The idea that modern writing scripts trace to either Egypt or China stopped me in my tracks, but a quick tour through Wikipedia tells me it’s basically true!
However, based on my memory, I can count one exception. The Cherokee syllabary was invented by a single illiterate individual in the 19th Century.
There's also Korean writing, which legendarily was invented by a Korean king to give them what China had. Which, as the case of Sequoyah proves, is possible.
The following contains some inaccuracies, but will serve as a first approach:
Koreans already were writing with Chinese characters. But Chinese uses thousands of characters, and only highly educated people could read and write.
So the king asked his advisors to come up with a writing system that could be used by everyone.
Those advisors probably took inspiration from Indic writing systems, which are abugidas, themselves descended from some abjad (some Aramaic or Protoaramaic variant).
Abjads, being used for Semitic languages, where consonants give the "core" of the meaning of a word, and vowels just modify it (e.g. book vs books vs to write, ... see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-T-B) originally only wrote consonants.
Abugidas, in contrast write syllables typically consisting of one or more consonants plus an implied "a" vowel (the most common vowel in those languages), or explicit vowel marks for other vowels, or a "virama/halant/pulli" vowel suppressor.
Korean writes syllable blocks consisting of symbols for leading consonant, vowels, and optional trailing consonant.
When I read this sentence I thought, "wait, what about India?" But it turns out Devanagari is related to Aramaic. Woah. What a long, sprawling path the Phoenician writing system's descendants took through the ancient world.
Well it's mostly, but not entirely, correct. An ABJAD is in fact an ALPHABET. A consonantal alphabet. He failed to mention this (maybe he didn't know it). And it was invented by the Canaanites (developed extensively from the hieroglyphics). Our alphabets therefore trace back to Canaan, and more particularly to modern-day Lebanon where the Phoenicians spread their version of the alphabet from.
Hi Jack, You seem to be using a different definition of abjad vs alphabet than Rogers does in his book, and therefore the one I'm using in the article. That's fair enough, but it doesn't make Rogers' definition incorrect given the terms that he is using.
Hi Colin, thanks for the response. As far as I know, Rogers basically defines it as a script that writes mostly consonants, but not vowels. But this is exactly what I'm talking about. An abjad does not use vowels, but this doesn't make it a non-alphabet. While I take Roger's definition (following Daniel) to be flawed, it is really the inference you drew from it (which many others also have) that I take some issue with. And that is that an abjad is non-alphabetical in its symbology/ that it uses a different kind of representation than "true alphabets." This just isn't true. From my other comment further down below--
"The distinction between alphabet and abjad is controversial because it often leads to the misapprehension that an abjad is a fundamentally different writing system. This is false. They are fundamentally the same: they each use discrete symbols (letters) to represent basic sounds (as opposed to the syllabaries that came before, which represented whole consonants instead). The only difference is that an abjad (mostly) lacks vowels. But the addition of vowels (done by the Greeks) didn't change the actual system of writing, which they had adopted from the Phoenicians. Instead, they just added more of the *same kinds of symbols* but which now represented *more sounds* (vowels). So, given that they used the same manner of symbolizing used by the Phoenician alphabet (and the Proto-Sinaitic script that it originated from), the Greek alphabet cannot be said to be the first alphabet; it can only be said to be the first *vowel-containing* alphabet."
The script still traces its origins back to the Roman alphabet and therefore to Egyptian hieroglyphs. What people mean when they say "writing was invented 4 times" is that *the idea of* writing was invented 4 times. Writing was invented many more times than the idea of writing, e.g. Cherokee, Tangut, Hangeul, and if you want to get really pedantic about it, every time it gets adapted to write another language.
I remember learning the origins of the letter A as a child too and being thoroughly fascinated by it as well! And I've learned languages where I can too - French, German, Latin, Spanish, Japanese, a bit of Welsh, random bits of Romanian... I loved learning the writing system in Japanese too, which is partly what interested me, and the chance to learn a non-European language.
I've gone deaf, annoyingly, so I've been learning British Sign Language and it's fascinating - in some ways, it draws on symbols like Chinese, in that you sort of show/mime the "thing". Others involve a bit of finger-spelling (but you could never finger-spell a whole language - it'd take forever).
A really interesting example are the signs for silver and gold. They begin with either a finger-spelled g or s, then both are followed by a sign which involves sort of waggling your fingers to signify something sparkly. Isn't that ingenious? And all invented by Deaf people!
