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How writing has spread across the world
- NonNefarious 4y agoNow it's time to chronicle its demise, on the WWW.
- NonNefarious 4y agoMore pro-illiteracy lobbyists down-modding the truth.
- NonNefarious 4y agoAnd coming back for more. Pathetic.
- roenxi 4y agoIt is easy to forget how dominant the Europeans were from 1600->1950. seeing the spread of the Latin script really illustrates that the options used to be European ideas or irrelevance.
- WalterBright 4y agoThe printing press I'm sure had a lot to do with it. 150 million books were printed by 1600. Latin script is also very amenable to movable type printing.
- csomar 4y agoI think colonialism and the discovery of the "new world" with Europeans moving there, multiplying and imposing their culture.
- WalterBright 4y agoWriting (and printing) enabled them to impose their culture. For example, Pizzaro had the benefit of a thousand years of military history to draw from, thanks to writing and books. The Inca did not. Writing & printing is a huge mind multiplier. It's hard to overestimate it. (The Inca Empire was, of course, also an Empire formed by the Inca imposing their culture on other tribes.)
- hulitu 4y agoPizzaro was a very educated man. /s
- barrkel 4y agoPizzaro apparently grew up illiterate, fwiw.
- WalterBright 4y agoLikely trained by officers who were. The interactions between him and the Incas showed he was quite a bit more knowledgeable about strategy than they were. The Romans also had great success against the illiterate barbarian tribes, despite the latter being much larger and better armed.
- jaclaz 4y agoPizarro (one z, two r's) AFAIK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Pizarro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Pizarro or is it an alternate spelling used in English? Pizzaro sounds (to an Italian) like an invented word about someone that deals with pizza's.
- WalterBright 4y agoPizza has conquered the world, too!
- dbdjv6t 4y ago
- csomar 4y agoIt's still the case today. We are entering the era of American hegemony now, but since the 1600s it was mostly Western European ideas.
- kzrdude 4y agoAmerican hegemony was established by 1950s. It's a definite branch out of western europe but became its own thing. Like any big enough state it is now inward-focused.
- gpt5 4y agoIt's interesting how seeing how these scripts has spread, can teach us about the tight trading routes and connections different civilizations in the past had, initially spreading the logographic writing from Egypt to the rest of the world, and later spreading the phonetic script, again from Egypt area. It's also interesting how according to this map, the entire southern and western hemisphere use latin alphabet, and that the only two countries still using a logographic writing system are China and Japan. I wonder why this writing system still has a stronghold there.
- bojo 4y agoI'll highlight Japanese because that is what I know. A lot of imagery can be conveyed with choice of characters. Whether alternate readings in a novel, or brilliant neon signs on the street, you get a lot more information at a glance due to the overloaded meaning of the word being represented. Even more so in the case of compound words. In spoken language you say のむ (nomu) - to drink, and contextually it doesn't matter how it's used. However, in writing 飲む means to drink a liquid, while 呑む means to drink alcohol. Imagine an author using the former for the latter as a particular word choice, probably to convey something like an alcoholic drinking alcohol as if it were water! The language also has the problem of having a ridiculous amount of homophones. Deciding to use the more phonetic-like hiragana system inversely makes adult level reading even more difficult, not simpler. Texts would become longer (one character kanji vs multiple hiragana), and the implied meaning would be lost.
- dougmwne 4y agoHomophones don’t seems like they would be a problem intuitively. If a homophone can exist in the spoken language and retain meaning, then it would be able to exist in the written language too without a loss of meaning.
- bojo 4y agoTo your point I came across this a moment ago: https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-homophones-in-japanese/ https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-h... While there are a ridiculous amount of homophones (top 3 are 45, 38, 31!), it does look like the total number of words that include them is at 3.4%, increasing outside of daily language as you step into more specific topics. Not exactly small, but not as dramatic as I had pictured either. English apparently has 7-15% depending on what you reference by comparison. The biggest difference is that while they are individual words in English, they are only word components in Japanese, which is why I'd say it's arguably harder. Not impossible of course, children are taught with spaced out hiragana at first, eventually learning the more compact non-spaced version of the language as they incorporate more kanji to help with word boundaries.
- est 4y agotraditional Mongolian script was still taught and used in Inner Mongolia, PRC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script
- suzzer99 4y agoSo the Maya had a full writing system since about 300 BCE. I guess we're just going to ignore that?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danielodievich 4y agoMaya's system of writing is very comprehensively destroyed and is completely unrecoverable. A plug here for the fantastic Fall of Civilizations podcast (https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/). It's Maya episode is incredibly riveting and informative (episode 3, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnFaRXeep5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnFaRXeep5Y) and goes at length into that exact destruction.
