What constitutes a written language?

[Brian Smith]

A digression I went into in another thread got me thinking about a certain topic. I don't know if anybody really has the background to give this serious discussion, but it's worth a try. I'm really just venting to keep myself from veering the other thread off-topic.

I have been doing some reading on the totem poles created by pre-contact north-Pacific American tribespeoples, and it is starting to look like the system they used for creating them was somewhat more formalized than meets the eye. Now, the general understanding of them is that they tell some kind of story. Well, to me, I thought right away of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Well, could this be considered to be a form of writing? The reason that I think that it is arguably at least a sort of proto-writing is that Hieroglyphics and similar pictographic scripts did eventually give rise to the modern alphabet we know today. What I am thinking is this: if these tribespeople had been left relatively unmolested by either white man or other native American cultures that existed at the time, who did have a formalized system of writing actually, could this have eventually flourished into a system akin to written communication?

But I'm also wanting to get at the broader sense of what actually differentiates a true system of writing from mere tribal art. What is the limit?

A greatly under-appreciated system of writing, though, is a system of writing that once flourished in the Andes that was based on knots, called Quipu. It was the written language that was favored by the Incas, and it was used largely for recording numerical data.

Think about Quipu: some clever accountant, hundreds of years ago, must have had this idea. Based on what I've read about it, it's a beautiful system. Intellectual energy went into this creation. If this person had been born in our time, that person would have been teaching at MIT or something. This person, who had come from a pre-literate culture, actually had the thought processes that led to the creation of a system that could be used for book-keeping and possibly other forms of communication. That takes true intelligence, people. That is a truly fulfilled savant.

Of course, right now I'm pounding on my usual drum, which is trying to give people from supposedly primitive, illiterate cultures the credit that they are really due. I tend to think that a lot of these cultures we commonly regard as "primal" or something of that nature were really much more advanced than they are often given credit for by history.

You see, one thing that really gets under my skin is how some people talk about cultures like the native American cultures, for example, as if they were utterly innocent savages who lived close to nature and so on, talking as if being ignorant and pre-literate makes them so wholesome somehow. It's so trite, and I think it really ends up selling these people short in the long-run. It's really a big deal to me to give due credit to those in any society who bother to think. For that reason, primitive writing systems are of interest to me because, when I look at some of them, they turn out to be pretty damn brilliant when you get right down to it.

 

[csb999]

trivia perhaps . Thinking that if writing is the symbolic-recordable equivalent of a spoken series of sounds , so also would be musical notation an agreed-upon list of symbolic equivalents or labanotation . Quipu and the abacus and chinese characters are not the recording of sound , there is no exact equivalent . Historically I think "silent reading" is an unusual modern particularly English development . Thinking also given the pervasiveness of the internet we will all begin to use musical notation commonly as part of our alphabet .

 

[csb999]

actually you could argue that "spelling" is symbolic not phonetic in that there is no variation for the constant very considerable differences in pronunciation .

 

[ludolfo]

hmmm hope you weren't meaning me Mr Smith, cause it was me thatyn mentioned Native American myth which includes animals as teachers. I in no way patraonize or idealize them as 'innocent savages'. yet FAR more intelligent than the real fukin savages running this world at the moment

The best book I could recommend you that will take you on one of the most sensual journeys into the discovery of the origins of language (it is an amazing book, and had me looking away from the page and feeling things and observing) is The Spell of the Sensuous

dont even think about it. order it now!

 

[Brian Smith]

trivia perhaps . Thinking that if writing is the symbolic-recordable equivalent of a spoken series of sounds , so also would be musical notation an agreed-upon list of symbolic equivalents or labanotation . Quipu and the abacus and chinese characters are not the recording of sound , there is no exact equivalent . Historically I think "silent reading" is an unusual modern particularly English development . Thinking also given the pervasiveness of the internet we will all begin to use musical notation commonly as part of our alphabet .

That's a very good point. In fact, it seems almost like the Greek alphabet was designed for the specific purpose of recording poetry. The Greek writing system was so heavily geared toward poetry that I think Anaxagoras...or some philosopher who had a similar name...tried recording his ideas in the form of poetry. I might have him mixed-up with another early philosopher, but I know that there was at least one extremely early on who hadn't graduated yet to regular prose.

Have you ever heard the Iliad read in real Greek hexameter by someone who really grasps the flow of the language? It is actually quite pretty.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/greek/ili01.htm

I'm behind where I intended to be as of last October with my Greek, when I started getting serious about getting into these languages, but I'm almost to the point where I can read along as he recites this. It still makes my head spin a little bit, though, because my poor dumb brain was not made for learning new languages.

