Writing was invented independently across multiple places and times.
Geniouses all over the place!! /j
Considering that the concept of writing has been invented independently so few times in the world, especially in the form I’m talking about, they are not all over the place.
the indigenous people of easter island invented writing in parallel to all other civilizations :)
we have yet to decode it.
I think it’s unclear if it was developed wholly indepently or if it was done after some exposure to European writing.
IMO it’s likely to be undecipherable because of small sample size, and the probability that the sample we do have was from a period of rapid evolution.
Laughs in King Sejong
Hot
And yet we’re all born with an inherent ability ‘to language’.
Like, it’s in the firmware.
I guess it is easier if you have a simple language and sillable-concept relations and therefore start with what would amount to hideograms. The real genius is the one who comes up with something prepositions and suffixes/prefixes.
And stuff like abstractions
Now you’ve got me thinking.
Did language evolve from writing, or did writing evolve from language?
Writing from language.
A lot of other animals besides humans use vocalisations, and those vocalisations can have quite specific meanings. This makes them a form of communication and demonstrates that encoding meaning in sound is a phenomenon that develops quite readily in nature.
We can also see then that the history of language in humans is those vocalisations becoming increasingly complex and able to represent more numerous concepts and thoughts until they eventually become something we recognise as a full language.
Written language is a mechanism to encode spoken language, but it’s spoken language which came first.
guess where the word “prehistoric” comes from ;)
also, non-human animals have language without writing.
