Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
1 The First IT Revolution
2 Cuneiform: Forgotten Legacy of a Forgotten People
3 Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Quest for Eternity
4 Chinese: A Love of Paperwork
5 Maya Glyphs: Calendars of Kings
6 Linear B: The Clerks of Agamemnon
7 Japanese: Three Scripts are Better than One
8 Cherokee: Sequoyah Reverse-Engineers
9 The Semitic Alphabet: Egypt to Manchuria in 3,400 Years
10 The Empire of Sanskrit
11 King Sejong’s One-Man Renaissance
12 Greek Serendipity
13 The Age of Latin
14 The Alphabet Meets the Machine
Appendix
Further Reading
Color Plates
Index
THE LANGUAGE LIBRARY
Series editor: David Crystal
The Language Library was created in 1952 by Eric Partridge, the great etymologist and lexicographer, who from 1966 to 1976 was assisted by his co-editor Simeon Potter. Together they commissioned volumes on the traditional themes of language study, with particular emphasis on the history of the English language and on the individual linguistic styles of major English authors. In 1977 David Crystal took over as editor, and The Language Library now includes titles in many areas of linguistic enquiry.
The most recently published titles in the series include:
Ronald Carter and Walter Nash Seeing Through Language
Florian Coulmas The Writing Systems of the World
David Crystal A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Fifth Edition
J. A. Cuddon A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Fourth Edition
Viv Edwards Multilingualism in the English-speaking World
Amalia E. Gnanadesikan The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet
Geoffrey Hughes A History of English Words
Walter Nash Jargon
Roger Shuy Language Crimes
Gunnel Tottie An Introduction to American English
Ronald Wardhaugh Investigating Language
Ronald Wardhaugh Proper English: Myths and Misunderstandings about Language
This edition first published 2009
© 2009 Amalia E. Gnanadesikan
Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gnanadesikan, Amalia E.
The writing revolution : cuneiform to the internet / by Amalia E. Gnanadesikan.
p. cm. – (The language library)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-5406-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-5407-9
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Writing–History. 2. Alphabet–History. I. Title.
P211.G58 2009
411.09–dc22
2008014284
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Illustrations
Plates
1 Neo-Assyrian cuneiform tablet with observations of the planet Venus
2 Papyrus with illustrations and cursive hieroglyphs from the Book of the Dead of Any
3 Chinese oracle bone from the Shang dynasty
4 Carved sapodilla wood lintel from Temple IV at Tikal
5 Linear B written on clay tablets, from the Palace of Knossos, Crete
6 Sequoyah with his syllabary
7 Twelfth-century AD palm-leaf manuscript of a Buddhist Prajnaparamita sutra
8 Page from the Book of Kells
9 Page from the 42-line Gutenberg Bible
Figures
1.1 How different writing systems represent language
2.1 A proto-cuneiform tablet
2.2 The development from proto-cuneiform, through early Sumerian cuneiform, to later Akkadian cuneiform
2.3 The first sentence of Darius the Great’s trilingual cuneiform inscription at Behistun
3.1 Some of the biconsonantal signs, triconsonantal signs, and determinatives used in Egyptian hieroglyphs
3.2 Egyptian uniconsonantal signs, the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet, in rightward-facing orientation
3.3 The Rosetta Stone, with inscriptions in hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek
4.1 Shang characters with identifiable modern descendants, and evolution of two characters from oracle bones to modern standard and cursive scripts
4.2 The printed Diamond Sutra, the oldest surviving woodblock-printed book in the world, dating to AD
4.3 Chinese pnyn Romanization, with IPA equivalents
5.1 The Maya syllabary (incomplete)
5.2 Examples of Maya glyphs
6.1 Some of Kober’s triplets
6.2 The Linear B syllabary
7.1 The Japanese syllabaries
7.2 A Japanese proverb written in (1) a mixture of kanji, katakana, and hiragana, (2) hiragana only, (3) katakana only
8.1 The Cherokee syllabary, as invented by Sequoyah and arranged by Samuel Worcester
9.1 Ancient alphabets
9.2 The Aramaic alphabet and three of its descendants
9.3 Three Altaic descendants of the Aramaic alphabet
9.4 The Arabic alphabet
9.5 Islamic zoomorphic calligraphy
10.1 Seal with Indus Valley symbols
10.2 The Devangar, Kannada, and Tamil scripts
10.3 The Thai script
11.1 The derivation of the han’gl letters from their pronunciations
11.2 Han’gl, the Korean alphabet, listed in the South Korean order
12.1 The derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician
12.2 Two of the descendants of the Greek alphabet
13.2 Non-Roman scripts of the British Isles
14.1 The Phaistos Disk
A.1 The International Phonetic Alphabet
A.2 The International Phonetic Alphabet applied to American English
A.3 The ancient Near East
A.4 The Chinese world
A.5 Mayan Mesoamerica and Cherokee North America
A.6 The Greek and Roman world
A.7 Southern Asia, the Sanskrit world
Preface
One day during my sophomore year of college I returned to my dorm excited by a piece of information I had encountered.
