The Writing Revolution

Cuneiform to the Internet

Amalia E. Gnanadesikan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444359855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In a world of rapid technological advancements, it can be easy to forget that writing is the original Information Technology, created to transcend the limitations of human memory and to defy time and space. The Writing Revolution picks apart the development of this communication tool to show how it has conquered the world.

• Explores how writing has liberated the world, making possible everything from complex bureaucracy, literature, and science, to instruction manuals and love letters
• Draws on an engaging range of examples, from the first cuneiform clay tablet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Japanese syllabaries, to the printing press and the text messaging
• Weaves together ideas from a number of fields, including history, cultural studies and archaeology, as well as linguistics and literature, to create an interdisciplinary volume
• Traces the origins of each of the world's major written traditions, along with their applications, adaptations, and cultural influences

1

The First IT Revolution

This sentence is a time machine. I wrote it a long time before you opened this book and read it. Yet here are my words after all this time, pristinely preserved, as good as new. The marvelous technology that allows the past to speak directly to the future in this way is by now so pervasive that we take it for granted: it is writing.

Imagine a world without writing. Obviously there would be no books: no novels, no encyclopedias, no cookbooks, no textbooks, no telephone books, no scriptures, no diaries, no travel guides. There would be no ball-points, no typewriters, no word processors, no Internet, no magazines, no movie credits, no shopping lists, no newspapers, no tax returns. But such lists of objects almost miss the point. The world we live in has been indelibly marked by the written word, shaped by the technology of writing over thousands of years. Ancient kings proclaimed their authority and promulgated their laws in writing. Scribes administered great empires by writing, their knowledge of recording and retrieving information essential to governing complex societies. Religious traditions were passed on through the generations, and spread to others, in writing. Scientific and technological progress was achieved and disseminated through writing. Accounts in trade and commerce could be kept because of writing. Nearly every step of civilization has been mediated through writing. A world without writing would bear scant resemblance to the one we now live in.

Writing is a virtual necessity to the societies anthropologists call civilizations. A civilization is distinguished from other societies by the complexity of its social organization, by its construction of cities and large public buildings, and by the economic specialization of its members, many of whom are not directly involved in food procurement or production. A civilization, with its taxation and tribute systems, its trade, and its public works, requires a sophisticated system of record keeping. And so the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, and (probably) India all developed a system of writing. Only the Peruvian civilization of the Incas and their predecessors did not use writing but instead invented a system of keeping records on knotted color-coded strings known as quipu.

Early writing had three essential functions. It was used in state administration and bureaucracy, in trade and commerce, and in religion. The ancient Sumerians invented writing for administration and trade. The ancient Chinese used it to record what questions they had asked of Heaven. The ancient Maya used it to establish the divine authority of kings, and the ancient Egyptians used it to gain eternal life. In the case of trade and adminstration, the advantage of keeping written records is clear. The natural affinity of writing with religion is less transparent, but may well stem from the relative permanence – immortality, almost – of the written word. From ancient Egypt to the modern world, writing has been used to mark burials (bestowing a form of immortality on the deceased), as well as to dedicate offerings and record the words of God. Literature, which we now tend to consider the essence of written language, was a much later development – and in the case of some writing systems, never developed at all.

Writing was invented from scratch at least three times: in Mesopotamia, in China, and in Mesoamerica. In Egypt and in the Indus Valley, writing may have been invented independently, or the basic idea may have been borrowed from Mesopotamia. When the first words were written down in what is now southern Iraq in the late fourth millennium BC, history was made in more senses than one, for it is writing that separates history from prehistory, the time that can be studied through written records from the time that can be studied only through archaeology. Thanks to the time-machine technology of writing, a selection of the thoughts and words of earlier peoples have come down to us.

Writing is one of the most important human inventions of all time. It is rivaled by agriculture, the wheel, and the controlled use of fire, but by little else. The goal of this book is to shed light on how this remarkable technology actually works, where it came from, what it has done for us, and why it looks so different in different parts of the world.

Writing was invented to solve a particular problem: information only existed if someone could remember it. Once it was gone from memory, it was gone for good. As human societies became more complex, those attempting to control them found that their memories were overtaxed. What they needed was an external storage device. What they came up with is writing.

