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14 dates).
> My initial thought (because of the graphemic shapes of the signs on the cylinders and the clear similarity to Early Alphabetic letters) was that these cylinders might be intrusive
So, the major argument that they're writing is that they look very similar to other writing that we can read. Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
"乇乂ㄒ尺卂" looks like "EXTRA", but it's (meaninglessly-arranged) Chinese characters with a purely coincidental relationship to the Latin.
Did they find a bunch of these artifacts, with a variety of inscriptions? If so then sure, I buy it. If it's just the "CHON" fragment - that could well be coincidence.
Depends; your example (乇乂ㄒ尺卂) would be a truly stupendous coincidence if it were the only extant example of something and the Chinese characters just happened to be arranged in that way, but would be much weaker evidence if you had gone mining through thousands of characters and cherry-picked one five-character string that happened to match something. It would be an even bigger coincidence if those five characters, in sequence, were found, by themselves, on a document created in an English-speaking or Latin-alphabet-writing region.
So if all of the handful of fragments have marks that look like actual alphabetic symbols that were actually used in that area (later), that's substantially stronger evidence than you're giving credit for.
Is it worth inquiring whether people who acquired PhDs and have spent lifetimes studying this subject, and (I think) years studying these particular objects, would overlook and be fooled by the most obvious issue?
> Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
Not sure if this is good example since we know that Greek alphabet really is writing.
ahmedfromtunis's comment was killed, presumably because he attributed it to Gemini, but it was correct on the facts. Here's the response I wrote to him:
-----
Count of symbol types is what you'd look at. You have a bunch of unknown symbols, so there's nothing else you can look at.
For comparison:
Japanese hiragana: ~71 symbols [*]
Cherokee syllabary: ~86 symbols
Greek alphabet: ~24 symbols
Latin alphabet: ~21 symbols ( https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/graffito/AGP-EDR187776 )
[*] Many Japanese syllables are spelled with digraphs ("sh", if the "h" appeared in a special combining form) or diacritics ("è", if è and e were completely distinct sounds, as they are in French), which lowers the memory burden. I've counted diacritics as creating new symbols and digraphs as not doing so.
How do you get 71 hiraganas? By counting the dakuten versions and smaller versions separately?
Carbon-14 dating can't be used directly on clay right? I assume the dating is inferred from some organic material found nearby?
Some informed speculation about this on languagehat, in the comments: https://languagehat.com/oldest-alphabet/
Wow, this is impressive if actually true. I wonder how accurate their dating methodology is, since they have to do carbon dating on something in that layer, and not on the clay tablet itself.
It does seem strange that the alphabet would have remained isolated for so many hundreds years, and not spread out somewhere else.
The article is not complete. I could not find any comparison of the new alphabet to the known ones. Is this close to Phoenician or Aramaic?
> Schwartz said. "Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate."
If you can't translate it, how do they know it's alphabetic?
Statistical analysis, more or less. Alphabets have a couple dozen characters, syllabaries have a couple hundred, and logographic scripts have thousands to tens of thousands.
CHON?
It's the brand name. When you need authentic pottery built to last, look for CHON on the cylinder.
Customer: *checks cylinder*, hey, this isn't CHON, it's C𓅓ON!
I guess they also knew organic chemistry back then!
How do they know when the writing is pictographic (an idea expressed as an image, like a big predator showing teeth), or syllabic (an image of a bestial grunt, basically, like 'ugh' or 'caw' or what not) or alphabetic (the breakdown of syllabic utterances into, at first, the hard consantants and the vowels)?
Basically, the number of symbols and the repeating patterns. But it seems that in this particular case, they also relied on the shapes of the "letters" to conclude the alphabetic nature of the script.
Graham Hancock.
They could also be descriptions of musical scales, or maybe weaving patterns, base-encoded numbers perhaps....who knows, really? Also Egyptian writing goes back perhaps 5000 years. That is a Semitic language so it stands to reason that it too would likely fall in the same category. Anyway I do love these kinds of archeological finds nonetheless. Interesting to see if Gobekli Tepe yields even older instances of written script? (If they ever get around to a proper excavation, that is! IIRC the site is currently not open to researchers.)
Egyptian is afro-asiatic but not semitic, like Berber, somali and others
Egyptian writing is old but it is not (primarily) alphabetic.
Yes kind of a hybrid, isn't it?