This week: What makes a word? Depends on what you're counting. Also, footnotes, a tiny bit of housekeeping, and a little bit of linguistic trivia to get us out. Let’s go.
Writing fascinates me. Think about how writing works: I have a thought. My brain sends impulses to my fingers which then make some scratches on a piece of paper. You look at that paper, your eyes vacuum up the data and send it to your brain, where it is translated into our shared symbolic vocabulary, and, voila, I have now communicated with you, brain to brain, via the intermediary of writing. Honestly, that that process exists is a miracle. The fact that we are in an age of such technology that we can use it to send snarky comments and cat memes to each other is an absolute wonder.
But where did writing come from? How did it evolve? And how did we English users end up with the obstinate and contrary set of symbols we call the alphabet?
Writing was invented independently in three or four different parts of the world (1). Ancient peoples in Mesoamerica, Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia all came up with the idea of making marks on a piece of clay or stone to record a transaction. Eventually, religion got involved as priests and monks began to record funeral inscriptions, and then sounds became attached to certain symbols and, voila, writing. As to when this happened, well...it happened slowly and at different times depending on when you begin counting.
Defining the moment when cave drawings, religious iconography, and etchings in stone or clay made the jump from drawing to writing has been extremely hard to pin down. Is that cave painting of four animals a fanciful or historic record of a hunt? Or is it a record of a transaction, showing that four animals were purchased? If it's the latter, can that be considered writing?
Probably not. Writing, by definition, allows another person to accurately state what one person has said. In other words, real (true) writing allows you to both capture and repeat someone's exact words, complete with grammar and structure. In the instance of the four animals on a cave wall, there would be no way to determine exactly what was said during that transaction, thus it is, at best, proto-writing.
So, how did it evolve? Again, slowly, and with great difficulty. Our oldest, continuous set of symbols for writing come from Mesopotamia. Cuneiform script can trace its lineage back over about 10,000 years, divided into four distinct eras. As noted above, the earliest form of “writing” was marks made on clay to record accounting transactions. Cuneiform is no different. These tokens were used to make trades and sales and keep track of who owned what. Eventually, people realized they didn’t actually need to have the physical token. They could just draw a picture that looked like a token. So, a picture of a token with ten hashes on it became the symbol for ten and so on. A few centuries down the road, and these symbols had become standard enough to have become permanently identified with a given sound and people again realized that they didn’t need to use the symbol to just record numbers, they could use it to record certain sounds, like names. From there, the last leap was to realize that those symbols could be merged with one another to create completely new meanings to represent new sounds and an alphabet was born. (2)
As noted above, cuneiform is the only unbroken example we have of this process happening. However enough bits and pieces of other systems have survived and been studied that we think that this process is near universal. Our own alphabet is a child of these processes, being a construction built on the Etruscan alphabet and going through centuries of adaptation and evolution until finally being set into its more-or-less (English) form by various branches of the church. (3)
Truthfully, I’m simplifying to a criminal degree. The history of writing, alphabets in general, and the English alphabet in particular are each far more detailed than I can summarize in 800 words. Suffice it to say, then, that the letters we use to build our words have a history longer, in some cases, than the language itself. But, as we’ve seen recently through the adaptation of logographs into English texting and other casual forms of writing, the alphabet may not be done evolving yet. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Some sources separate Egypt from Mesopotamia, others call the whole area the "Near East.”
My source for most of the information in this article is a fascinating paper by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, published in the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Technically, the clergy were using the Latin alphabet but as the influence of other languages and cultures made their mark on the kingdoms that would become England, they were forced to adapt again and again until we eventually arrived at good old A through Z.
Housekeeping
Fellow Substacker and teacher David Thomson asked a question a couple of weeks ago, “What is the invisible 10% that makes some teachers exceptional?” This week, he posted a follow up that features a few choice quotes from yours truly. It’s an interesting discussion and one that I think would benefit from more voices. After all, we have all had great teachers, and many of us in the field strive to be great teachers, so is there something intangible required beyond the lesson planning and subject matter? In my view? Absolutely.
Trivially Yours
You know how in cartoons and other media when they want to show that something is meant to be of the past, they add a “Ye Olde” to the front of it? Well, it turns out, that Y is actually meant to be read as a TH. See, there was another letter in an earlier version of the English alphabet called the thorn. Why did it disappear? Mental Floss has a good answer:
We replaced it with 'th' over time—thorn fell out of use because Gothic-style scripting made the letters Y and thorn look practically identical. And, since French printing presses didn’t have thorn anyway, it just became common to replace it with a Y.
And now you know. Stay curious,
J