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Often on such artefacts they use "I" to refer to the thing itself, but it appears that the author did not do that here? I wonder if it says something about how
by vintermann 4y ago
Often on such artefacts they use "I" to refer to the thing itself, but it appears that the author did not do that here?
I wonder if it says something about how comfortable they were with writing: how strange was it to them that you could make a lifeless thing "speak", and carry words? The stranger it was to them, I would think, the more they might think of it as magical and let the item speak in an "I" voice.
Maybe there are some parallels to that in how we make large language models talk to us. We feel it as something unsettling and almost magical that we can make the models talk to us as if they were people, but when you think about it, objects carrying words on their own at all was an even bigger leap.
- 082349872349872 4y agoOne theory about the development of writing goes as follows: - always take inventory by counting stuff in the warehouse - make clay tokens (1:1 with warehouse items) and keep them in the office (now you know when things in the warehouse get legs and walk away) - keep the tokens in the office in sealed clay balls (so someone can't five finger discount out of the warehouse and pilfer the right number of office tokens) - make marks on the clay balls (1:1 with the tokens) so you don't have to keep making new clay balls each time you break open the old ones to check how many things they represent. - realise that, by transitivity, the marks are 1:1 with things in the warehouse - refactor the legacy system and just make marks on tablets (which, as a bonus, are more easily filed than balls!)