The world's writing systems

What Hacker News says

1. Jun8Feb 2017
   With respect to your first comment: I think you're right, hieroglyphs being inspired by cuneiform is quote improbable. One reason for this is pointed out in [1]:

   "Unlike early Chinese and Egyptian writing, there is only sporadic evidence for phonetic complementation, which is used more frequently in later phases of the writing system" (p35).

   An interesting possible explanation of why cuneiform started with less phonetic symbols and evolved to have more is given in [2]:

   "...cuneiform writing apparently developed in two stages. In the first stage, writing was fairly in- dependent of phonetic coding, but its application was restricted to narrowly defined contexts and its signs and sign combinations did not yet represent universally applicable words but rather specific entities and activities in the context of administration. In the second stage, phonetic coding made a new type of application possible, the written representation of information in the same way as it was previously transmitted orally.""

   [1] The World's Writing Systems, OED, 1996. This is a fantastic book to have if you're interested in the topic btw.

   [2] http://cdli.ucla.edu/files/publications/cdlj2006_001.pdf

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2. tokenadultNov 2014
   Poor research produces a poor article, below the standard we should expect here on Hacker News. In one example, the article author writes, "It's also during this time that we begin to see markings that look like writing on pottery. Over a period of just a couple of centuries, these crude marks evolved quickly into an alphabet that we still can't decipher." First of all, "alphabet" is surely the wrong word, as that refers to a specific kind of writing system that the Harappan script most likely was not. Indeed, there is considerable controversy over whether the Harrapan script is writing at all, that is a representation of language, rather than proto-writing, for example markings of ruling families or the like. (Those are stages of development of not-yet-writing attested in other centers of ancient civilization.) As the article correctly notes, there is no evidence of a successor civilization to the Indus Valley civilization, so at the very least we have no sure evidence of any linguistic affiliations of any use of Harappan script for writing. The attested later historical development of writing in India (which flourished at the time of the emperor Ashoka) is based on script forms from the ancient Near East.

   AFTER EDIT: As usual, I would be happy to hear a rationale for the disagreement that is evidently being expressed regarding this comment. Please show your capacity to teach me (and onlookers) something. I'll mention here that I have studied a variety of other languages (those are disclosed in my Hacker News user profile), including Chinese, and I have made specialized study of the origins of writing around the world. That's my basis for judging the plausibility of various claims about the ancient Harappan inscriptions. A book on that topic I highly recommend, because it is written by very knowledgeable historical linguists, is The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. There has been a little bit of new work on Harappan inscriptions since that book was published, with several claims and counterclaims by competing scholars, but no settled demonstration that the Harappan inscriptions are writing at all, and certainly no settled demonstration of what they are writing about, if anything (as the article submitted here acknowledges).

   [1] http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...

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3. Jun8Oct 2013
   Thanks for pointing out the early Chinese phonetic effort, I remember reading it about in the excellent The World's Writing Systems by OUP.

   Resisting efforts to broaden literacy for the masses is also cites as the reason why the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing did not evolve much over the vast time period (first inscriptions around BCE 2800, last inscription dated to CE 394, that's more than 3,000 years!). Specifically, although they did have 24 uniliteral signs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_uniliteral_signs#Unili...), which they could have used as an alphabet they never did so.

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4. tokenadultDec 2011
   I read English (my native language) and Chinese (my undergraduate major subject). I have been reading articles about reading speed of second-language speakers of Chinese since my first year of study of the language, back in the 1970s. There is a very strong impression among persons who read both languages that reading Chinese is faster, but the experimental finding, over and over over, is that for a given reliable level of comprehension, reading speed does NOT differ in a way that favors Chinese for most bilingual readers, whether their first language is Chinese or their first language is English.

   The late John DeFrancis, who through his innovative textbooks was the first teacher of a whole generation of Americans who succeeded in acquiring Chinese as a second language, was a co-founder of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, and author of a fascinating article titled "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese." The Chinese writing system (no matter which form of the spoken language, ancient or modern, it is applied to) is full of ambiguities and other partially cued information that slows down reading--as is every other writing system in the world. By dint of much practice, I can read Chinese comfortably for information on a variety of subjects. By test, I was one of the most proficient readers of Chinese among second-language learners who participated in the norming rounds for a Test of Chinese as a Second Language in the mid-1980s (which I think was never rolled out into regular use, perhaps because it showed that most learners learned more Chinese from overseas residence than from taking university courses in Chinese).

   Hacker News readers who would like to learn about English, Chinese, or other writing systems would be well advised to read the specialized articles in The World's Writing Systems

   http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...

   edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. The article on Chinese is very good, and the overview articles that discuss general features of writing systems are also very good.

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5. Jun8May 2010
   Some interesting facts about the Chinese writing system:

   * The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no anagrams, and no Morse code! To get around the last problem, The Chinese have devised a system where each word was assigned a number, e.g. "Person" was 0086 [The Mother Tongue]

   Massive statistical tests in the past two decades have repeatedly demonstrated that 1,000 characters cover approximately 90% of symbols in typical texts, 2400 cover 99%, 3,800 cover 99.9%. Based on the study of other logographic systems (Mayan writing, Egyptian hieroglyphs), it seems that there's an upper limit on the number of unique forms that can be tolerated in a script. For most people, this value seems to be in the range 2000-2500.

   * A Chinese character is generally confused with a word, the assumption being that Sinitic language are exclusively monosyllabic. This is not true. In modern Mandarin the average length of a word is almost exactly two syllables.

   * The Chinese writing system is very well suited to writing Classical Chinese but ill-equipped to record the vernaculars (local dialects/languages) of which there are many in China. Consequently, to write Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Shanghainese, it is necessary to invent characters or resort to romanization.

   The source is The World's Writing Systems by Oxford University Press. I recommend this book to everyone who's interested in these matters.

   [Edit] In case you're wondering, Chinese has palindromes, but not the letter-based ones like we're used to. Hofstadter in Le Ton beau de Marot relates an anecdote with a Chinese professor. Prof. Wu first shows them a famous Chinese palindrome: Ye luo tian luo ye (At leaves-fall season, fall the leaves). In turn, H shows him the quintessential Panama palindrome, but Prof. Wu has difficulty understanding it because he was reading it word by word (p. 143)

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6. tokenadultJun 2012
   The interesting submitted article refers to "and as-yet undeciphered writing," but there is considerable controversy about whether or not the Indus Valley script

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

   is a writing system at all, rather than the kind of ornamentation from a pre-proto-writing stage known in several other sites of ancient civilizations. (As a reality check, we can remember that several regions of the world had elaborate empires and cities with extensive trade routes but without writing.)

   Some of the controversy about this issue arises because of the extreme sensitivity of cultural heritage claims in south Asia in a region that spans a heavily militarized border. A good popular book about the nature and origin of writing systems in general, worldwide, is Visible Speech by John DeFrancis,

   http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...

   and the definitive compilation of international research on writing systems to the date of publication is The World's Writing Systems

   http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...

   edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright and published in 1996. I haven't concluded absolutely that the Indus Valley Script could not be a writing system, but there is no sure evidence that it is, and the earliest attested writing system in a nearby region is the Brahmi script

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script

   that is much more recent in time (a few centuries older than the common era, that is approximately 2,300 years old) and unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East.

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