Sign languages have their own grammars, so BSL puts the question word at the end of the sentence - just like I was used to doing in Japanese. But there's even more to sign than that because if you ask a question, you lean forwards and raise your eyebrows to signify it's a question! It's so fascinating to learn, but also bloody useful when I'm struggling to follow what someone's saying. In fact, my youngest brother is selective mute and although he won't verbalise, he's being taught sign so for the first time in years we can talk to each other! Pinker's theory of "the language instinct" is potent.
Thank you for sharing that, Helen! The structure of signed languages is extremely interesting, and hasn't had nearly enough attention from linguists over the years.
Very true. I think it's probably because Deaf communities can be quite closed and don't want to be under the microscope. But it's interesting - I was watching something not-British on telly recently where someone signed and I recognised some of it. It's interesting because the “mime” aspect of some signs will work between some cultures.
I suppose it's a bit like recognising the Chinese character for “tea” - as soon as you realise it's a little teahouse, you can't unsee it, even if you're not Chinese!
I went to college with a guy who'd learned Irish Sign Language and a bit of BSL. He said learning American Sign Language was much easier because ISL and ASL are both originally based on French Sign Language. He could talk to LSF users even though he knew no French!
I think BSL and Canadian Sign Language as I signed "where's my shopping?" During a meeting as an example of sign, and there was Canada's woman there who is a sign interpreter and she knew exactly what I meant!
Interestingly, there's regional variation in sign, so if you watch videos from the Exeter school, some signs are different from other schools. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised it has those localisms because language does, but also, you have Deaf children in school talking to each other and local signs evolve.
I think all sign comes in regional accents and school accents; probably has from the beginning. Certainly the speed at which people sign differs by region; people in the US South sign slower and people from NYC sign faster, just like us people who speak aloud.
The difference between English and French Canadian sign mirrors the difference in the spoken languages.
I recall when Arnold Schwartzenegger was elected governor of California. Obviously that's WAY too long to finger-spell, so it quickly became an arm flex to denote muscles (just like we speakers do) with an added A drawn in the air above the bicep with the other hand. Perfectly logical; I got it the first time I saw it used.
There's several stories I've heard about where deaf children have invented their own sign. Like in France, where the hearing guy invented a sign language (I think it was basically finger spelling) and the children ignored it and invented their own! Then there was a deaf school where they decided not to teach sign at all, so, again, the pupils in invented their own.
My partner and I have invented some signs of our own which we only use between us, when we can't find the word we want. Although we do stick to standard BSL - it's just some obscure things we have trouble finding the right signs for!
When I was seven years old, I was interested in dinosaurs. And then volcanoes. In the back of the volcano book was a page on geothermal energy: generating electricity from the heat of the earth (often close to volcanoes). Wow! What a cool concept. And then, the first oil crisis hit. People waited in line for hours to get gas. Adults were all worked up about it. I knew then that energy would be a big deal for my adult life, and that we needed to find sustainable ways to harvest it (like geothermal energy). Here I am, 50 years later, still working in that field of sustainable energy.
Wonderful! It just goes to show you: sometimes the kids know very early exactly what they want to do... and parents should thank their lucky stars every kid doesn't fixate on astronaut for too long.
Fascinating story indeed. And it easy to understand how and why the Roman alphabet adopted from the Greek was later adopted by Anglo-Saxons people converted to Christianism.
But what about the old English runic alphabet ? How and from who did the German tribes get it ?
The origin of the runic alphabets is a very interesting question, and one which is still being debated by scholars. They seem to have come from some Greek-derived alphabet, but which one (and under what circumstances) is still a mystery!
Another great article. Memories of stretching out on the floor while everyone listened to radio dramas while I read the 1940s Britannica are priceless.
Anthony is right! I'll just add that the f => h change from Latin to Spanish may not be due to Basque influence, but could also have been driven by influence of other, Indo-European languages, or due to tendencies and variation internal to Latin.
Interesting abt the silent 'h' in Spanish replacing an unvoiced 'f'. And I beleev many words in Spanish that begin with 'h' do not derive from an f-beginning word (e.g., hijo, hermano, hermoso, herencia, hierba), so there must hav bin multiple influences, as you point out.
Basque (Euskara) didn't evolve in isolation, but all of its relatives died off. I believe it became a written language when the Basque region became part of the Roman Empire, and this is first writing system was the Latin alphabet.
One interesting fact about Basque is that it doesn't really have an 'f' sound; as a result many Spanish words have an 'h' where the Latin root had an 'f'. For example: ferrum -> hierro..
