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It’s an interesting accident of history that Gutenberg was able to make the innovations he did, and thereby ignite the explosive popularity of movable type in t
by evincarofautumn 14y ago
It’s an interesting accident of history that Gutenberg was able to make the innovations he did, and thereby ignite the explosive popularity of movable type in the West. If the Roman empire hadn’t brought the Latin alphabet in its various forms to so much of Europe, it’s possible that a less modular script would have dominated—leading to the same problems that plagued Chinese printing.
Of course, abjads and syllabaries are as common (and about as modular) as alphabets, so it’s likely that we would have been fine either way. Still, it’s interesting to think of what Europe would be like if the predominant script were semantophonetic like Chinese. Oddly enough, the main reason that phonemic scripts exist is precisely because languages tend to be non-isolating—in other words, modularity in a language leads to non-modularity in its orthography, and vice versa.
- anon_d 14y agoI love posts like this. Between the ideas in this post and the googling of words I wasn't very familiar with, I just learned quite a bit.
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- pjungwir 14y agoWhen you compare Roman & Greek letters to Arabic, it's clear that the former were designed for carving, and the latter for writing. It's interesting that the carving letters wound up being more suitable for a printing press.
- evincarofautumn 14y agoIt’s largely coincidental though. The Mayan script was carved, while Latin, Greek, and Phoenician were all originally pressed in clay with a stylus. With few limitations, you can use any medium to convey any script. I don’t think the original design constraints have much bearing on that.
- twelvechairs 14y agoGreat post, but I'm not sure we should wholly credit the Romans with ensuring we have a 'modular script'. Before the Romans, the Greek and Phonecian writing systems (and derivitives) were taking hold, and more complex scripts (like Chinese logograms) had never simply never been common near Europe, with the single notable exception of Egyptian heiroglyphs (which had complex logograms, but could equally be used with simpler phonetic characters).
- ekianjo 14y agoEven before the Greeks and Phonecians we have evidence of such writing systems. SUch as the Linear A or Linear B (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B). Word scripting using letters/glyphs goes a long way in the past of Europe. It's a long tradition in this part of the continent.
- evincarofautumn 14y agoRight, I didn’t say we should. I was giving two separate hypotheticals. First, what would have happened if the Roman empire hadn’t unified the alphabet of Europe? We might still write English with a runic alphabet, which would mean you could no longer have typeset English with the letterforms you’d cast for, say, French. Second, what would have happened if European scripts were not typically alphabetic, but instead logographic/semantophonetic? Would the printing press have been adopted so quickly?
- ajuc 14y agoByzantine imperium brought greek script to Europe, so if not for latin, we would probably write in cyrylica - still good for printing.