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Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city
- mihaic 2y agoWow, this is impressive if actually true. I wonder how accurate their dating methodology is, since they have to do carbon dating on something in that layer, and not on the clay tablet itself. It does seem strange that the alphabet would have remained isolated for so many hundreds years, and not spread out somewhere else.
- Ericson2314 2y agoCHON?
- drcode 2y agoTo clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing, cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older.
- Archelaos 2y agoIt should also be noted that a difference is often made between alphabets in the strict sense, where consonants and also vowels are represented by distinct symbols, and alphabets in the wider sense, where this is not the case (vowels are not represented at all or occasionally by certain consonant symbols typically when clarification is necessary). A writing system where symbols denote larger units of speech is not called an alphabet, but a syllabary. If it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units, it is called a logographic script. There are of course all kinds of mixed forms ("I ♥ NY").
- ejplatzer 2y agoTechnically, a syllabary only refers to writing systems where the symbol represents the specific consonant and vowel pair, such as Japanese's Hiragana. For example, in a syllabary, the syllables "ka" and "ki" are two different symbols. If the vowels are optional or not present, e.g. there's one "k" symbol regardless of the vowel, it's an Abjad. The archetypal Abjad is the Hebrew writing system. If the vowels are written by adding them to the consonant symbol (similar to diacritics), it's called an Abugida. One example of this is the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia.
- Archelaos 2y agoI did not want to make it too technical, so "Abjad" falls under "alphabets in the wider sense" and "Abugida" under "mixed forms". My comment was based on the assumption that the article in question does not necessarily refer to an alphabet in the strict sense. To make this clear, I did not think it was necessary to go into too much detail.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoThere are many specialized terms for different types of writing system, but those distinctions are generally of very little interest unless you're compiling a table of different writing systems. Generally you look at what concepts are embodied in the script, and at the form of the glyphs. So: You might have a script that assigns glyphs to phonemes. ("Language is made of sounds.") You might have a script that assigns glyphs to consonants and doesn't bother to represent vowels. ("Language is made of sounds, and some of them are more important than others.") You might have a script that assigns glyphs to syllables. ("Language is made of things you can say.") You might have a script in which the glyphs assigned to syllables are composed of recognizable and conceptually distinct parts, but those parts have no independent representation. (Compare the glyphs ሀ ለ ሐ with the related glyphs ሄ ሌ ሔ.) ("Language is made of things you can say, but there are patterns.") You might have a script that assigns glyphs to words, though in almost all cases you don't. The label "logographic script", applied to a script the labeler doesn't know well, is infinitely more popular than the concept "logographic script". I don't think any script has ever existed meeting the criterion of "it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units". But there are some, and used to be more, that leaned more or less strongly in that direction.
- abtinf 2y ago> To clarify, this is specific to "alphabetic" writing, cuneiform/hieroglyphs are older. That’s literally in the title of both the post and the article. What are you “clarifying”?
- sapphicsnail 2y agoIt's common to think of alphabetic writing as all writing. I assume that the author is asserting that the characters represent individual phonemes as opposed to pictograms or syllables because those have been around much earlier. There's not much information though and I have no idea how they can make such a radical claim with 4 finger-sized cylinders.
- Mistletoe 2y agoWell it helped me, I didn’t put two and two together.
- alok-g 2y agoYes, however, I was still left wondering about the writing that existing from earlier; and was hoping the article would explain it. I am still not fully clear actually -- Alphabet being a finite set of symbols, how did pre-alphabetic writing work?
- Electricniko 2y agoAlphabets have symbols that represent sounds which are strung together to make words. Other types of writing might include symbols that represent words or phrases, with an example being like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters.
- mmooss 2y agoAlso, in some, symbols represent syllables. It's significant because there are many more syllables than individual sounds.
- tdeck 2y agoJust a fun fact: some later forms of cuneiform were alphabets. Like Old Persian Cuneiform: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm https://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm If you wanted to tell people you "learned cuneiform" you could memorize this in an afternoon!
- aprilthird2021 2y ago[flagged]
- Tagbert 2y agoYou may be thinking of Lebanon.
- ptidhomme 2y agoIsrael does regularly bomb Syria. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/12/how-can-israel-attack-syria https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/12/how-can-israel-att...