Let’s say I owe you five dollars. If I say “I will repay you next April,” the words are gone the instant I utter them. They exist only in my memory and in the memory of anyone who has heard me. And who is to say I will continue to remember them? You may well want more lasting evidence of my promise. Nowadays I could record my words electronically, but the inventors of writing lived more than five millennia before the invention of the phonograph, the tape recorder, or the digital voice recorder. Nor was capturing human speech their intention; they needed a way to record information. The memories of non-literate people are good, but they are far from infallible, and the human memory was not made for book-keeping.

So is there any way to keep my promise alive? How can we be sure exactly what has been said, or thought, or done? I could tell someone else, who would tell someone else, who would tell someone else... and, as in the party game “telephone,” where each person whispers a message to the next person in a circle, the message would be very different by the end. But let’s say I write down the words on a piece of paper and pass the paper around the circle. The words are just the same at the end as at the beginning. There is no amusing party game left, but in recording the words we have achieved reliable transmission of information.

This is the essence of writing. Writing represents language, but it outlasts the spoken word. The oldest examples of writing have lasted over five thousand years. Others will last only until I press my computer’s delete key. But all have the potential to outlast the words I speak, or the words I put together in my head. A spoken (or mentally composed) message unfolds in time, one word replacing the previous one as it is uttered. Writing arranges the message in space, each word following the previous one in a line. Writing is therefore a process of translating time into space.

Being spatial, writing is visible. But being visible is not crucial to its definition. Braille, for example, is a writing system for the blind designed to be felt with the fingers. It represents letters as a series of raised bumps that can be read by touch. In both reading by touch and reading by sight, time has been translated into space. There are also forms of language which are inherently visible and spatial, such as American Sign Language (ASL). But such languages are akin to spoken languages in their essential properties: they too unfold in time. Like spoken words, signed words are gone the moment they are produced. By contrast, writing is a transformation of language, a technology applied to language, not language itself.

Writing takes words and turns them into objects, visible or tangible. Written down, words remain on the page like butterflies stuck onto boards with pins. They can be examined, analyzed, and dissected. They can be pointed to and discussed. Spoken words, by contrast, are inherently ephemeral. So written language seems more real to us than spoken language. Nevertheless, writing is only a means of expressing language; it is not language itself. In a highly literate culture it is easy to confuse the two, since much communication is mediated by writing, and the standards of written language influence our sense of “proper” language. But writing is not language, nor is it necessary to language.

Humans everywhere use language. It is a natural and normal human behavior. Although babies are not born speaking a language, all children who are raised around other people, who can perceive the language spoken around them (they are not, say, deaf in an environment where no sign language is used), and who are within normal range in certain mental and physical facilities will inevitably learn at least one language. They pick up their mother tongue naturally over the first few years of life. Indeed they cannot really be taught it, and will resist instruction if parents try too hard to correct their baby talk. Reading and writing do not come so naturally and must be taught. By the time children learn to read and write the vast majority of their language learning (other than further vocabulary growth) has already taken place.

As far as we can tell, language has been with us since the human race began. By contrast, writing is not a fundamental aspect of human life despite the profound impact it has had on human history. All human societies have had language, but many have had no writing. The organization SIL (originally the Summer Institute of Linguistics) has counted 6,912 languages spoken in the world today. Thousands more were once spoken but are now dead. The exact tally of languages is open to dispute, as it is often difficult to determine what forms of speech are dialects of a single language and which are different languages; also, languages change constantly, and two dialects may grow into distinct languages (especially in the absence of a common written form); languages may also die out, and are now doing so at increasing rates. Thousands of the world’s languages use no writing system; no more than a hundred languages have produced a significant literary tradition.

Although writing is secondary to language, it often enjoys higher prestige. Writing is generally done more deliberately than speaking, so finished written pieces are much more carefully crafted than a typical spoken sentence. Written texts can thus convey their message more precisely, adding to the sense that writing is worth more than speech. Until the development of modern recording and broadcasting techniques, writing could reach a larger audience than the spoken word, and continue to communicate to people over a long period of time. Writing is associated with education, and education with wealth and power. The small percentage of languages that have a well-established written tradition include all the languages of national and international influence. Most of the unwritten languages are spoken by small minority groups, and many of these languages are not expected to survive the twenty-first century. Language conservation efforts must therefore include the development of writing systems and literacy programs.