In your studies, have you learned any of the languages that were written with cuneiform? I'm wondering about the various symbols they used. In the Romance/Germanic languages, the Latin alphbet is used for all of them, and a given letter used for pretty much the same sound in all the languages. So for example, the letter T is pronounced the same in English, Latin, French, and Norwegian (yes, I know there are exceptions, but the basic idea is true.) Now, what I understand about cuneiform is that the various signs stood for syllables -- ba, da, ta, ma etc. Were the same signs used for the same sounds in Akkadian as in Sumerian? I can't quite see the various peoples re-assigning new sounds to old signs, but folks have done stranger things. (I believe some Latin letters in Irish Gaelic have been re-assigned that way.)
I've not studied any of the languages written with a cuneiform script but, from what I've read, the situation is extremely complicated there: there are multiple cuneiform writing systems, with different structures, used to write languages from entirely different families.
How universal is the notion that an alphabet has an order (ABC...XYZ)? It's always struck me as quite odd, since the placement of a letter within an ordered alphabet is completely irrelevant. I assume the Greek alphabet shares this property (hence speaking of the alpha and the omega, unless that was a later accretion), but I don't know if it goes back farther.
That's easy to explain. As soon as you need to teach an alphabet, you need an ordering for that alphabet. Of course there can be different orderings, e.g. the Japanese syllabaries had an ordering based on the pangramic poem Iroha, but also another one (gojūon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon) based on traditional Sanskrit ordering, which is the one commonly used today.
That description of Egyptian hieroglyphs reminds me somewhat of Chinese characters, with characters read both for meaning and sound, and homophones and near-homophones distinguished in writing by radicals (e.g. 風 feng 'wind', 瘋 feng 'mad', 楓 feng 'maple'). And another parallel is that Chinese characters too were simplified into pure phonemes when the Japanese got hold of them (although, as I'm sure you know, they also kept the originals). It would seem that those who invent writing independently prefer logographic scripts, and the desire of foreign borrowers not to have to reinvent from scratch is what leads to syllabaries, abjads and alphabets.
The idea that modern writing scripts trace to either Egypt or China stopped me in my tracks, but a quick tour through Wikipedia tells me it’s basically true!
However, based on my memory, I can count one exception. The Cherokee syllabary was invented by a single illiterate individual in the 19th Century.
Right! Cherokee is a glorious exception!
He got the idea from the Latin alphabet.
There's also Korean writing, which legendarily was invented by a Korean king to give them what China had. Which, as the case of Sequoyah proves, is possible.
The following contains some inaccuracies, but will serve as a first approach:
Koreans already were writing with Chinese characters. But Chinese uses thousands of characters, and only highly educated people could read and write.
So the king asked his advisors to come up with a writing system that could be used by everyone.
Those advisors probably took inspiration from Indic writing systems, which are abugidas, themselves descended from some abjad (some Aramaic or Protoaramaic variant).
Abjads, being used for Semitic languages, where consonants give the "core" of the meaning of a word, and vowels just modify it (e.g. book vs books vs to write, ... see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-T-B) originally only wrote consonants.
Abugidas, in contrast write syllables typically consisting of one or more consonants plus an implied "a" vowel (the most common vowel in those languages), or explicit vowel marks for other vowels, or a "virama/halant/pulli" vowel suppressor.
Korean writes syllable blocks consisting of symbols for leading consonant, vowels, and optional trailing consonant.
When I read this sentence I thought, "wait, what about India?" But it turns out Devanagari is related to Aramaic. Woah. What a long, sprawling path the Phoenician writing system's descendants took through the ancient world.
Well it's mostly, but not entirely, correct. An ABJAD is in fact an ALPHABET. A consonantal alphabet. He failed to mention this (maybe he didn't know it). And it was invented by the Canaanites (developed extensively from the hieroglyphics). Our alphabets therefore trace back to Canaan, and more particularly to modern-day Lebanon where the Phoenicians spread their version of the alphabet from.
Hi Jack, You seem to be using a different definition of abjad vs alphabet than Rogers does in his book, and therefore the one I'm using in the article. That's fair enough, but it doesn't make Rogers' definition incorrect given the terms that he is using.
Hi Colin, thanks for the response. As far as I know, Rogers basically defines it as a script that writes mostly consonants, but not vowels. But this is exactly what I'm talking about. An abjad does not use vowels, but this doesn't make it a non-alphabet. While I take Roger's definition (following Daniel) to be flawed, it is really the inference you drew from it (which many others also have) that I take some issue with. And that is that an abjad is non-alphabetical in its symbology/ that it uses a different kind of representation than "true alphabets." This just isn't true. From my other comment further down below--
"The distinction between alphabet and abjad is controversial because it often leads to the misapprehension that an abjad is a fundamentally different writing system. This is false. They are fundamentally the same: they each use discrete symbols (letters) to represent basic sounds (as opposed to the syllabaries that came before, which represented whole consonants instead). The only difference is that an abjad (mostly) lacks vowels. But the addition of vowels (done by the Greeks) didn't change the actual system of writing, which they had adopted from the Phoenicians. Instead, they just added more of the *same kinds of symbols* but which now represented *more sounds* (vowels). So, given that they used the same manner of symbolizing used by the Phoenician alphabet (and the Proto-Sinaitic script that it originated from), the Greek alphabet cannot be said to be the first alphabet; it can only be said to be the first *vowel-containing* alphabet."