“Is it true,” I asked my neighbor, Joan Kim, “that Korean uses an alphabet you can learn in a single day?” Naïve Westerner that I was, I thought all East Asian languages, including hers, had very complicated scripts.
“Faster than that,” she replied. “Here, I’ll show you.” And she did.
So began a love affair with writing systems which has culminated many years later in this book. It is written for people who, like my college-age self, are curious to know what the apparently meaningless squiggles of written symbols actually stand for, where they came from, and how they have adapted to and shaped the cultures that have used them through the centuries.
All of the world’s major scripts are here, though the inclusion of important extinct ones means that not every modern script is discussed in the detail its present cultural prominence would merit. Also given pride of place are some minor scripts whose stories I could not resist telling, while many other of the world’s smaller written traditions are at least mentioned. Enthusiasts may be disappointed, however, at the absence of Easter Island’s rongo-rongo, the virtual absence of Anatolian hieroglyphs, the scanty treatment of runes, or other slights and omissions. Scholars may equally find that their field of specialty is touched on too quickly, with a lack of the nuance they rightly see as its due. To them I offer my apologies, pleading the constraints of length. To other readers I offer this book as an invitation to a fascinating topic of global importance.
I would like to acknowledge here a number of people who have helped my work along the way. Of foundational importance was John McCarthy, whose inspired teaching and mentorship helped me become a phonologist, giving me the tools to understand many of the linguistic aspects of writing systems. I was also fortunate to receive his introduction to the editors at Wiley-Blackwell. My thanks also go to people who have taught me or helped me practice their scripts over the years: Joan Kim, Sandeepa Malik, Sheela Jeyaraj, and Lydia Peters. Thanks to Bill Poser for writing-system discussion, to the folks in the tablet room of the UPenn museum for showing me their work, and to Gillett Griffin for sharing with me Princeton’s Mayan collection (and his own). Thanks to Yukiyo Yoshihara and Keith Rodgers for the Japanese proverb quoted in chapter 7. Some of the ancient scripts included in the figures and occasionally in the text are in the Alphabetum Unicode font, designed by Juan-José Marcos and used here with my thanks.
At Wiley-Blackwell I would like to thank Ada Brunstein for enthusiastically supporting the book in its early days, and Danielle Descoteaux and Kelly Basner for seeing it through to the end. My gratitude also goes to the members of the production team, especially to Fiona Sewell for her expert copyediting. Thanks also to David Crystal and three anonymous reviewers who made a number of useful suggestions and corrections. Remaining errors – and stances taken on controversial topics – are entirely mine. Thanks to Susan Hines, Patricia Athay, John Kilgore, and especially Lisa Fishman Kim for their comments on chapter drafts.
The paradox of the writing life is that it is both essentially communicative and essentially solitary. My heartfelt thanks, therefore, to John Hawthorn for being there in those moments when I emerged from my cave. Finally, my love and everlasting gratitude go to my dear ones, Anand and Gitanjali, who gracefully combined constant support and love with the role of literary critics and (in Gita’s case) Chinese tutor.
1
The First IT Revolution
This sentence is a time machine. I wrote it a long time before you opened this book and read it. Yet here are my words after all this time, pristinely preserved, as good as new. The marvelous technology that allows the past to speak directly to the future in this way is by now so pervasive that we take it for granted: it is writing.