- epicureanideal 4y agoYes, Fall of Civilizations is an amazing podcast. The Sumerian episode is also great, but all of them are equal to the best documentaries I’ve watched anywhere.
- MikePlacid 4y agoMaya writing system is decoded to a great extent, the history of which decoding is an interesting story in itself: http://share.nook.com/ean/9780500770610 http://share.nook.com/ean/9780500770610 Breaking the Maya Code (Third edition) by Michael D. Coe. And since the language (a group of descendent languages) is still in use, the writing system can potentially get back into active use. The probability (and benefits) seem low though.
- suzzer99 4y agoOn top of that it's even being taught to Maya schoolchildren, marking the first time a culture has ever lost their writing, then gotten it back.
- csomar 4y ago
- cozos 4y agoThings that I found interesting: - Indonesian is based on ancient Indian (forgot what it's called) - Germanic tribes uses Runes (Runic?) - Turkish is based on Persian (Farsi?)
- kzrdude 4y agoIt's one of all the places of the world, but too little is known about germanic history. So little was written down. Scandinavian/Nordic history is known from some written sources, but around the current location of Germany, there seems to be even less. It's thought that household use of runes could have been using carvings on wood (rune shapes are made to be easy to carve, mostly), and wood doesn't survive well, except we have some medieval finds of runes on wood.
- tablespoon 4y agoAre the Cree and Inuktitut really the major scripts in use across half of Canada's land area today, like the video implies?
- rrwo 4y agoPeople throughout the Americas has mnemonic writing systems, but apparently that doesn't count.
- kzrdude 4y agoGeographic map and solid colors are mostly never a faithful representation of something as mixed as which people, language etc are present in a place, so it comes with that caveat.
- ekianjo 4y agoA more interesting video or series of chart would be about the amount of work produced over time in every language, and its potential reach with the amount of literacy in every part of the world. Until recently almost nobody could read anything. Widespread access to books and the ability to read them is very, very recent.
- tmnvix 4y agoReally interesting. A bit disappointing to see all of Polynesia and other Pacific islands excluded.
- 73idiloyal 4y agoThe article contains a pretty cool surface-level visual of written language "coverage". I found it necessary to watch at 2x speed but toggling through the frames is neat. It's a funny comparison, but makes me ponder "writing spreading around the world" vs "adoption of internet around the world"
- jpfdez 4y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Papyrus-Invention-Books-Ancient-World/dp/0593318897#:~:text=The%20long%20and%20eventful%20history,very%20foundation%20of%20Western%20culture https://www.amazon.com/Papyrus-Invention-Books-Ancient-World....
- hulitu 4y agoI would like to thank white christian men for bringing writing to Africa and America. /s (i'm white). I'm pretty sure that Gengis Han was able to conquer Europe only doing calculations with his brain. /s
- eric4smith 4y agoCurrently learning to write Thai. For something really weird check out Burmese characters. I just can’t begin to wrap my head around it. But was Same with Thai in the beginning. Learning to read Thai was like being blind and then having the blindfold become less and less opaque each week. One day it just looks like something really weird and then you start to read street signs, it’s a very strange experience to start learning a language with a totally different character set than English.
- LtWorf 4y ago> totally different character set than English *latin
- omwow 4y agoI'm having the exact same experience, also with Thai funny enough, and the best way to describe it to me is like this: It feels like when I was a small kid learning to read for the first time. You see a bus driving by, and you now recognize a few letters, and then you mentally try to "compress" the letters into a word and suddenly: Woop! This bus is headed for Minburi! There's a little jolt of joy in that moment of recognition. Curious, why are you learning Thai?
- eric4smith 4y agoHaha that's how I felt the first time I was in the provinces and could find the Krung Thep bus. I'm living here.
- zppln 4y agoThe dark spots in the Brahmi region (India) during the first millennium BC are curious. Anyone know what's up with that?
- ryzvonusef 4y agoDeserts I think
- biorach 4y agoThere's a single entry for Ogham and Runes which is misleading because the evidence points to then being unrelated, independent developments
- msrenee 4y agoI don't know much about Ogham, but from what I've read, the runic alphabet was probably developed from an alphabet used in northern Italy. That one likely descends from the Etruscan alphabet. It's muddy, as are many things from 2000 years ago, but there seems to be a line of decent back to a preexisting alphabet.
- twerh3o4i234 4y ago[flagged]
- reactspa 4y agoIt's crazy that the Indus Valley script, the peak-fruit of a civilization, was completely lost. Shaking my head.