Writing, Reading, Typing, Texting?

I write code almost every day; I am sure many of you do, as well. The history bug in me often ponders, how long have we come? Just a few thousand years ago, people did not even know how to jot anything down. And today, I am tying this on my laptop, without even a pen or paper. All of us are familiar with the English Alphabet and the origins of computers and its different languages. But what existed before it? How did we arrive from caveman drawings to the alphabet? If the thought intrigues you as much as me, let me shed some light on “some” of the theories from the combination of mythology, history & anthropology, The origins of writing.

Written language is something that seems to have always been around us. It has been a long time since no one on the planet knew how to write. Even in our Vedic culture, a lot of our knowledge was श्रुति, i.e., passed by recitations from gurus to their disciples.

Why do we need a writing system at all? Won’t it produce forgetfulness in the minds of learners, with the neglect of their own memory? Won’t they believe more in the external symbols than their own experiences?

The earliest records of recording information and imagination are found in ancient cave drawings, not just by homo-sapiens but our other homo-cousins as well. These symbols and paintings are called petroglyphs and are found not only in India but the entire world. A common issue with using drawings as a writing method is its inability to capture context and also jotting down thoughts that do not exist in the real world. How would one record, “a man who takes rest in hunting shall not be given the share of the hunt?” by just picturisation.

The scientific term for these drawings is pictographs, a “man” carrying a “spear” to hunt “two deers” is a basic drawing all of us can make. But abstract ideas like walking or taking rest need to be drawn using more abstract drawings, such as legs, denoting walking, or a man beneath a tree as “taking rest.” We call them ideographs.

We don’t know who invented the tally marks, but it’s one of the most critical inventions in human history. Remember writing seven as IIII II? Instead of depicting the idea that Ram owes me 13 goats, by mundanely, slowly but artistically drawing 13 goats for it, I can write it as IIII IIII III followed by the goat symbol in the tally system. They are called logographs. Logographs were most commonly used by Sumerians, with their wedgy-cuneiform on their clay-tablets to record the ration quota. Who owes whom? How much? What? When is it due? What punishment for defaulting?

So, simply put, pictographs can be visualized, ideographs can be imagined, but logographs can be read directly and consistently and hence are advantageous. One can probably understand, all of these require remembering thousands of different representations, each one for a word, and it’s a tremendous task. Do we really need so many characters to write? Luckily, the answer is no.

The idea to represent similar sounding words by the same symbol is called rebus. So, the symbol for the Sun can be used directly for son, soon, and sown. The writing system slowly shifted from semantic to phonetic, from encoding meaning to encoding speech sounds. From a modern perspective, one can think that the phonetic script must have destroyed semantic script quickly. But as anthropology always says to us, what one thinks first is often wrong.

Let’s take an example to understand all this, say, you find a piece of cloth in those ancient times, written OO↑O over it. From your rebus-education, you know O can mean either Sun, son, sown, or soon. And ↑ means high, and ↑O means heaven. How will you transliterate OO↑O? My son sown in the high Sun? or Son will soon go to heaven or Soon the Sun will rise(go to heaven)? As one can guess, we desperately needed the old-styled logographs back. Adding determinatives (not pronounced, but which separates meanings of different similar-sounding words) could handle this problem. So, ♡O became son, ☉ became Sun, and so on.

As the writer knows their intent to write a sentence, they want to write as shortly and quickly as possible, while the reader who is not as well read, involved, or keen, compared to the writer, can misinterpret the writing. So, it’s a tradeoff between making it easy for the writer vs. the reader. In our world, the classic dilemma of how much documentation we should do while writing code is an excellent example of this.

Writing well is all about aesthetics. Remember in our childhood, they used to give us the 4 line notebooks to write our alphabets. Even now, we have our lined-registers in school so that we write in distinguishable straight lines. What would happen if this wasn’t the case, sure we would have a hard-time in understanding the sequence of words. Ever thought, why are all the alphabets of 3–4 different set of heights? Some are half, some are full, some just go below the line. Why are almost all of them the same width? What difference does it make to write and read like this? Like mathematics, it is a standard metric that helps curate and make stuff easy to read, write, duplicate and understand. Such fundamental pieces of logic and thought, and yet we dance in our ignorance. Ever thought writing could be so mathematical?

Gradually, phonetics overtook logography, as it was easier to write, and we realized the benefits of linking sounds to characters. Suddenly a few dozen symbols could encode all of the words we knew. Did we arrive at the familiar consonants and vowels yet? No, it was not that easy to crack.

Civilizations started writing sounds as characters. Let’s say ⎏(ba) ⎔(la) O(ma), were the symbols for their respective sounds, so it’s easy to write a word that sounds like ma-ba-la as O⎏⎔, but to write ba-la-m, see the last sound does not have a extended “a” sound here. They just strike off the character, so “ma” which was O, will get converted to “m”, as ⍉. Ba-la-m will be written as ⎏⎔⍉.

See, writing without vowels is a tough task. CML, can very well translate to CaMeL or iCeMoLe? A smart guy in Greece figured out that we desperately need vowels to fix our alphabets and used the sounds of ah, oo, ee, etc. to use them as symbols for vowels. This technique became widespread in all of Europe and then to England, where we adopted the English writing system from.

One way is to strike off the characters; another is to write them in their base form & modify them using minor characters that give vowel-like sounds. This common technique is called matres lectionis. One can commonly find them as dots and dashes in الرشابه(education) in Arabic and as modifiers in ध्रुव(Dhruv) or पद्मा(Padma) in devanagari. What an aesthetic beauty they are, only if we write them correctly.

Each writing system has its history, influences, logic, adaptation, and peeking embedded in it. We can learn a lot about a culture, just from its languages. To summarise, a system using just sound noises as their writing script is called syllabaries, just using consonants called abjads. Consonants and vowels in sequence make the system alphabets. And systems like devanagari, which use modifiers as vowels are called alpha-syllaberies.

Truth be told, writing took a lot of sides in its journey, and all of them are debatable.

Should it represent meanings or sounds?

Should it favor the writer or the reader?

Should it contain maximum information about every sound or just recognition?

Should it be flexible/creative or rigid/consistent?

And a lot more.

The question is, are we done? Have we achieved the final version of the best writing system possible? Obviously, the answer is no. See, no writing system easy enough, can produce all the sounds possible in the world. English, due to the lack of symbols, is quite fundamental. Devanagari does not have the familiar click sounds found in African languages and so on. And our binary zeros and ones are capable of nothing. At least, as of now.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”