Anyway, you raise a very good point about how standards of musical notation are just as important as writing for the transmission of information, so we could arguably make a case for departing from a purely visual-centric concept of recorded information. In fact, the way I understand it, we use a somewhat different part of our brain for recalling music than we do for recalling speech.

As for your argument that Quipu and the Abacus do not constitute languages, first let me say that Quipu is known to have non-numerical components. It's just that, as far as anyone can tell, its primary use was for record-keeping. However, I would also argue that the recording of numerical information is just as important as the recording of other information.

I would approach you on the contention that the symbolic-recordable equivalent of spoken language is necessarily what constitutes a writing system. Remember, one of the earliest alphabets that was purely based on recorded sounds rather than morphemes was the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet it was descended from and the related Semitic alphabets, such as Hebrew and Arabic, retained vestiges of the idea that individual letters have specific meanings. That's where we get the idea of "Tetragrammaton," which just means "four letters." In "YHWH," or "Yodh-He-Wah-He," the letters translate into a sentence, which I argue is, "I am what I choose to be."

The thing is, though, early written languages like many of those written in Cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics were not based on the idea of recording sounds. They were descended from pictograms that there might have been different vocalizations for in different languages. Therefore, a line of text that was read as "Yodh-He-Waw-He" in one language and stated conveniently as "Ya-h-we-h" would be read in another language as "Jeh-Ha-Vah-Ha" in another, and then stated simply as "Je-ho-va-h." Because it's not an essentially phonetic language, either would be valid.

It's just as valid to pronounce it "java," really. I don't believe in supernatural spirits, but I don't have a problem with worshiping java. I could observe that religion all day, baby. Are there any other Javists in the peanut-gallery tonight?

So what is really a novel concept is the idea that written speech MUST inherently correspond with sounds, and I think that this is, at heart, a Hellenistic innovation. By "innovation," I mean innovations that occurred sometime before the 800's BCE. We have to take into consideration that, between the eruption of Thera and the time of Homer, there was a lot of social change. It had actually been less than a millennium ago, so it was still fresh in most people's minds that the world had virtually come to an end only a few hundred years ago.

Anyway, this is what creates a dilemma as to where we draw the line on what really constitutes writing! If we do away with the necessity of a system of writing needing to correspond with the syntax of a spoken language, we could make an argument that a reasonably organized system for telling stories with cave-paintings could be a written language as good as any!

So maybe what defines something as "writing" is whether it's an organized and standardized system for storing information in inanimate objects. This includes simplified pictographs that could reasonably be roughly interpreted with little or no instruction, and the reason that I say so is that Chinese writing is essentially a pictographic language, even though it's gotten to be so abstract that it would take years to really grasp how the morphemes are connected together unless you are Joseph Needham (the Chinese counterpart of Dr. Livingston).

But you do raise a very good point that metrical forms and musical traditions are just as important for the recording of information.

 

[Brian Smith]

Excuse me, where I said "Hellenistic," I meant "Hellenic."

 

[Brian Smith]

hmmm hope you weren't meaning me Mr Smith, cause it was me thatyn mentioned Native American myth which includes animals as teachers. I in no way patraonize or idealize them as 'innocent savages'. yet FAR more intelligent than the real fukin savages running this world at the moment

And they were practicing slash-and-burn agriculture when my ancestors stumbled off the boat.

My part of the country is famous for the longleaf pine. When Europeans first settled here, there were actually large forests of these trees, and the natives were actually practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. This is actually a highly misunderstood method of agriculture: far from being a destructive and wasteful method of cultivation, the burning of the pine forests was important for maintaining these ecosystems.

But what it also means is that the "wilderness" here was not really a "pristine" wilderness at all. They were actually carefully maintained parks that had been painstakingly and deliberately cultivated for centuries. This method was used to promote the growth of desirable plants in the region and clear away underbrush that made it hard to get around. In some ways, it's a very simple equivalent of covering the land with roads and sidewalks.

Well, there is a science to this, and we call it "forestry." The native Americans were practicing a science. They were doing it in a concerted, carefully planned way. They were using it to shape the world that they lived in. We just didn't understand it as such. We misinterpreted this behavior because we, as Europeans, had never really thought of a forest as a place that was tamed, controlled and carefully groomed over a really tremendous area. I'm sure that my ancestors had a concept of forestry, but I think that my ancestors may have viewed it somewhat differently.

By the same token, I think that we might have also been misinterpreting what worked for some of our tribal cultures similarly to our system of writing. Let me give you the Cherokee, for example: one of their customs was a system of trail-marking. They would actually tie down a young tree so that it pointed the way on the trail. If you actually have membership in the Boy Scouts of America and it's a truly good troop, you end up learning a lot about these old customs. I don't know if they could have wrapped their minds around the idea that the longleaf pines they were looking at were actually a crop.

