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Now I wonder whether a rhythm-based writing system could have been developed ahead of pictographic and alphabetic writing if preliterate people had had a telegr
by schoen 3y ago
Now I wonder whether a rhythm-based writing system could have been developed ahead of pictographic and alphabetic writing if preliterate people had had a telegraph. They might have started off developing rhythm conventions based on particular songs, or something.
I guess signal drums predate writing in many places and successfully use rhythm to convey information over long distances. I'm not sure whether any that don't encode writing have a writing-like ability to represent arbitrary messages rather than just prearranged ones.
- zdragnar 3y agoWe have always had musical notation, though what we have today is much more complex than any surviving records from clay tablets and such of ancient times. The idea of communicating sounds via physical marks was there, but it clearly lost out- why bother writing a message that needs to be sounded out, then translated to a spoken language, when you can skip the translation step with something glottographic?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]