Many scripts but only one alphabet

Many scripts across the world have been developed independently of one another (Diringer 1953; Diringer 1960; Gelb 1963): Mesopotamian cuneiform 3500 BC (approximate dates here from Diringer 1962), Egyptian hieroglyphics 3000 BC (with perhaps some influence from cuneiform), Minoan or Mycenean 'Linear B' 1200 BC, Indus Valley script 3000-2400 BC, Chinese script 1500 BC, Mayan script AD 50, Aztec script AD 1400.

Scripts have complex antecedents. Most if not all scripts trace back directly or indirectly to some sort of picture writing, or, sometimes perhaps, at an even more elemental level, to the use of tokens. It has been suggested that the cuneiform script of the Sumerians, the first of all known scripts (c. 3500 BC), grew at least in part out of a system of recording economic transactions by using clay tokens encased in small, hollow but totally closed pod-like containers or bullae, with indentations on the outside representing the tokens inside (Schmandt-Besserat 1978) . Thus the symbols on the outside of the bulla - say, seven indentations - carried with them, inside the bulla, evidence of what they represented - say, seven little clay artifacts distinctively shaped, to represent cows, or ewes or other things not yet decipherable- as though words were always proffered with their concrete significations attached. The economic setting of such prechirographic use of tokens could help associate them with writing, for the first cuneiform script, from the same region as the bullae, whatever its exact antecedents, served mostly workaday economic and administrative purposes in urban societies. Urbanization provided the incentive to develop record keeping. Using writing for imaginative creations, as spoken words have been used in tales or lyric, that is, using writing to produce literature in the more specific sense of this term, comes quite late in the history of script.

Pictures can serve simply as aides-memoire, or they can be equipped with a code enabling them to represent more or less exactly specific words in various grammatical relation to eaeh other. Chinese character writing is still today basically made up of pictures, but pictures stylized and codified in intricate ways which make it certainly the most complex writing system the world has ever known. Pictographic communication such as found among early Native American Indians and many others (Mackay 1978, p. 32) did not develop into a true script because the code remained too unfixed. Pictographic representations of several objects served as a kind of allegorical memorandum for parties who were dealing with certain restricted subjects which helped determine in advance how these particular pictures relatcd to each other. But often, even then, the meaning intended did not come entirely clear.

Out of pictographs (a picture of a tree represents the word for a tree), scripts develop other kinds of symbols. ......

[Discussion of ideographs, rebus writing, Chinese, syllabaries and hybrids.]

The most remarkable fact about the alphabet no doubt is that it was invented only once. It was worked up by a Semitic people or Semitic peoples around the year 1500 BC, in the same general geographic area where the first of all scripts appeared, the cuneiform, but two millennia later than the cuneiform. (Diringer 1962, pp.l2l-2, discusses the two variants of the original alphabet, the North Semitic and the South Semitic.) Every alphabet in the world - Hebrew, Ugaritic, Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Tamil, Malayalam, Korean - derives in one way or another from the original Semitic development, though, as in Ugaritic and Korean script, the physical design of the letters may not always be related to the Semitic design.

Hebrew and other Semitic languages, such as Arabic, do not to this day have letters for vowels. A Hebrew newspaper or book still today prints only consonants (and so-called semi-vowels [j] and [w], which are in effect the consonantal forms of [i] and [u] ): if we were to follow Hebrew usage in English we would write and print 'cnsnts' for 'consonants'. The letter aleph, adapted by the ancient Greeks to indicate the vowel alpha, which became our roman 'a', is not a vowel but a consonant in Hebrew and other Semitic alphabets, representing a glottal stop (the sound between the two vowel sounds in the English 'huh-uh', meaning 'no') . Late in the history of the Hebrew alphabet, vowel 'points', little dots and dashes below or above the letters to indicate the proper vowel, were added to many texts, often for the benefit of those who did not know the language very well, and today in Israel these 'points' are added to words for very young children learning to read - up to the third grade or so. Languages are organized in many different ways, and the Semitic languages are so constituted that they are easy to read when words are written only with consonants.

....