Nowadays individuals faced with the task of designing a writing system for a language can draw on a wealth of literacy experience and linguistic theory. The original inventors had no such luxury. Later pioneers had the benefit of knowing that writing was possible, but still had to make most of it up as they went along.

Take King Njoya, for instance. King Ibrahim Njoya ruled the Bamum people of Cameroon from 1880 to 1931, the seventeenth king to rule from the ancient capital of Foumban. Njoya lived in a changing world, as strange people with strange new technologies encroached on traditional lands. To the north were invading Arabs, and they gave credit for their victories to a small book. Impressed, Njoya became a Muslim. Then Europeans came along with superior fire power. When asked where their strength came from, they also pointed to a book. Their book was larger, and their power the greater. Njoya therefore considered adopting Christianity, but could not accept its requirement of monogamy.

One thing was clear, however: writing was a powerful technology, and his people needed it. So in 1896 Njoya set out to invent a writing system for his language, Shü-mom, gathering together his best thinkers and best artists to help him.

The job he faced was not an easy one. His advisors were bright, but none of them had any prior experience with writing, and so none knew how the technology worked. What should Njoya write? What aspects of the Shü-mom language should be recorded?

Could he perhaps bypass the words of language and just record the thoughts he wanted to convey? When European scholars first encountered Egyptian hieroglyphs they thought the elaborate drawings represented pure thought. They believed that the hieroglyphic signs were ideograms – symbols that stood for ideas, not specific words. This misunderstanding set the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs back considerably. The ideogram hypothesis was more than just a bad guess for Egyptian, however. As it turns out, a full writing system that bypasses the encryption process of language is not possible. In other words, information separate from language is not the place to begin writing.

Rudimentary systems of such a type do exist. A road sign that shows a car skidding will convey its meaning whether you say to yourself, “Slippery when wet,” or, “Watch out, you might skid,” as you “read” it. Similarly, mathematical symbols and equations convey a meaning that can be expressed in any one of many languages, or even several ways within a language. What is essential in an expression such as ∫ dx/(a + bx²)² is not what it sounds like in English words, but what mathematical operation it refers to.

The graphical systems of road signs and mathematics work because they apply to a very limited part of human communication. By contrast, one of the essential properties of human language is the infinite range of what can be communicated using only a finite number of basic words. If we could distill human thoughts into a finite number of concepts that could be written down, could we resist giving them names – words? No. We would “read” the symbols by pronouncing them as words. Written symbols cannot systematically bypass language.

So King Njoya’s writing system had to encode language. But this did not make the problem much easier. The system of encoding and communicating information that we call language has many layers. Which layer or layers should Njoya make symbols for?

The most obvious layer of language is its words. However, to make a truly different symbol for each word of a language would result in far too many symbols. To take an example from English, the 160,000 entries of the second edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary would require 160,000 different symbols. But the number of entries in a dictionary actually underestimates the number of words in a language. For example, the entry for girlish also mentions girlishly and girlishness– both words of English, but not given their own entries. It would be silly, though, to try to create a writing system that had one symbol for girl, an entirely different one for girlish, and another completely different one for girlishness. The words girl, girlish, and girlishness have pieces in common. They all contain the piece girl, while girlish and girl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1: The First IT Revolution
• 2: Cuneiform: Forgotten Legacy of a Forgotten People
• 3: Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Quest for Eternity
• 4: Chinese: A Love of Paperwork
• 5: Maya Glyphs: Calendars of Kings
• 6: Linear B: The Clerks of Agamemnon
• 7: Japanese: Three Scripts are Better than One
• 8: Cherokee: Sequoyah Reverse-Engineers
• 9: The Semitic Alphabet: Egypt to Manchuria in 3,400 Years
• 10: The Empire of Sanskrit
• 11: King Sejong’s One-Man Renaissance
• 12: Greek Serendipity
• 13: The Age of Latin
• 14: The Alphabet Meets the Machine
• Appendix
• Further Reading
• Color Plates
• Index