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

Comments

• birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Writing was invented independently across multiple places and times.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Geniouses all over the place!! /j

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    • alina@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Considering that the concept of writing has been invented independently so few times in the world, especially in the form I’m talking about, there are not all over the place.

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• FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  See my other comment, but naturally evolving writing systems arose from drawing pictures over millennia; noone just started writing letters.

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  • alina@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    thanks? but I didn’t deny it.

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    • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      It means there almost certainly never was such a genius.

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• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  And yet we’re all born with an inherent ability ‘to language’.

  Like, it’s in the firmware.

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• mycodesucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Laughs in King Sejong

  Image

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  • alina@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Hot

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• Twongo@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  the indigenous people of easter island invented writing in parallel to all other civilizations :)

  we have yet to decode it.

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  • m0darn@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I think it’s unclear if it was developed wholly indepently or if it was done after some exposure to European writing.

    IMO it’s likely to be undecipherable because of small sample size, and the probability that the sample we do have was from a period of rapid evolution.

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• Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The Chinese just made a symbol for each word/concept

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  • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    That is not how Chinese writing works; characters represent morphemes, which are smaller than words. There are tens of thousands of words required for proficiency in a language, but only a few thousand required symbols for proficiency in writing Chinese. ("Words” here also counts different inflections of a single stem word as the same )

    Almost all writing that we know of started out with pictures, which became pictograms (where there was a standard way of drawing a picture to represent something) then logograms (where the pictures stopped having to be recognisable).

    Look into Sumerian cuneiform and the evolution of some of the symbols to see this in action; it’s fascinating. This writing system then became partially syllabic, where symbols could also stand for the sound of the thing they originally represented, which is again a common way for writing systems to evolve.

    The exceptions are things like Korean, which was invented from scratch: but not independently.

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    • Hegar@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      The chinese kinda did just make a character for each word though.

      Modern chinese uses plenty of words with multiple characters but Old chinese didn't really. So character = word was much closer to the truth around the time of the oracle bone inscriptions.

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• Zahille7@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Now you’ve got me thinking.

  Did language evolve from writing, or did writing evolve from language?

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  • Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    There are plenty of oral languages, where the writing only came after contact with missionaries. Māori, and the other Pacific languages, aboriginal etc. And as all other species have some form of oral language, but not written. I’d pretty safe saying that sounds and words long predated the written forms. Unless you know of written only languages that the pronunciation came later?

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  • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Writing from language.

    A lot of other animals besides humans use vocalisations, and those vocalisations can have quite specific meanings. This makes them a form of communication and demonstrates that encoding meaning in sound is a phenomenon that develops quite readily in nature.

    We can also see then that the history of language in humans is those vocalisations becoming increasingly complex and able to represent more numerous concepts and thoughts until they eventually evolve into something we recognise as a language.

    Written language is a mechanism to encode spoken language, but it’s spoken language which came first.

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  • thethirdobject@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    guess where the word “prehistoric” comes from ;)

    also, non-human animals have language without writing.

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• biofaust@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I guess it is easier if you have a simple language and sillable-concept relations and therefore start with what would amount to hideograms. The real genius is the one who comes up with something prepositions and suffixes/prefixes.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    And stuff like abstractions

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