In that case, let's venture into my broad interpretation of what constitutes a system of writing. If the Cherokee and other Native American peoples had a sophisticated, standardized system for marking their trails, I would argue that this is a means of symbolic communication that is very much like a system of writing.

And this would buttress my argument that it is a mistake to regard these tribal cultures as necessarily "preliterate." If they had a truly sophisticated system in place, then this is a peculiar form of "written" communication. This leaves an important question: how sophisticated was this system in actual practice? Could we organize the system into charts and group different variations into separate families?

And why is this important to me? Because decoding the "language" of these cultures--if there is one--could open up an ancient and forgotten biblioteca of native American history that may very well go back to Antiquity. It might not tell us words to recited poetry, but it would tell us information about who these people were, how they lived, what wars they might have fought, how populations may have shifted over the centuries, etcetera.

And I think that we ought to give some serious thought as to the extent to which we may have intruded upon a flourishing and thriving civilization.

 

[mightbe]

After having read most of the thread, I only have a few questions for you. Everything else seems tied up clean enough.

1. Where do you draw the line between graphic communication and and proto-language? Or do you think that there is not clear distinction?
2. Have you ever looked into the artwork of Keith Haring? Some of his artwork definitely communicates through common symbols (unique, but common to his work). He took these 'trademarks' and made something out of them. Some murals told stories or messages that could be quite complex. I think it could comfortably be seen as an anthropological foray into the most basic forms of non-verbal communication. It's like modernist cave art--maybe neoprimitivism is a better explanation. He actually did a lot of really cool things worth looking into.
2a. What would you consider this?

Food for thought.

 

[bankside]

Writing and symbolism are separate concepts I think, at least thinking of symbolism in the literary or artistic sense. You can write without symbolism; it would seem possible to use symbolism without writing too.

So, the totem pole is rich with symbolism, but to access the accompanying stories, you needed to know the oral history.

Without the oral history, to the extent that you might be able to infer the accompanying story from the symbolism carved into the pole, then it functions as a kind of language, but I think that aspect is limited.

 

[mightbe]

That was exactly the point I was alluding to. If one says that all graphic communication falls under the broad definition of written language, symbolism would have to be included. I think that's the one paradox in Brian's logic. Everything after that works out just fine.

Keith Haring's style is 100% symbolism, like the totem poles, but I do not fully subscribe to calling them written language. It's certainly something to think about. It takes someone 'fluent' in the symbols to decode them, which would have to be passed along orally. Written language is exactly the same. It's either based off of or supplementary to the spoken word.

Symbols~writing. But symbols≠writing. The line must be drawn somewhere. I'd personally vote for the point where new words can be constructed. If no new meanings for symbols (or sets of them) can be derived, it's not a fully-fledged written language.

My 2 cents.

 

[ludolfo]

...we, as Europeans, had never really thought of a forest as a place that was tamed, controlled and carefully groomed over a really tremendous area. I'm sure that my ancestors had a concept of forestry, but I think that my ancestors may have viewed it somewhat differently.

The patriarchal Europe, yes, not Old Europe.
I have info somewhere about how the forests were feared in patriarchal culture. A place of 'wildness and chaos'. The control-freak mindset.

My ancestor Luther Standing Bear wrote circa 1900:"when a man fears the forest, he will want to control the forest, and what he can’t control, he will want to destroy." (source)

 

[Brian Smith]

After having read most of the thread, I only have a few questions for you. Everything else seems tied up clean enough.

1. Where do you draw the line between graphic communication and and proto-language? Or do you think that there is not clear distinction?

You are hitting on exactly the point that I was getting at, and that is what is so difficult for me to really comprehend. To me, when you take into account pictographic systems of writing, where do you say "writing stops here, art begins here, and symbolism begins here"? To me, it seems to be tricky. The only consistent thing, as far as I can tell, that distinguishes written language from other things is that a written language follows a system of standards that are observed by other people that allows them to consistently derive from it a similar meaning.

2. Have you ever looked into the artwork of Keith Haring? Some of his artwork definitely communicates through common symbols (unique, but common to his work). He took these 'trademarks' and made something out of them. Some murals told stories or messages that could be quite complex. I think it could comfortably be seen as an anthropological foray into the most basic forms of non-verbal communication. It's like modernist cave art--maybe neoprimitivism is a better explanation. He actually did a lot of really cool things worth looking into.

2a. What would you consider this?

One is an orgy, and the other seems to be an alien invasion.

 

[Kulindahr]

Have you ever heard the Iliad read in real Greek hexameter by someone who really grasps the flow of the language? It is actually quite pretty.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/greek/ili01.htm

Nice to listen to, but for me he has an obnoxious accent that makes it a bit irritating.

