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Alphabet is most probably the greatest human invention even more than wheel. It's truly the original "bicycle of the mind", without it human progress is greatl

Alphabet is most probably the greatest human invention even more than wheel. It's truly the original "bicycle of the mind", without it human progress is greatly hindered and inhibited [1]. "The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic" [2]. [1] Bicycle of the Mind (45 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712009 [2] Alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet

card_zero 2y ago
We invented a lot of things before the alphabet, though, such as the drawer, the manacle, musical scales, and socks with toes. I feel like a rich background of objects was necessary before we got it together to reach an alphabet level of abstraction. Letter T is a wheel (it's the spokes).
adrian_b 2y ago
Very few, if any, inventions appear in a void, completely independent of prior inventions. Most inventions, no matter how original and non-obvious they are claimed to be, appear at a closer analysis to be only modifications and combinations of prior inventions, where what is new is always much less than what is old. The Phoenician alphabet with 22 letters was just a simplification of an older North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters. Both the North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters (the oldest alphabet from which our alphabetic order A, B, C, D ..., comes) and the South-Semitic alphabet with 29 letters (and a different alphabetic order) come from an older Semitic alphabet, which had been derived from a simplification of the Egyptian consonantic writing system. The Egyptian writing system has been derived from some older pictographic proto-writing system, a transition that might have been inspired by exposure to the Sumerian writing system, which had similarly been derived from an older proto-writing system used for accounting. The proto-writing systems, i.e. sets of symbols designating various things, like icons or emojis, could have appeared only after people had discovered how to draw using pigments or how to sculpt or carve hard substrates. And so on, every invention is based on even earlier inventions, and it is seldom possible to say that one step has been the most important. Normally all the chain of inventions is important and every step has been indispensable.

card_zero 2y ago

We invented a lot of things before the alphabet, though, such as the drawer, the manacle, musical scales, and socks with toes. I feel like a rich background of objects was necessary before we got it together to reach an alphabet level of abstraction. Letter T is a wheel (it's the spokes).

adrian_b 2y ago

Very few, if any, inventions appear in a void, completely independent of prior inventions. Most inventions, no matter how original and non-obvious they are claimed to be, appear at a closer analysis to be only modifications and combinations of prior inventions, where what is new is always much less than what is old. The Phoenician alphabet with 22 letters was just a simplification of an older North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters. Both the North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters (the oldest alphabet from which our alphabetic order A, B, C, D ..., comes) and the South-Semitic alphabet with 29 letters (and a different alphabetic order) come from an older Semitic alphabet, which had been derived from a simplification of the Egyptian consonantic writing system. The Egyptian writing system has been derived from some older pictographic proto-writing system, a transition that might have been inspired by exposure to the Sumerian writing system, which had similarly been derived from an older proto-writing system used for accounting. The proto-writing systems, i.e. sets of symbols designating various things, like icons or emojis, could have appeared only after people had discovered how to draw using pigments or how to sculpt or carve hard substrates. And so on, every invention is based on even earlier inventions, and it is seldom possible to say that one step has been the most important. Normally all the chain of inventions is important and every step has been indispensable.