TODAY, PROFESSIONAL LINGUISTS design writing systems for unwritten languages by the method of blueprint copying. Most such tailor-made systems modify existing alphabets, though some instead design syllabaries. For example, missionary linguists are working on modified Roman alphabets for hundreds of New Guinea and Native American languages. Government linguists devised the modified Roman alphabet adopted in 1928 by Turkey for writing Turkish, as well as the modified Cyrillic alphabets designed for many tribal languages of Russia.
In a few cases, we also know something about the individuals who designed writing systems by blueprint copying in the remote past. For instance, the Cyrillic alphabet itself (the one still used today in Russia) is descended from an adaptation of Greek and Hebrew letters devised by Saint Cyril, a Greek missionary to the Slavs in the ninth century A.D. The first preserved texts for any Germanic language (the language family that includes English) are in the Gothic alphabet created by Bishop Ulfilas, a missionary living with the Visigoths in what is now Bulgaria in the fourth century A.D. Like Saint Cyril’s invention, Ulfilas’s alphabet was a mishmash of letters borrowed from different sources: about 20 Greek letters, about five Roman letters, and two letters either taken from the runic alphabet or invented by Ulfilas himself. Much more often, we know nothing about the individuals responsible for devising famous alphabets of the past. But it’s still possible to compare newly emerged alphabets of the past with previously existing ones, and to deduce from letter forms which existing ones served as models. For the same reason, we can be sure that the Linear B syllabary of Mycenaean Greece had been adapted by around 1400 B.C. from the Linear A syllabary of Minoan Crete.
At all of the hundreds of times when an existing writing system of one language has been used as a blueprint to adapt to a different language, some problems have arisen, because no two languages have exactly the same sets of sounds. Some inherited letters or signs may simply be dropped, when the sounds that those letters represent in the lending language do not exist in the borrowing language. For example, Finnish lacks the sounds that many other European languages express by the letters b, c, f, g, w, x, and z, so the Finns dropped these letters from their version of the Roman alphabet. There has also been a frequent reverse problem, of devising letters to represent “new” sounds present in the borrowing language but absent in the lending language. That problem has been solved in several different ways: such as using an arbitrary combination of two or more letters (like the English th to represent a sound for which the Greek and runic alphabets used a single letter); adding a small distinguishing mark to an existing letter (like the Spanish tilde ñ, the German umlaut ö, and the proliferation of marks dancing around Polish and Turkish letters); co-opting existing letters for which the borrowing language had no use (such as modern Czechs recycling the letter c of the Roman alphabet to express the Czech sound ts); or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).
The Roman alphabet itself was the end product of a long sequence of blueprint copying. Alphabets apparently arose only once in human history: among speakers of Semitic languages, in the area from modern Syria to the Sinai, during the second millennium B.C. All of the hundreds of historical and now existing alphabets were ultimately derived from that ancestral Semitic alphabet, in a few cases (such as the Irish ogham alphabet) by idea diffusion, but in most by actual copying and modification of letter forms.
That evolution of the alphabet can be traced back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, which included a complete set of 24 signs for the 24 Egyptian consonants. The Egyptians never took the logical (to us) next step of discarding all their logograms, determinatives, and signs for pairs and trios of consonants, and using just their consonantal alphabet. Starting around 1700 B.C., though, Semites familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs did begin to experiment with that logical step.
Restricting signs to those for single consonants was only the first of three crucial innovations that distinguished alphabets from other writing systems. The second was to help users memorize the alphabet by placing the letters in a fixed sequence and giving them easy-to-remember names. Our English names are mostly meaningless monosyllables (“a,” “bee,” “cee,” “dee,” and so on). But the Semitic names did possess meaning in Semitic languages: they were the words for familiar objects (’aleph = ox, beth = house, gimel = camel, daleth = door, and so on). These Semitic words were related “acrophonically” to the Semitic consonants to which they refer: that is, the first letter of the word for the object was also the letter named for the object (’a, b, g, d, and so on). In addition, the earliest forms of the Semitic letters appear in many cases to have been pictures of those same objects. All these features made the forms, names, and sequence of Semitic alphabet letters easy to remember. Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters’ original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One minor modification that readers will already have noticed is that the Semitic and Greek g became the Roman and English c, while the Romans invented a new g in its present position.
The third and last innovation leading to modern alphabets was to provide for vowels. Already in the early days of the Semitic alphabet, experiments began with methods for writing vowels by adding small extra letters to indicate selected vowels, or else by dots, lines, or hooks sprinkled over the consonantal letters. In the eighth century B.C. the Greeks became the first people to indicate all vowels systematically by the same types of letters used for consonants. Greeks derived the forms of their vowel letters by “co-opting” five letters used in the Phoenician alphabet for consonantal sounds lacking in Greek.
