Sociological Linguistics

[Brian M. Scott]

Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

> Robert writes:

> > Yes, I've noticed how, for example, in the history of writing
> > systems, the earliest writing systems were incredibly simple
> > logographic systems consisting of only several hundred to several
> > thousand signs and that reading and writing was so simple that it
> > was a specialized occupation that required many years of study to
> > master.

> I. J. Gelb writes: "For the primitive Indo-Europeans, Semites, or
> Amerindians the needs of writing were fulfilled in a *****simple*****
> picture or series of pictures (emphasis added)." Gelb, under whom I studied,
> spent a lifetime studying writing; and I do believe his characterization
> carries more weight than your opinions on the subject. Children --- with no
> training and only the availability of a crayon --- make the same kind of
> pictures that were the basis of early writing; and it is naif in the extreme
> to believe --- as you apparently do --- that logographs are somehow more
> complex than an alphabet.

Contra Gelb:

	[W]riting is defined as _a system of more or less permanent
	marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it
	can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention
	of the utterer_.  By this definition, writing is bound up with
	language; consequently, the widespread practice of recording
	by means of pictures (_pictograms_) of _ideas_ that are not
	couched in a specific linguistic form is excluded.  Such
	pictograms are often designated _forerunners_ of writing (e.g.
	Gelb 1952), but in fact writing systems (or _scripts_) do not
	develop from them (DeFrancis 1989).

[Peter T. Daniels in _The World's Writing Systems_, Daniels & Wm. Bright, eds.]

> The earliest writing system we know that followed pure logographs is the
> mixed writing system of Sumer.

That mixed writing system (or perhaps, in light of recent finds, the
roughly contemporary Egyptian mixed writing system) is the earliest
_writing_ system of which we have record.  Purely pictorial records that
precede these systems, not being writing, cannot sensu stricto be read.

> Robert continued:

> > Finally,
> > this gave way to the most complex system of all, the alphabet, in
> > which the tens of thousands of words in a language can be written
> > with around 30 signs and is so complicated that it takes all the
> > resources that the average 5-year-old can muster to learn it.

> Pat comments:

> Yes, actually alphabets are the most complex system of all --- how clever of
> you to recognize it! It requires analyzing a morpheme, which has meaning,
> into meaningless parts.

The Sumerians and Egyptians had already performed such analyses with
their mixed (logosyllabic) systems.  Moreover, you are confusing two
completely different (and often roughly complementary) things: the
amount of ingenuity needed to develop a system, and the ease and
simplicity of its use.

Brian M. Scott