The script still traces its origins back to the Roman alphabet and therefore to Egyptian hieroglyphs. What people mean when they say "writing was invented 4 times" is that *the idea of* writing was invented 4 times. Writing was invented many more times than the idea of writing, e.g. Cherokee, Tangut, Hangeul, and if you want to get really pedantic about it, every time it gets adapted to write another language.
I remember learning the origins of the letter A as a child too and being thoroughly fascinated by it as well! And I've learned languages where I can too - French, German, Latin, Spanish, Japanese, a bit of Welsh, random bits of Romanian... I loved learning the writing system in Japanese too, which is partly what interested me, and the chance to learn a non-European language.
I've gone deaf, annoyingly, so I've been learning British Sign Language and it's fascinating - in some ways, it draws on symbols like Chinese, in that you sort of show/mime the "thing". Others involve a bit of finger-spelling (but you could never finger-spell a whole language - it'd take forever).
A really interesting example are the signs for silver and gold. They begin with either a finger-spelled g or s, then both are followed by a sign which involves sort of waggling your fingers to signify something sparkly. Isn't that ingenious? And all invented by Deaf people!
Sign languages have their own grammars, so BSL puts the question word at the end of the sentence - just like I was used to doing in Japanese. But there's even more to sign than that because if you ask a question, you lean forwards and raise your eyebrows to signify it's a question! It's so fascinating to learn, but also bloody useful when I'm struggling to follow what someone's saying. In fact, my youngest brother is selective mute and although he won't verbalise, he's being taught sign so for the first time in years we can talk to each other! Pinker's theory of "the language instinct" is potent.
Thank you for sharing that, Helen! The structure of signed languages is extremely interesting, and hasn't had nearly enough attention from linguists over the years.
Very true. I think it's probably because Deaf communities can be quite closed and don't want to be under the microscope. But it's interesting - I was watching something not-British on telly recently where someone signed and I recognised some of it. It's interesting because the “mime” aspect of some signs will work between some cultures.
I suppose it's a bit like recognising the Chinese character for “tea” - as soon as you realise it's a little teahouse, you can't unsee it, even if you're not Chinese!
I went to college with a guy who'd learned Irish Sign Language and a bit of BSL. He said learning American Sign Language was much easier because ISL and ASL are both originally based on French Sign Language. He could talk to LSF users even though he knew no French!
How extraordinary!
I think BSL and Canadian Sign Language as I signed "where's my shopping?" During a meeting as an example of sign, and there was Canada's woman there who is a sign interpreter and she knew exactly what I meant!
Interestingly, there's regional variation in sign, so if you watch videos from the Exeter school, some signs are different from other schools. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised it has those localisms because language does, but also, you have Deaf children in school talking to each other and local signs evolve.
I think all sign comes in regional accents and school accents; probably has from the beginning. Certainly the speed at which people sign differs by region; people in the US South sign slower and people from NYC sign faster, just like us people who speak aloud.
The difference between English and French Canadian sign mirrors the difference in the spoken languages.
I recall when Arnold Schwartzenegger was elected governor of California. Obviously that's WAY too long to finger-spell, so it quickly became an arm flex to denote muscles (just like we speakers do) with an added A drawn in the air above the bicep with the other hand. Perfectly logical; I got it the first time I saw it used.
Oh, I love the sign the sign for Arnie!
There's several stories I've heard about where deaf children have invented their own sign. Like in France, where the hearing guy invented a sign language (I think it was basically finger spelling) and the children ignored it and invented their own! Then there was a deaf school where they decided not to teach sign at all, so, again, the pupils in invented their own.
My partner and I have invented some signs of our own which we only use between us, when we can't find the word we want. Although we do stick to standard BSL - it's just some obscure things we have trouble finding the right signs for!
Your story is wonderful. Mine is similar.
