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Marks, images, pictographs, petroglyphs—as these forms grew stylized, conventional, and t...
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they approached what we understand as writing, but one more transition was crucial, from the representation of things to the...
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representation twice...
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There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then...
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signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound.
This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another.
Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people who cannot speak to one anothe...
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It employs at least fifty thousand symbols, about six thousand commonly used and known...
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Characters can be transformed in meaning by reorienting their elements: child to childbirth and man to corpse.
Chinese thus became an extreme case: the largest set of symbols, and the most meaningful individually.
fewer symbols, each carrying less information.
An intermediate stage is the...
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phonetic writing system using individual characters to re...
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A few hundred characters can serve a language. The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabe...
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The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversi...
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The alphabet was invented only once. All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor, which arose
near the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, sometime not much before 1500 BCE, in a region that became a politically unstable crossroads of culture, covering Palestine, Phoenicia, and Assyria.
To the east lay the great civilization of Mesopotamia, with its cuneiform script already a millennium old; down the shoreline to the southwest lay Egypt, where hieroglyph...
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Traders traveled, too, from Cyprus and Crete, bringing their own incompatible systems. With glyphs from Minoan, Hittite, and Ana...
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The ruling priestly classes were invested in their...
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Whoever owned the scripts owned the laws ...
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But self-preservation had to compete with the desire for r...
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The scripts were conservative; the new technolog...
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A stripped-down symbol system, just twenty-two signs, was the innovation of Semitic peo...
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The paleographer has a unique bootstrap problem.
The foremost twentieth-century authority on the alphabet, David Diringer, quoted an earlier scholar: “There never was a man who could sit down and say: ‘Now I am going to be the first man to write.’
The alphabet spread by contagion.
The new technology was both the virus and the vector of transmission.
It could not be monopolized, and it could not...
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Even children could learn these few, lightweight, semantic...
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H...
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Phoen...
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B...
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related Indian...
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The new civilization arising there brought the alphabet to a high ...
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L...
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Cyr...
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Greece had not needed the alphabet to crea...
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the Iliad and the Odyssey not only could have been but must have been composed and sung without benefit of writing.
meter, the formulaic redundancy, in effect the very poetry of the great works served first and foremost to aid memory.
incantatory power made of the verse a...
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to transmit a virtual encyclopedia of culture acr...
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His argument was first controversial and then overwhelmin...
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but only because the poems were written down, sometime in the sixth o...
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the transcribing of the Homeric epics—echoes through the ages. “It was something like a thu...
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Eric Havelock, a British classical scholar who followed Parry. “It constituted an intrusion into culture, with results that proved irreversible. It laid the basis for the destruction of the oral way of life and the oral modes of thought.”
The transcription of Homer converted this great poetry into a new medium and made of it something unplanned: from a momentary string of words created every time anew by the rhapsode and fading again even as it echoed in the listener’s ear, to a fixed but portable line on a papyrus sheet.
In the meantime the written word helped more mundane forms of discourse: petitions to the gods, statements of law, and economic agreements.
The language of an oral culture had to be wrenched into new forms; thus a new vocabulary emerged.
born of the natural impulse toward imitation that begins in childhood.
