Writing: How and Why It Developed and Changed
Traditional View of History:
Writing: How and Why It Developed and Changed
Traditional View of history:
- Eurocentricism: from savagery to civilization
- Important developments: e.g. writing
- Knowledge = power
o Central administration
§ Communication = blood then writing is the heart
o Communication
o More: persusasive
o Better
o In Technicolor
Questions:
Why would an empire lack literacy?
o E.g. West African nations
o
§ They had the reason to write but didn’t; why not?
Why write?
o Recordkeeping: governmental administration
o Religion: arm of government
§ Emergence of middle class spread literacy to the laity
o Commerce
o Entertainment
o Education
o Government
How many times did writing arise?
o Iraquis are illiterate but developed writing later
Why earlier/later?
How/why did it diffuse?
o Copied
o Inspiration
Adapting to language?
Chris’s Observations:
Language gets easier
o E,g from Latin to Italian
Educated laity = diverse use of language
Influence of influenced
o Proliferation of language often has something to do with prestige
§ Hunan Chinese script not liked by
What is language [in a technical sense]? [everything under this category affects the choice of system]
-Sound
-Phonemes: basic sounds [cah, ah, er]
-Tonemes [not present in English and European languages, but important in Chinese and Chinese-related languages; inflection changes meaning]
-Grammar [case and syntax]
o Inflections/agglutinations [agglutinations = Bask and Korean; addition of many affixes v. inflectional]
o Snytax
-Writing
o Alphabets: single character represents a sound or tonome
o Syllabaries: individual unit represents meaning [Cherokee or Japanese]
o Logograms: symbols that represent an idea [Chinese]
§ However, most languages are a combination of the above; not clear or pure
· E.g. hieroglyphics
§ Earliest systems = most complex
o Don’t pigeonhole
How?
-Developing is hard
o Prestige
o Making a writing system from scratch is difficult; most languages come from a common source or diffusion
-Common sourcres
-Bluprint
o Copied almost directly
o From Hebrew to …
-Idea Diffusion
o Have the idea of the language; marks can be made to customize system
o Cherokee
Who?
-
o Eventually diffused into use for religious writing and government records
-
-
o Governmental administration
-Ugarites
o First to develop an alphabet
o Based on cuneiform
o Eventually evolved into Hebrew—then to
o Phoniceans
§ For commerce; then to
§ Greek – Latin
o All were centralized governments with FH agricultural systems
-Brahmins [Brahmic]
o Based on Hebrew when Hebrews fled from
-Chinese – glyph
o Initially used for prediction/oracles
-Mayans
-King Sejong developed Korean as idea diffusion from Mongolian
-Sequoyah
o Most native American languages are syllabaries similar to the Latin alphabet
Why Not? [use writing]
-Bottom up need/ agricultural proliferation
-N/S v. E/W
-Geographical barriers
o E.g.
o
o Mountains, jungles $