Easy as A, B, C

There's an unfortunate but natural tendency for us to assume that because something is done a particular way in the culture we were raised in, that obviously, everyone else must do it the same way.

It's one of the (many) reasons I think travel is absolutely critical.  Not only do you find out that people elsewhere get along just fine doing things differently, it also makes you realize that in the most fundamental ways -- desire for peace, safety, food and shelter, love, and acceptance -- we all have much more in common than you'd think.  As Mark Twain put it, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

One feature of culture that is so familiar that most of the time, we don't even think about it, is how we write.  The Latin alphabet, with a one-sound-one-character correspondence, is only one way of turning spoken language into writing.  Turns out, there are lots of options:

• Pictographic scripts -- where one symbol represents an idea, not a sound.  One example is the Nsibidi script, used by the Igbo people of Nigeria.

• Logographic scripts -- where one symbol represents a morpheme (a meaningful component of a word; the word unconventionally, for example, has four morphemes -- un-, convention, -al, and -ly).  Examples include early Egyptian hieroglyphics (later hieroglyphs included phonetic/alphabetic symbols as well), the Cuneiform script of Sumer, the characters used in Chinese languages, and the Japanese kanji.

• Syllabaries -- where one symbol represents a single syllable (whether or not the syllable by itself has any independent meaning).  Examples include the Japanese hiragana script, Cherokee, and Linear B -- the mysterious Bronze-Age script from Crete that was a complete mystery until finally deciphered by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in the mid-twentieth century.

• Abjads -- where one symbol represents one sound, but vowels are left out unless they are the first sound in the word.  Examples include Arabic and Hebrew.

• Abugidas -- where each symbol represents a consonant, and the vowels are indicated by diacritical marks (so, a bit like a syllabary melded with an abjad).   Examples include Thai, Tibetan, Bengali, Burmese, Malayalam, and lots of others.

• Alphabets -- one symbol = one sound for both vowels and consonants, such as our own Latin alphabet, as well as Cyrillic, Greek, Mongolian, and many others.

To make things more complicated, scripts (like every other feature of language) evolve over time, and sometimes can shift from one category to another.  There's decent evidence that our own alphabet evolved from a pictographic script.  Here are three examples of pathways letters seem to have taken:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rozemarijn van L, Proto-sinaitic-phoenician-latin-alphabet-2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason the topic comes up is the discovery at Tell Um-el Marra, Syria of incised clay cylinders that date to 2400 B.C.E. and may be the earliest known example of an alphabetic script -- meaning one of the last four in the list, which equate one symbol with one sound or sound cluster (rather than with an idea, morpheme, or entire word).  If the discovery and its interpretation bear up under scrutiny, it would precede the previous record holder, Proto-Sinaitic, by five hundred years.

"Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite," said Glenn Schwartz, of Johns Hopkins University, who led the research.  "Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.  And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now...  Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 B.C.E.  But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought."

When you think about it, alphabetic scripts are a brilliant, but odd, innovation.  Drawing a picture, or even a symbol, of an entire concept as a way of keeping track of it -- the head of a cow on a vessel containing milk, for example -- isn't really that much of a stretch.  But who came up with letting symbols represent sounds?  It's a totally different way of representing language.  Not merely the symbols themselves altering, and perhaps becoming simpler or more stylized, but completely divorcing the symbol from the meaning.

No one, for example, links the letter "m" to water any more.  It's simply a symbol-sound correspondence, and nothing more; the symbol itself has become more or less arbitrary.  The level of meaning has been lifted to clusters of symbols.

It's so familiar that we take it for granted, but honestly, it's quite a breathtaking invention.

Scholars are uncertain what the writing on the clay cylinders says; they've yet to be translated, so it may be that this assessment will have to be revisited.  Also uncertain is how it's related to other scripts that developed later in the region, which were largely thought to be derived from Egyptian writing systems.

If this discovery survives peer review, it may be that the whole history of symbolic written language will have to be re-examined.

But that's all part of linguistics itself.  Languages evolve, as does our understanding of them.  Nothing in linguistics is static.  The argument over whether it should be -- the infamous descriptivism vs. prescriptivism fight -- is to me akin to denying the reality of biological evolution.  Our word usages, definitions, and spellings have changed, whether you like it or not; so have the scripts themselves.  Meaning, somehow, still somehow survives, despite the dire consequences the prescriptivists warn about.

It's why the recent tendency for People Of A Certain Age to bemoan the loss of cursive writing instruction in American public schools is honestly (1) kind of funny, and (2) swimming upstream against a powerful current.  Writing systems have been evolving since the beginning, with complicated, difficult to learn, difficult to reproduce, ambiguous, or highly variable systems being altered or eliminated outright.  It's a tough sell, though, amongst people who have been trained all their lives to use that script; witness the fact that Japanese still uses three systems, more or less at the same time -- the logographic kanji and the syllabic hiragana and katakana.  It will be interesting to see how long that lasts, now that Japan has become a highly technological society.  My guess is at some point, they'll phase out the cumbersome (although admittedly beautiful) kanji, which require understanding over two thousand symbols to be considered literate.  The Japanese have figured out how to represent kanji on computers, but the syllabic scripts are so much simpler that I suspect they'll eventually win.

I doubt it'll be any time soon, though.  The Japanese are justly proud of their long written tradition, and making a major change in it will likely be met with as much resistance as English spelling reform has been.

In any case, it's fascinating to see how many different solutions humans have found for turning spoken language into written language, and how those scripts have changed over time (and continue to change).  All features of the amazing diversity of humanity, and a further reminder that "we do it this way" isn't the be-all-end-all of culture.

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