Comment on To independently invent the concept of writing in which sounds are encoded into symbols from which an infinite number of words can be assembled, you must be a genius

• FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It means there almost certainly never was such a genius.

  source

  • rockerface@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The closest was probably the guy who invented the Korean alphabet. Dude looked at the scribes and scholars struggling to fit Chinese characters to a language they don’t mesh with at all in terms of phonetics and grammar and said “fine, I’ll do it myself”.

    source

    • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Indeed, but he understood the concept of writing already, and several existing scripts (besides Chinese) were known to him and his court, so he could consciously take those ideas and work with them.

      source
    • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      That’s also how the Cyrillic alphabet came to be

      source

      • rockerface@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Cyrillic was at least based on Greek, for Korean it looks like mostly original glyphs

        source
  • alina@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Right? I just mean, to a modern person it seems obvious and simple, but when I really thought about it, if I had never had an example of writing in front of me, the concept wouldn’t have been obvious to me at all.

    source