- mupuff1234 2y agoSyria also regularly bombs Syria. It's worth mentioning the ongoing civil war in Syria that so far result in around 700k dead.
- kamikazeturtles 2y agoIt was closer to a "regime change" proxy war with thousands of imported fighters, rather than a "civil war".
- dotancohen 2y ago[flagged]
- kamikazeturtles 2y agoAccording to the Lancet medical journal, the Gaza deaths are closer to 200k but other sources say it might even be higher. No one knows because most of the hospitals are not operational, the dead from collapsed buildings can't be retrieved. For Syria, I've heard ranges of anywhere between 300k and 700k. The difference between Syria and Gaza is most of the dead in Gaza are woman and children and the Syrian civil war death toll is over a decade
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoI'm curious how they arrived at the conclusion it's an alphabet without deciphering it.
- ahmedfromtunis 2y ago[flagged]
- w10-1 2y agoRight. 4 clay cylinders inch-long, perforated, with geometric symbols on the outside, are not jewelry (otherwise found in the same tomb) but ... labels with a new form of writing because... they were found next to the pottery? The article is brilliantly written to lead with the significance of such a find before providing evidence.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoThe article is well cited. They handily beat out newspapers by providing links to earlier blog posts on the research. You might want this one: http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921 http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921 > I will convey my own perspective regarding these four inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters), the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14 dates). > My initial thought (because of the graphemic shapes of the signs on the cylinders and the clear similarity to Early Alphabetic letters) was that these cylinders might be intrusive So, the major argument that they're writing is that they look very similar to other writing that we can read. Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
- sterlind 2y ago"乇乂ㄒ尺卂" looks like "EXTRA", but it's (meaninglessly-arranged) Chinese characters with a purely coincidental relationship to the Latin. Did they find a bunch of these artifacts, with a variety of inscriptions? If so then sure, I buy it. If it's just the "CHON" fragment - that could well be coincidence.
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- photochemsyn 2y agoHow do they know when the writing is pictographic (an idea expressed as an image, like a big predator showing teeth), or syllabic (an image of a bestial grunt, basically, like 'ugh' or 'caw' or what not) or alphabetic (the breakdown of syllabic utterances into, at first, the hard consantants and the vowels)?
- ahmedfromtunis 2y agoBasically, the number of symbols and the repeating patterns. But it seems that in this particular case, they also relied on the shapes of the "letters" to conclude the alphabetic nature of the script.
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- bargainbot3k 2y ago[flagged]
- Eumenes 2y agoA classic: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/23/ancient-apocalypse-is-the-most-dangerous-show-on-netflix https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/23/ancient...
- bargainbot3k 2y agoThe smugness of that article had me thinking I was reading The Atlantic for a moment.
- NelsonMinar 2y agoSome informed speculation about this on languagehat, in the comments: https://languagehat.com/oldest-alphabet/ https://languagehat.com/oldest-alphabet/
- mcswell 2y agoAnd some comments at Language Log here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67023 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67023
- joshdavham 2y agoAlphabetic writing really is incredible. Despite the fact that I personally prefer syllabaries. I can't discount the fact that alphabets have done an incredible job of being adopted by other languages that didn't previously have any sort of writing system. Alphabets are really flexible like that. The latin alphabet alone is used in all sorts of languages from English to Tukish, Indonesian and Swahili. Having this many diverse languages follow a single writing system is only really possible with alphabets. You couldn't do this with Chinese characters or Korean hangul, for example.
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- sneak 2y agoHangeul is an 24 character alphabet, with 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Each little square is a syllable made up of consonants and vowel combinations.
- jmyeet 2y agoCurious: why do you prefer syllabaries? I think about Chinese writing systems, which additionally don't have clear word boundaries. Now you can argue that this is an independent issue (which is true) but why does this complication seemingly show up in such writing systems? Anyway, alphabets have been profoundly successful. You bring up Turkish. It's a good example. I'm sure most here know that prior to 1929 or so Turkish used the Arabic writing system. This is also an alphabet but a more complicated one (eg vowels aren't typically written) and didn't necessarily fit the Turkish language. So they designed a Latin writing system that is entirely phonetic it was was profoundly successful at increasing literacy rates. A completely illiterate person could be taught to read and write Turksih in a matter of months. I compare this to Taiwan that has high school competitions to see who can find a word the fastest in a dictionary because knowledge is required of the roots and symbols. There are thousands of characters to learn in Chinese languages. As a foreigner, this will often take a decade or more. I've seen accounts of people who have spent a decade learning Chinese that still struggle to read books intended for 12 year olds. Literacy is so transformative to one's life that I'm so on board with anything that makes that easier.
