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Great 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 sy
by twelvechairs 14y ago
Great 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?