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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Fine-toothed comb

Sometimes I need to tell y'all about a new discovery not because it's weird or controversial, but simply because it's cool.

I owe my awareness of this one from my twin brudda from anudda mudda, Andrew Butters of the brilliant blog Potato Chip Math (which you should all subscribe to immediately).  Andrew is not only smart and a great writer and funnier than hell, he also knows my capacity for geeking out over anything related to languages, so when he found this, he sent it on to me instantaneously.

It's about the discovery of an ancient ivory comb near Tel Lachish, Israel.  It was a cool enough artifact, dating from about 1,700 B.C.E., but its coolness factor increased by a factor of a thousand when it was discovered that it was inscribed with seventeen tiny letters.

[Image courtesy of Dafna Gazit, Israeli Antiquities Authority]

The inscription is in Canaanite, and says: "ytš ḥṭ ḏ lqml śʿ[r w]zqt," which translates roughly to, "may this tusk root out lice of the hair and the beard."  If you're wondering what happened to all the vowels, they're missing because written Canaanite was an abjad -- a writing system wherein vowels are left out unless they occur first in a word.  (Modern abjads include Hebrew and Arabic, both of which are in the same family as Canaanite.  If you're curious about abjads and other writing systems, I did a post about that topic back in January.)

There are a lot of things that are cool about this.  First, it's mildly amusing that one of the earliest inscriptions ever found has to do with getting rid of lice.  Be that as it may, the (much) more awesome piece is that this is the earliest known inscription in the alphabet that would eventually morph into not only Arabic and Hebrew, but Cyrillic (used in several Slavic languages), Greek, and eventually, English.

"This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel," said archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  "There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used still today…  The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3,700 years ago.  This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write."

An amusing postscript is that the next oldest inscriptions ever found in Canaanite were on a 3,500 year old lead tablet found near Mount Ebal in Israel, and said, "Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the God YHW.  You will die cursed.  Cursed you will surely die.  Cursed by YHW—cursed, cursed, cursed."

So that's cheerful.  I probably don't need to mention that "YHW" is a transcription of the Hebrew name for God, usually rendered either "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" in English.  It's a little humbling that the oldest surviving written texts we know of had to do with (1) ill-wishing an enemy, and (2) getting rid of parasites.

Although if you'll look around you at the behavior of people now, you'll probably be struck by the fact that not all that much has changed.

So that's our cool discovery of the day, and thanks to Andrew for bringing it to my attention.  Interesting that the letters I'm typing right at this moment have a history that stretches back over three millennia, back to inscriptions like this one.

I just hope what I'm writing these days is more edifying than "Use this comb to remove lice" and 'You will die cursed."

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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 Egyptian hieroglyphics, 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 (more about that one later), 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 lots of 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:

Note, for example, the evolution of our letter "A," from a cow's head (so presumably the symbol originally represented an actual cow or ox), becoming a stylized representation of a horned animal, and finally losing its pictographic character entirely and becoming a representation of a sound instead of an idea.

Not only do scripts evolve, they can be invented.  (Obviously, they're all invented, but most of the ones we know about are old enough that we don't know much about their origins.)  Cyrillic, for example, was an creation of the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon I, but he based it on three sources -- Greek, Latin, and Glagolitic (a script used to write Old Church Slavonic), so it wasn't an invention ex nihilo.  The syllabic Cherokee script, however, was invented in the early nineteenth century by the brilliant Cherokee polymath Sequoyah, to give his people a way to write down their own history (a script that became one of the first written languages of the Indigenous people of North America).  In fact, it's a recently-invented script that brought this topic up today; a paper last week in Current Anthropology looks at a writing system I'd never heard of, the Vai script of Liberia, invented by a collaboration of eight people in 1833 from motivation similar to Sequoyah's.  Like Cherokee, it's syllabic in nature:

The paper looks at the interesting fact that even in the short time since its invention, Vai has evolved -- the symbols have simplified, and the script has "compressed" -- similar-sounding syllables eventually being represented by the same symbol.

"Visual complexity is helpful if you're creating a new writing system," said the study's lead author, Piers Kelly, of the Max Planck Institute, in an interview with Science Alert.  "You generate more clues and greater contrasts between signs, which helps illiterate learners.  This complexity later gets in the way of efficient reading and reproduction, so it fades away."  Also, as more and more people learn the writing system, it becomes regularized and standardized -- something that happens even faster when people switch from pen-and-paper to some kind of technological means of reproducing text.

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, 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 requires 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.

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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Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]