From those earliest Semitic alphabets, one line of blueprint copying and evolutionary modification led via early Arabian alphabets to the modern Ethiopian alphabet. A far more important line evolved by way of the Aramaic alphabet, used for official documents of the Persian Empire, into the modern Arabic, Hebrew, Indian, and Southeast Asian alphabets. But the line most familiar to European and American readers is the one that led via the Phoenicians to the Greeks by the early eighth century B.C., thence to the Etruscans in the same century, and in the next century to the Romans, whose alphabet with slight modifications is the one used to print this book. Thanks to their potential advantage of combining precision with simplicity, alphabets have now been adopted in most areas of the modern world.
WHILE BLUEPRINT COPYING and modification are the most straightforward option for transmitting technology, that option is sometimes unavailable. Blueprints may be kept secret, or they may be unreadable to someone not already steeped in the technology. Word may trickle through about an invention made somewhere far away, but the details may not get transmitted. Perhaps only the basic idea is known: someone has succeeded, somehow, in achieving a certain final result. That knowledge may nevertheless inspire others, by idea diffusion, to devise their own routes to such a result.
A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English. Because he was a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by devising an accounting system to help him keep track of his customers’ debts. He drew a picture of each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to represent the amount of money owed.
Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to go on to design a system for writing the Cherokee language. He again began by drawing pictures, but gave them up as too complicated and too artistically demanding. He next started to invent separate signs for each word, and again became dissatisfied when he had coined thousands of signs and still need
ed more.
Finally, Sequoyah realized that words were made up of modest numbers of different sound bites that recurred in many different words—what we would call syllables. He initially devised 200 syllabic signs and gradually reduced them to 85, most of them for combinations of one consonant and one vowel.
As one source of the signs themselves, Sequoyah practiced copying the letters from an English spelling book given to him by a schoolteacher. About two dozen of his Cherokee syllabic signs were taken directly from those letters, though of course with completely changed meanings, since Sequoyah did not know the English meanings. For example, he chose the shapes D, R, b, h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the shape of the numeral 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He coined other signs by modifying English letters, such as designing the signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.
Still other signs were entirely of his creation, such as , , and for ho, li, and nu, respectively. Sequoyah’s syllabary is widely admired by professional linguists for its good fit to Cherokee sounds, and for the ease with which it can be learned. Within a short time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy in the syllabary, bought a printing press, had Sequoyah’s signs cast as type, and began printing books and newspapers.
Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion. We know that Sequoyah received paper and other writing materials, the idea of a writing system, the idea of using separate marks, and the forms of several dozen marks. Since, however, he could neither read nor write English, he acquired no details or even principles from the existing scripts around him. Surrounded by alphabets he could not understand, he instead independently reinvented a syllabary, unaware that the Minoans of Crete had already invented another syllabary 3,500 years previously.
SEQUOYAH’S EXAMPLE CAN serve as a model for how idea diffusion probably led to many writing systems of ancient times as well. The han’gul alphabet devised by Korea’s King Sejong in A.D. 1446 for the Korean language was evidently inspired by the block format of Chinese characters and by the alphabetic principle of Mongol or Tibetan Buddhist writing. However, King Sejong invented the forms of han’gul letters and several unique features of his alphabet, including the grouping of letters by syllables into square blocks, the use of related letter shapes to represent related vowel or consonant sounds, and shapes of consonant letters that depict the position in which the lips or tongue are held to pronounce that consonant. The ogham alphabet used in Ireland and parts of Celtic Britain from around the fourth century A.D. similarly adopted the alphabetic principle (in this case, from existing European alphabets) but again devised unique letter forms, apparently based on a five-finger system of hand signals.
We can confidently attribute the han’gul and ogham alphabets to idea diffusion rather than to independent invention in isolation, because we know that both societies were in close contact with societies possessing writing and because it is clear which foreign scripts furnished the inspiration. In contrast, we can confidently attribute Sumerian cuneiform and the earliest Mesoamerican writing to independent invention, because at the times of their first appearances there existed no other script in their respective hemispheres that could have inspired them. Still debatable are the origins of writing on Easter Island, in China, and in Egypt.
The Polynesians living on Easter Island, in the Pacific Ocean, had a unique script of which the earliest preserved examples date back only to about A.D. 1851, long after Europeans reached Easter in 1722. Perhaps writing arose independently on Easter before the arrival of Europeans, although no examples have survived. But the most straightforward interpretation is to take the facts at face value, and to assume that Easter Islanders were stimulated to devise a script after seeing the written proclamation of annexation that a Spanish expedition handed to them in the year 1770.
As for Chinese writing, first attested around 1300 B.C. but with possible earlier precursors, it too has unique local signs and some unique principles, and most scholars assume that it evolved independently. Writing had developed before 3000 B.C. in Sumer, 4,000 miles west of early Chinese urban centers, and appeared by 2200 B.C. in the Indus Valley, 2,600 miles west, but no early writing systems are known from the whole area between the Indus Valley and China. Thus, there is no evidence that the earliest Chinese scribes could have had knowledge of any other writing system to inspire them.