Imagine a world without writing. Obviously there would be no books: no novels, no encyclopedias, no cookbooks, no textbooks, no telephone books, no scriptures, no diaries, no travel guides. There would be no ball-points, no typewriters, no word processors, no Internet, no magazines, no movie credits, no shopping lists, no newspapers, no tax returns. But such lists of objects almost miss the point. The world we live in has been indelibly marked by the written word, shaped by the technology of writing over thousands of years. Ancient kings proclaimed their authority and promulgated their laws in writing. Scribes administered great empires by writing, their knowledge of recording and retrieving information essential to governing complex societies. Religious traditions were passed on through the generations, and spread to others, in writing. Scientific and technological progress was achieved and disseminated through writing. Accounts in trade and commerce could be kept because of writing. Nearly every step of civilization has been mediated through writing. A world without writing would bear scant resemblance to the one we now live in.
Writing is a virtual necessity to the societies anthropologists call civilizations. A civilization is distinguished from other societies by the complexity of its social organization, by its construction of cities and large public buildings, and by the economic specialization of its members, many of whom are not directly involved in food procurement or production. A civilization, with its taxation and tribute systems, its trade, and its public works, requires a sophisticated system of record keeping. And so the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, and (probably) India all developed a system of writing. Only the Peruvian civilization of the Incas and their predecessors did not use writing but instead invented a system of keeping records on knotted color-coded strings known as quipu.
Early writing had three essential functions. It was used in state administration and bureaucracy, in trade and commerce, and in religion. The ancient Sumerians invented writing for administration and trade. The ancient Chinese used it to record what questions they had asked of Heaven. The ancient Maya used it to establish the divine authority of kings, and the ancient Egyptians used it to gain eternal life. In the case of trade and adminstration, the advantage of keeping written records is clear. The natural affinity of writing with religion is less transparent, but may well stem from the relative permanence – immortality, almost – of the written word. From ancient Egypt to the modern world, writing has been used to mark burials (bestowing a form of immortality on the deceased), as well as to dedicate offerings and record the words of God. Literature, which we now tend to consider the essence of written language, was a much later development – and in the case of some writing systems, never developed at all.
Writing was invented from scratch at least three times: in Mesopotamia, in China, and in Mesoamerica. In Egypt and in the Indus Valley, writing may have been invented independently, or the basic idea may have been borrowed from Mesopotamia. When the first words were written down in what is now southern Iraq in the late fourth millennium BC, history was made in more senses than one, for it is writing that separates history from prehistory, the time that can be studied through written records from the time that can be studied only through archaeology. Thanks to the time-machine technology of writing, a selection of the thoughts and words of earlier peoples have come down to us.
Writing is one of the most important human inventions of all time. It is rivaled by agriculture, the wheel, and the controlled use of fire, but by little else. The goal of this book is to shed light on how this remarkable technology actually works, where it came from, what it has done for us, and why it looks so differ
ent in different parts of the world.
Writing was invented to solve a particular problem: information only existed if someone could remember it. Once it was gone from memory, it was gone for good. As human societies became more complex, those attempting to control them found that their memories were overtaxed. What they needed was an external storage device. What they came up with is writing.
Let’s say I owe you five dollars. If I say “I will repay you next April,” the words are gone the instant I utter them. They exist only in my memory and in the memory of anyone who has heard me. And who is to say I will continue to remember them? You may well want more lasting evidence of my promise. Nowadays I could record my words electronically, but the inventors of writing lived more than five millennia before the invention of the phonograph, the tape recorder, or the digital voice recorder. Nor was capturing human speech their intention; they needed a way to record information. The memories of non-literate people are good, but they are far from infallible, and the human memory was not made for book-keeping.
So is there any way to keep my promise alive? How can we be sure exactly what has been said, or thought, or done? I could tell someone else, who would tell someone else, who would tell someone else... and, as in the party game “telephone,” where each person whispers a message to the next person in a circle, the message would be very different by the end. But let’s say I write down the words on a piece of paper and pass the paper around the circle. The words are just the same at the end as at the beginning. There is no amusing party game left, but in recording the words we have achieved reliable transmission of information.
This is the essence of writing. Writing represents language, but it outlasts the spoken word. The oldest examples of writing have lasted over five thousand years. Others will last only until I press my computer’s delete key. But all have the potential to outlast the words I speak, or the words I put together in my head. A spoken (or mentally composed) message unfolds in time, one word replacing the previous one as it is uttered. Writing arranges the message in space, each word following the previous one in a line. Writing is therefore a process of translating time into space.
The Writing Revolution Page 1
