WHAT IS WRITING?

Technically, writing is a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more of less exactly without the intervention of the utterer. Now, what does that mean? It means that writing is about language; writing is about speech. Writing is not about ideas. Writing has to involve the sounds of the language; it doesn’t involve just the meanings of the language

If you are a tourist landing in an airport in a foreign country and you’re desperately hunting and you finally find a pair of doors and one of them has a silhouette of a man and the other has the silhouette of a woman, even if you’re in Tokyo or Paris or Abidjan you know that they say “men” and “women”, but the French tourist in the same airport knows that they same “homme” and “dame”. Those are ideograms because they are not writing in any particular language.

Up until 1822 when Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, they thought that they were pictures of ideas, that somehow if they could only unlock their secret, they would have a universal code for expressing everything in pretty little Egyptian pictures. But as Champollion showed, that’s not how it works. Egyptian hieroglyphs, just like the Chinese characters or the English alphabet, record language. They record speech; they record the sounds of speech.

THE INVENTION OF WRITING

Why are there so few writing systems in comparison to the five thousand languages spoken in the world today and the probably tens of thousands of languages spoken over the past five thousand years? One reason is that writing only got invented in three or four places that we know for sure. Another is that writing gets spread around by missionaries and by traders and merchants and even by invading armies. So that what started out as the writing system of one small people comes to be the writing system for dozens of peoples.

The book, A Study of Writing, by Jay Gelb, published in 1952 and reissued with some changes in 1963, was the very first scientific study of writing as a part of linguistics. And Dr. Gelb suggested that all writing could have gone back to the Sumerian cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq - all writing including Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Chinese characters and the alphabets of Europe and everything else. All writing had a single origin and covered the entire old world from there. Now that was okay for the 1950s, but within a couple of decades after that, something had happened to make that theory rather doubtful. And that was the decipherment of the Mayan writing of Central America, those beautiful Mayan glyphs that you see on step pyramids and such. By 1978 we had a pretty good understanding of how Mayan writing worked and could read words, phrases to some extent. And by now we can read pretty much connected texts in Mayan. Now, unless you believe in ancient astronauts, there’s no way that Sumerian cuneiform influenced the origin of Mayan writing half a world away in Central America.

So now we have three independently devised writing systems - the Sumerian, the Chinese, and the Mayan - that are remarkably similar in the way they encode their languages. So maybe there’s something in the languages that’s similar, that causes the writings to get invented in the first place and to be so similar. And in fact there is - in all three languages, the smallest unit of meaning is only one syllable long. In English, we can have words like “apple” and “paper” routinely two syllables and even more, but in Sumerian, Chinese, and Mayan, each unit of meaning - we call it a “morpheme” in linguistics - is just one syllable. Now, we in the western world have grown up from the beginning of school with alphabets, so we naturally think that consonants and vowels are the shortest bits of speech that we can pay attention to. But that’s only true for people who learned from childhood to use an alphabet. If you ask people who have never learned to read with an alphabet what the parts of a word are, they won’t tell you that for instance, “cat” is “cuh,” “aa,” “tuh.” They’ll say “cat”? That doesn’t have any parts; that’s one piece all by itself. That means that when someone who wanted to write something down in Sumerian, or in Chinese, or in Mayan, drew a picture to represent a word, the picture for that word represented a whole syllable.

In Sumerian, the words for “arrow” and “life” happen to sound the same; just like we have “hair” on the head and “hare”, a bunny rabbit - they’re different words in English but they sound the same, they’re homonyms. In Sumerian, both “arrow” and “life” are pronounced “tee.” So if the scribe wanted to make a notation recording something about arrows, it’s easy enough to draw a picture of an arrow, and that stands for the idea of arrows, it stands for the word arrow, and it stands for the pronunciation of that word “tee.” But a Sumerian scribe could also have good reason to want to write something about life. It’s not easy to draw a picture of life, but the Sumerian scribe can just draw a picture of an arrow, use it for the sound “tee” and “tee” means life. And that is why monosyllables are so important.

SYLLABLES

But what is a syllable after all? We don’t know; phoneticians cannot tell you exactly what a syllable is. Ask a linguist what’s a syllable? We can’t tell you. We just know that “book” is one syllable, and “apple” is two syllables, and “transubstantiation” is six syllables; but what exactly is going on is a mystery. It’s simply a fact that the syllable is the smallest piece of speech that you can naturally break a word down into, and, in fact, it was syllables that people in the modern world wrote down when they invented scripts for their own language.

The first one we know about is Sequoia, who invented a writing system for the Cherokee language around 1822 and the first person he taught it to was his young daughter who was maybe nine years old at the time, and they put out a demonstration for the elders in the village. They asked him to write something down on a piece of paper and they carried it across to her on the other side of the square, and she opened up the paper and read off exactly what they had told him to write. And they were amazed, and within a few years everyone in the community was using Sequoia’s writing system to write the Cherokee language

And the same thing happened a few years later in Liberia when Momolu Duwalu Bukele invented a writing system for Vai; also nothing but syllables. And the same thing happened later in the nineteenth century in Alaska when a fellow called Uyoqoq invented a syllabic writing system for his Inuit language. And King Njoya of the Bamoun people of Cameroon invented a syllabic script for his people. And on and on, a dozen times or so, around the world, in Africa, in Latin America, even in Oceania. Syllabic scripts were invented by people who didn’t know anything about writing except that other people were able to write their languages.