When I was seven years old, I was interested in dinosaurs. And then volcanoes. In the back of the volcano book was a page on geothermal energy: generating electricity from the heat of the earth (often close to volcanoes). Wow! What a cool concept. And then, the first oil crisis hit. People waited in line for hours to get gas. Adults were all worked up about it. I knew then that energy would be a big deal for my adult life, and that we needed to find sustainable ways to harvest it (like geothermal energy). Here I am, 50 years later, still working in that field of sustainable energy.
Wonderful! It just goes to show you: sometimes the kids know very early exactly what they want to do... and parents should thank their lucky stars every kid doesn't fixate on astronaut for too long.
Fascinating story indeed. And it easy to understand how and why the Roman alphabet adopted from the Greek was later adopted by Anglo-Saxons people converted to Christianism.
But what about the old English runic alphabet ? How and from who did the German tribes get it ?
The origin of the runic alphabets is a very interesting question, and one which is still being debated by scholars. They seem to have come from some Greek-derived alphabet, but which one (and under what circumstances) is still a mystery!
Colin, I am enjoying your discussions immensely. Thanks for doing this! (English Lang & Lit, U of T)
Thank you very much, Anne!
And now we see teenagers in their own way coming full circle communication in text speak (lol, rofl, imho etc) and emojis. 🧐
Another great article. Memories of stretching out on the floor while everyone listened to radio dramas while I read the 1940s Britannica are priceless.
Thanks, John! They may have been pricey but I think we got our money's worth in the end!
Great 👍🏻 stuff- 🥰 love it 😊
Thank you!
I just found out about your newsletter. I originally discovered you from your conlanging series. I will be reading this often!
Thank you and biirai!
The history of linguistics has always fascinated me. Thanks for sharing this.
Thank you for reading!
What abt Basque, a language evolved in isolation, I believe? Did it develop an alphabet?
Anthony is right! I'll just add that the f => h change from Latin to Spanish may not be due to Basque influence, but could also have been driven by influence of other, Indo-European languages, or due to tendencies and variation internal to Latin.
Interesting abt the silent 'h' in Spanish replacing an unvoiced 'f'. And I beleev many words in Spanish that begin with 'h' do not derive from an f-beginning word (e.g., hijo, hermano, hermoso, herencia, hierba), so there must hav bin multiple influences, as you point out.
Basque (Euskara) didn't evolve in isolation, but all of its relatives died off. I believe it became a written language when the Basque region became part of the Roman Empire, and this is first writing system was the Latin alphabet.
One interesting fact about Basque is that it doesn't really have an 'f' sound; as a result many Spanish words have an 'h' where the Latin root had an 'f'. For example: ferrum -> hierro..
In your studies, have you learned any of the languages that were written with cuneiform? I'm wondering about the various symbols they used. In the Romance/Germanic languages, the Latin alphbet is used for all of them, and a given letter used for pretty much the same sound in all the languages. So for example, the letter T is pronounced the same in English, Latin, French, and Norwegian (yes, I know there are exceptions, but the basic idea is true.) Now, what I understand about cuneiform is that the various signs stood for syllables -- ba, da, ta, ma etc. Were the same signs used for the same sounds in Akkadian as in Sumerian? I can't quite see the various peoples re-assigning new sounds to old signs, but folks have done stranger things. (I believe some Latin letters in Irish Gaelic have been re-assigned that way.)
I've not studied any of the languages written with a cuneiform script but, from what I've read, the situation is extremely complicated there: there are multiple cuneiform writing systems, with different structures, used to write languages from entirely different families.
How universal is the notion that an alphabet has an order (ABC...XYZ)? It's always struck me as quite odd, since the placement of a letter within an ordered alphabet is completely irrelevant. I assume the Greek alphabet shares this property (hence speaking of the alpha and the omega, unless that was a later accretion), but I don't know if it goes back farther.
That's easy to explain. As soon as you need to teach an alphabet, you need an ordering for that alphabet. Of course there can be different orderings, e.g. the Japanese syllabaries had an ordering based on the pangramic poem Iroha, but also another one (gojūon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon) based on traditional Sanskrit ordering, which is the one commonly used today.
That description of Egyptian hieroglyphs reminds me somewhat of Chinese characters, with characters read both for meaning and sound, and homophones and near-homophones distinguished in writing by radicals (e.g. 風 feng 'wind', 瘋 feng 'mad', 楓 feng 'maple'). And another parallel is that Chinese characters too were simplified into pure phonemes when the Japanese got hold of them (although, as I'm sure you know, they also kept the originals). It would seem that those who invent writing independently prefer logographic scripts, and the desire of foreign borrowers not to have to reinvent from scratch is what leads to syllabaries, abjads and alphabets.
I love that you fell in love with linguistics as a child looking at a book.
Fascinating stuff! More more more plz!