I'm behind where I intended to be as of last October with my Greek, when I started getting serious about getting into these languages, but I'm almost to the point where I can read along as he recites this. It still makes my head spin a little bit, though, because my poor dumb brain was not made for learning new languages.

I can read along -- it's fun.

BTW, of course your head was made for learning new languages -- it's in our basic wiring. But different brains lose the flexibility to acquire them quickly at different rates.

I would approach you on the contention that the symbolic-recordable equivalent of spoken language is necessarily what constitutes a writing system. Remember, one of the earliest alphabets that was purely based on recorded sounds rather than morphemes was the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet it was descended from and the related Semitic alphabets, such as Hebrew and Arabic, retained vestiges of the idea that individual letters have specific meanings. That's where we get the idea of "Tetragrammaton," which just means "four letters." In "YHWH," or "Yodh-He-Wah-He," the letters translate into a sentence, which I argue is, "I am what I choose to be."

Interestingly, both the Pheonician and Greek used regular letters for numeric symbols, and in some uses retained some of the original pictogram content of various letters as well.

BTW, that rendering of the Tetragrammaton is really out there -- you're introducing an entirely new verb into the mix. If you want to get a philosophical concept out of it, "I Am Who Am" is quite sufficient: it's a statement of non-contingent being, a being with no reliance on outside cause or source -- with this idea it's been rendered as "I am the self-'amming' one", the contrast obviously with all contingent beings whose existence rests upon a prior cause.

The thing is, though, early written languages like many of those written in Cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics were not based on the idea of recording sounds. They were descended from pictograms that there might have been different vocalizations for in different languages. Therefore, a line of text that was read as "Yodh-He-Waw-He" in one language and stated conveniently as "Ya-h-we-h" would be read in another language as "Jeh-Ha-Vah-Ha" in another, and then stated simply as "Je-ho-va-h." Because it's not an essentially phonetic language, either would be valid.

I butt in here to point out that there was never a dialect in which YHWH was vocalized with a J sound, and using a V sound is a late occurrence. We got "Jehovah" because an ignorant scholar used the English version of German consonants imposed on a set of Hebrew consonants from one word mixed with the vowels from another -- it's a truly bastardized atrocity of language.

It's just as valid to pronounce it "java," really. I don't believe in supernatural spirits, but I don't have a problem with worshiping java. I could observe that religion all day, baby. Are there any other Javists in the peanut-gallery tonight?

Only if you abbreviate it from the ignorant bastardization.

So what is really a novel concept is the idea that written speech MUST inherently correspond with sounds, and I think that this is, at heart, a Hellenistic innovation. By "innovation," I mean innovations that occurred sometime before the 800's BCE. We have to take into consideration that, between the eruption of Thera and the time of Homer, there was a lot of social change. It had actually been less than a millennium ago, so it was still fresh in most people's minds that the world had virtually come to an end only a few hundred years ago.

To a large extent, I learned in Greek I (Attic), the common pronunciation of Greek words came about because of the great poets, whose works were read and recited in the same way, thus imparting a common standard. The event which finalized a universal pronunciation was a Greek-speaking foreigner named Alexander, who took a liking to winning battles and conquered the Hellenic world as a result.

Anyway, this is what creates a dilemma as to where we draw the line on what really constitutes writing! If we do away with the necessity of a system of writing needing to correspond with the syntax of a spoken language, we could make an argument that a reasonably organized system for telling stories with cave-paintings could be a written language as good as any!

So maybe what defines something as "writing" is whether it's an organized and standardized system for storing information in inanimate objects. This includes simplified pictographs that could reasonably be roughly interpreted with little or no instruction, and the reason that I say so is that Chinese writing is essentially a pictographic language, even though it's gotten to be so abstract that it would take years to really grasp how the morphemes are connected together unless you are Joseph Needham (the Chinese counterpart of Dr. Livingston).

But you do raise a very good point that metrical forms and musical traditions are just as important for the recording of information.

Pictogram forms of communication are insufficient to constitute writing since they lack the complexity for conveying conceptual structures as well as the spoken language, even at a minimum. Trade pidgin versions in the ancient near east needed five hundred words at a minimum, and tended to have more on the order of eight hundred. Without at least that many distinct elements, or clear was to make that many distinct elements out of structural components, there's not enough to call a language. Letters aren't necessarily the only way to go; writing wouldn't have to be linear but could be positional; for example a series of three-by-three grids where each subsymbol carried a different meaning depending on where the grid it appeared could carry a vocabulary of hundreds of words fairly easily. But totem poles for the most part are linear, merely vertical rather than horizontal.