Egyptian hieroglyphics, the most famous of all ancient writing systems, are also usually assumed to be the product of independent invention, but the alternative interpretation of idea diffusion is more feasible than in the case of Chinese writing. Hieroglyphic writing appeared rather suddenly, in nearly full-blown form, around 3000 B.C. Egypt lay only 800 miles west of Sumer, with which Egypt had trade contacts. I find it suspicious that no evidence of a gradual development of hieroglyphs has come down to us, even though Egypt’s dry climate would have been favorable for preserving earlier experiments in writing, and though the similarly dry climate of Sumer has yielded abundant evidence of the development of Sumerian cuneiform for at least several centuries before 3000 B.C. Equally suspicious is the appearance of several other, apparently independently designed, writing systems in Iran, Crete, and Turkey (so-called proto-Elamite writing, Cretan pictographs, and Hieroglyphic Hittite, respectively), after the rise of Sumerian and Egyptian writing. Although each of those systems used distinctive sets of signs not borrowed from Egypt or Sumer, the peoples involved could hardly have been unaware of the writing of their neighboring trade partners.
It would be a remarkable coincidence if, after millions of years of human existence without writing, all those Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies had just happened to hit independently on the idea of writing within a few centuries of each other. Hence a possible interpretation seems to me idea diffusion, as in the case of Sequoyah’s syllabary. That is, Egyptians and other peoples may have learned from Sumerians about the idea of writing and possibly about some of the principles, and then devised other principles and all the specific forms of the letters for themselves.
LET US NOW return to the main question with which we began this chapter: why did writing arise in and spread to some societies, but not to many others? Convenient starting points for our discussion are the limited capabilities, uses, and users of early writing systems.
Early scripts were incomplete, ambiguous, or complex, or all three. For example, the oldest Sumerian cuneiform writing could not render normal prose but was a mere telegraphic shorthand, whose vocabulary was restricted to names, numerals, units of measure, words for objects counted, and a few adjectives. That’s as if a modern American court clerk were forced to write “John 27 fat sheep,” because English writing lacked the necessary words and grammar to write “We order John to deliver the 27 fat sheep that he owes to the government.” Later Sumerian cuneiform did become capable of rendering prose, but it did so by the messy system that I’ve already described, with mixtures of logograms, phonetic signs, and unpronounced determinatives totaling hundreds of separate signs. Linear B, the writing of Mycenaean Greece, was at least simpler, being based on a syllabary of about 90 signs plus logograms. Offsetting that virtue, Linear B was quite ambiguous. It omitted any consonant at the end of a word, and it used the same sign for several related consonants (for instance, one sign for both l and r, another for p and b and ph, and still another for g and k and kh). We know how confusing we find it when native-born Japanese people speak English without distinguishing l and r: imagine the confusion if our alphabet did the same while similarly homogenizing the other consonants that I mentioned! It’s as if we were to spell the words “rap,” “lap,” “lab,” and “laugh” identically.
A related limitation is that few people ever learned to write these early scripts. Knowledge of writing was confined to professional scribes in the employ of the king or temple. For instance, there is no hint that Linear B was used or understood by any Mycena
ean Greek beyond small cadres of palace bureaucrats. Since individual Linear B scribes can be distinguished by their handwriting on preserved documents, we can say that all preserved Linear B documents from the palaces of Knossos and Pylos are the work of a mere 75 and 40 scribes, respectively.
The uses of these telegraphic, clumsy, ambiguous early scripts were as restricted as the number of their users. Anyone hoping to discover how Sumerians of 3000 B.C. thought and felt is in for a disappointment. Instead, the first Sumerian texts are emotionless accounts of palace and temple bureaucrats. About 90 percent of the tablets in the earliest known Sumerian archives, from the city of Uruk, are clerical records of goods paid in, workers given rations, and agricultural products distributed. Only later, as Sumerians progressed beyond logograms to phonetic writing, did they begin to write prose narratives, such as propaganda and myths.
Mycenaean Greeks never even reached that propaganda-and-myths stage. One-third of all Linear B tablets from the palace of Knossos are accountants’ records of sheep and wool, while an inordinate proportion of writing at the palace of Pylos consists of records of flax. Linear B was inherently so ambiguous that it remained restricted to palace accounts, whose context and limited word choices made the interpretation clear. Not a trace of its use for literature has survived. The Iliad and Odyssey were composed and transmitted by nonliterate bards for nonliterate listeners, and not committed to writing until the development of the Greek alphabet hundreds of years later.
Similarly restricted uses characterize early Egyptian, Mesoamerican, and Chinese writing. Early Egyptian hieroglyphs recorded religious and state propaganda and bureaucratic accounts. Preserved Maya writing was similarly devoted to propaganda, births and accessions and victories of kings, and astronomical observations of priests. The oldest preserved Chinese writing of the late Shang Dynasty consists of religious divination about dynastic affairs, incised into so-called oracle bones. A sample Shang text: “The king, reading the meaning of the crack [in a bone cracked by heating], said: ‘If the child is born on a keng day, it will be extremely auspicious.’”
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Page 26