- af3d 2y agoThey could also be descriptions of musical scales, or maybe weaving patterns, base-encoded numbers perhaps....who knows, really? Also Egyptian writing goes back perhaps 5000 years. That is a Semitic language so it stands to reason that it too would likely fall in the same category. Anyway I do love these kinds of archeological finds nonetheless. Interesting to see if Gobekli Tepe yields even older instances of written script? (If they ever get around to a proper excavation, that is! IIRC the site is currently not open to researchers.)
- novateg 2y agoThe article is not complete. I could not find any comparison of the new alphabet to the known ones. Is this close to Phoenician or Aramaic?
- lisp2240 2y agoWooden structures 476,000 BCE Sailing 100,000 BCE Drawing 73,000 BCE Counting 60,000 BCE Medicine 40,000 BCE … Writing 3,200 BCE Alphabet 2,400 BCE I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
- v8xi 2y agoWas going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
- jaco6 2y agoThe article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more widely used.
- dragonwriter 2y ago> Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. The first Egyptian pyramid known was built ~2780 BCE, the alphabetic writing in this article was from ~2500 BCE. That’s a gap of ~250 years, not ~2,500. > How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing? The Egyptians at the time of the Pyramids had writing, but it was logographic (symbols directly represent a word/concept), not alphabetic (a small inventory of symbols are combined in different ways to represent words/concepts.) An alphabetic – and also phonetic – script is a big advance not because of what you communicate with it, but because if you know a fairly small set of symbols and their phonetic interpretation, you can encode a spoken language in it in a reasonably intelligible way to anyone who knows the same script (and you can even encode different spoken languages in the same script intelligibly, if they have a similar-enough phonetic inventory.)
- timschmidt 2y agoI'm no expert, but my understanding is that Coptic made use of hieroglyphs as an alphabet, and co-existed with their use for Egyptian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language
- tivert 2y ago> Schwartz said. "Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate." If you can't translate it, how do they know it's alphabetic?
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- philipov 2y agoStatistical analysis, more or less. Alphabets have a couple dozen characters, syllabaries have a couple hundred, and logographic scripts have thousands to tens of thousands.
- olalonde 2y agoCarbon-14 dating can't be used directly on clay right? I assume the dating is inferred from some organic material found nearby?
- Sam6late 2y agoSome claim that standard Arabic has been intentionally made more complicated because writers were paid well by rulers back in old days, and there were more incentives to make grammar hard for the ordinary folks, so that you need "craftsmen" to write according to an Arabic linguist.Until the 80s in many Arab countries you needed clerks to produce documents from governments. (Comedy sketch on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtloJgMgFho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtloJgMgFho) Arabic linguist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0 'Category V – It usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach S-3/R-3 proficiency in these languages. This small group of “super-hard languages” includes Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic.' (Arabic linguist)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0&t=3645s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0&t=3645s
- newsclues 2y agoSounds like our laws and lawyers.
- mrkeen 2y agoLikewise with keeping science and Catholicism in Latin.
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- mcswell 2y agoI don't think anyone has seriously claimed that Modern Standard Arabic has been intentionally made complicated. It's clearly related to a lot of other Semitic languages (including the regional varieties of spoken Arabic). And the Category V thing is only about learning Arabic (any variety, not just MSA) as a second language, an in particular a second language for native speakers of English.
- openrisk 2y ago> Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated Thousands of years later (with few cultural diffusion barriers) billions of people do not use alphabets. So there is probably something missing from this picture. E.g., the large Chinese society is notoriously competitive and you would think that if the use of alphabet is an obvious enabler it would have been adopted by some segment? Maybe there is a tradeof in a phonetic system: if the spoken language cannot be properly captured it negates the combinatorial benefits of an alphabet.
- singularity2001 2y agoGiven that most signs on the cylinders are unique it's much more likely that they represent just another syllabary of it's time, no?
- consf 2y ago[dead]