When this is all said, however, about the Semitic alphabet, it does appear that the Greeks did something of major psychological importance when they developed the first alphabet complete with vowels. Havelock (1976) believes that this crucial, more nearly total transformation of the word from sound to sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy over other ancient cultures. The reader of Semitic writing had to draw on non-textual as well as textual data: he had to know the language he was reading in order to know what vowels to supply between the consonants. Semitic writing was still very much immersed in the non-textual human life world. The vocalic Greek alphabet was more remote from that world (as Plato's ideas were to be). It analyzed sound more abstractly into purely spatial components. It could be used to write or read words even from languages one did not know (allowing for some inaccuracies due to phonemic differences between languages). Little children could acquire the Greek alphabet when they were very young and their vocabulary limited. (It has just been noted that for Israeli schoolchildren to about the third grade vowel 'points' have to be added to the ordinary consonantal Hebrew script.) The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn. It was also internationalizing in that it provided a way of processing even foreign tongues. This Greek achievement in abstractly analyzing the elusive world of sound into visual equivalents (not perfectly, of course, but in effect fully) both presaged and implemented their further analytic exploits.

It appears that the structure of the Greek language, the fact that it was not based on a system like the Semitic that was hospitable to omission of vowels from writing, turned out to be a perhaps accidental but crucial intellectual advantage. Kerckhove (1981) has suggested that, more than other writing systems, the completely phonetic alphabet favors left- hemisphere activity in the brain, and thus on neurophysiological grounds fosters abstract, analytic thought.

The reason why the alphabet was invented so late and why it was invented only once can be sensed if we reflect on the nature of sound. For the alphabet operates more directly on sound as sound than the other scripts, reducing sound directly to spatial equivalents, and in smaller, more analytic, more manageable units than a syllabary: instead of one symbol for the sound ba, you have two, b plus a.

Sound, as has earlier been explained, exists only when it is going out of existence. I cannot have all of a word present at once: when I say 'existence', by the time I get to the '-tence', the 'exis-' is gone. The alphabet implies that matters are otherwise, that a word is a thing, not an event, that it is present all at once, and that it can be cut up into little pieces, which can even be written forwards and pronounced backwards: 'p-a-r-t' can be pronounced 'trap'. If you put the word 'part' on a sound tape and reverse the tape, you do not get 'trap', but a completely different sound, neither 'part' nor 'trap'. A picture, say, of a bird does not reduce sound to space, for it represents an object, not a word. It will be the equivalent of any number of words, depending on the language used to interpret it: oiseau, uccello, pajaro, Vogel, sae, tori, 'bird'.

All script represents words as in some way things, quiescent objects, immobile marks for assimilation by vision. Rebuses or phonograms, which occur irregularly in some pictographic writing, represent the sound of one word by the picture of another (the 'sole' of a foot representing the 'soul' as paired with body, in the fictitious example used above). But the rebus (phonogram), though it may represent several things, is still a picture of one of the things it represents. The alphabet, though it probably derives from pictograms, has lost all connection with things as things. It represents sound itself as a thing, transforming the evanescent world of sound to the quiescent, quasi-permanent world of space.

The phonetic alphabet invented by ancient Semites and perfected by ancient Greeks, is by far the most adaptable of all writing systems in reducing sound to visible form. It is perhaps also the least aesthetic of all major writing systems: it can be beautifully designed, but never so exquisitely as Chinese characters. It is a democratizing script, easy for everybody to learn. Chinese character writing, like many other writing systems, is intrinsically elitist: to master it thoroughly requires protracted leisure. The democratizing quality of the alphabet can be seen in South Korea. In Korean books and newspapers the text is a mixture of alphabetically spelt words and hundreds of different Chinese characters. But all public signs are always written in the alphabet alone, which virtually everyone can read since it is completely mastered in the lower grades of elementary school, whereas the 1800 han, or Chinese characters, minimally needed besides the alphabet for reading most literature in Korean, are not commonly all mastered before the end of secondary school. ...

[One long paragraph about King Sejong of Korea in 15th C and creation of the Korean alphabet.]

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