THE INVENTION OF THE ALPHABET

Egyptian only records the consonants of the words. But it seems to me every time a writing system is invented from scratch, it is syllables that get written down. So how is it possible that Egyptian is written only with consonants? Well maybe it happened like this: a clever Egyptian discovered that Sumerian could be written down, and recorded, and kept for the ages, and wanted to be able to write Egyptian as well. So the Egyptian, who didn’t know much about Sumerian, asked the Sumerian scribe how it works, and the Sumerian scribe explained, “Well, it’s easy, you just write down the picture for every word you want to write”. So the Egyptian tried writing a picture for each word, but there’s one big difference between the Sumerian and the Egyptian languages. When you say a word in Sumerian, even if you change the endings on it, it doesn’t change the word very much. But when you change a word in Egyptian by adding endings or making a past tense or something like that, you’ve changed the vowels in the middle of the word. So if the Egyptian is writing the same word, with the same symbol every time, it’s not being pronounced the same every time. And what stays the same when you write an Egyptian word is only the consonants; that’s how the Egyptian hieroglyphs came to stand for consonants only.

The Greeks got the alphabet from the Phoenicians and that was a big step because the Greek alphabet has separate letters for consonants and vowels. But the Phoenician alphabet only had letters for the consonants. Now how did this happen? Was there some great Greek genius who woke up one day and said, “Gee we really need to write our language with vowels”? No, it was a lot simpler than that. When some Greek would-be scribe wanted to learn to write Greek from some friendly Phoenician scribe, they just started going through the letters of the alphabet and the very first one was “aleph.” Now, that probably sounded like it started with ‘ah’ because in English we don’t have a glottal stop consonant. So we wouldn’t recognize the consonant at the beginning of “aleph” or another consonant at the beginning of “aeen,” or another consonant at the beginning of “het.” Similarly, when the Greek heard the letter names “owp” and “hey” and “het” and “yot” and “aeen” and “wow”, the Greek didn’t hear any of those consonants, but heard the initial vowels. So the Greek thought that you use those letters to write vowels with, and that’s all it took to get vowels into the alphabet.

So the Sumerians wrote their words with syllable signs, and by the way, so did the Chinese on the other side of the continent. Meanwhile, the Egyptians had misunderstood the Sumerian and wrote their words with consonants only. And then the ancestral Semites misunderstood the Egyptian and wrote with letters for consonants, and the ancient Greeks misunderstood the Semitic form of writing and wrote with consonants and vowels. And out of those three origins - the Greek, the ancient Semitic, and the Chinese - the entire world has developed a multitude of different ways to write.

And with the Greek alphabet, using both consonants and vowels, for the first time we get a true alphabet. The Roman alphabet was borrowed from the Greek alphabet around six or seven hundred BC; so was the Russian alphabet around 1600 years later. But they all looked pretty much alike; you can see from the shapes of the letters how they all go back to the same origin. Some of the letters have different sounds, but they still pretty much all look alike.

Everyone knows the order of the ABC’s – ABCDEFGHI - but no one knows why that order is; it’s been that way for 3500 years at least. All sorts of guesses have been tried. Is it phonetic similarity? Is it the meanings of the original names of the letters? Is it the shapes of the letters? Each of those explanations works for two or three letters at a time, but there’s nothing to explain the order of our alphabet.

Now what about the shapes of the letters? Originally those thirty odd consonant letters - each was the name of an object and the name of that object started with the sound of the letter stood for. So the letter “awp” stood for an ox head, and you can still see in the letter “a” today, an ox head, the letter “b” stood for “bet” (house), and originally it was just a square box. It’s changed quite a bit over the almost 3000 years since then. And so on through the alphabet. Each letter has a name, and the name of a letter is the name of an object whose name starts with that letter.

THE KOREAN ALPHABET

The Korean alphabet was created by King Sejong and his advisors, and published in 1443 as a simple way for the common people to learn to read and write, and it’s an extraordinarily remarkable achievement. Not only is it an alphabet with a separate letter for each consonant and each vowel, but the letters for each syllable are combined into a square block in imitation of Chinese characters. For instance, in this Casanova Café we have four syllables, and the first one is a K and an Ah, and the second one is an S and an Ah, and the third one is an N and an O, and the fourth one is a V and an Ah. Ca-sa-no-va. It was an amazing intellectual achievement to combine alphabetic and syllabic writing and the Chinese aesthetic way of doing it.

Five thousand years ago, just a small group of people in one spot on the world were able to write, but now the entire globe has access to literacy. It may be the single most important technology invention that’s ever been made.