Hello! I recently finished my biggest project yet: a whole animated tour of the history of writing.
Before we move on, I wanted to take some time to cover 2 things: one, what we missed, and
two, what we got wrong. But I think there’s someone better for this job - the narrator
herself!
Hi! I’m Jessica, hopefully you already know me as the voice of Thoth’s Pill.
If you haven't had a chance to catch that yet, I highly recommend it. There's a lot of great stuff in there.
I'm also the girl who’s about to start showing how your life is made of code over at CompChomp.
But, Thoth’s Pill, yeah, this was really a labor of love - as it stands now, we put
about 10 to 15 minutes into this film for every single person that's watched it so far. So
that's a very personal connection for us. 99% of that is Josh. He did all of the art, the
animation, the music, the scripts for the animated history of writing. He even recorded himself
narrating the whole thing over and over again, but he ended up liking my version better and
so, yeah, I’m the narrator!
One thing that that meant was that there are a lot of parts where you actually hear the
languages that we're talking about and I don't actually speak those languages so
we ended up cutting that.
Let's talk about what else we didn't get to.
So, in the beginning, we had prehistory. And the cave rushes over so much of history and
speculation about proto-writing, and we used it as a metaphor just as much as an actual
historical place.
When you leave the ancestral cave and enter the “civilized world”, we meet logographs.
The original plans had us pan from the dark cave up to the well-lit world above.
Once we’re up in those cities, we profile a handful of them. Some of them - like the
Minoans in Crete - just barely get a mention later on in the series. If you start digging,
it’s not hard to find other early scripts that we skipped altogether like
Elamite, or Cypriot or Zapotec.
And the questionable unsolved mysteries of prehistoric writing like Vinca symbols and Indus
Indus scripts and whatnot - integrating those started to sidetrack the story.
So, after going down the birth of writing hitlist, we ran into that early tension between
meaning and sounds.
Well, we originally had a second tension for these cradles of civilization: what is writing
for? These symbols helped civilizations expand, carve propaganda, track their goods.
Time after time, these old logographs
are about boring, mundane things like counting goats and barley. Or that king so-and-so
ruled for such a long time and smote all of his enemies throughout his many
days of being awesome!
But fortunately for the romantic in all of us, some writers were capable of turning
early symbols into verbal art. The most famous early example is Gilgamesh, a story that topped
the Cuneiform bestseller list for over a thousand years. We ended up folding the idea behind
this tension into the flexibility and creativity versus consistency tension that shows up in
the Maya script.
It was particularly sad to cut Gilgamesh. Its story reminds us that civilization and
its innovations tame the savage human, but at a cost. Nature is wild, immortality is
elusive but civilized humans can live on through their physical achievements during their lifetimes.
It was like an uncanny prism for Thamus’ warning in the introduction - oral ideas are
embedded, but Thoth’s pill, the technology of writing, “de-embeds you” and offers
some degree of immortality to your thoughts and actions.
Ok, on to rebus writing.
We talked a lot about taking a character and using it for its sound-alike value. Of course,
there’s another option beyond using the same character for smaller or larger sound
chunks, and this will apply to later innovations, too. The character can change in the process.
Anyone who’s ever learned to read another writing system has the experience of painfully
copying every little nook, cranny and sidler of a symbol before finding out which strokes
are meaningful and which ones can be left out. Add serifs to an “i”, and you’re
fine. But leave the dot off the top of i and things get weird. Unless it’s Turkish, then
they’re entirely different letters. Although it’s a crucial step in learning to script like
a native, the stroke game is something that’s obvious from the inside, but can really perplex outsiders.
I contrasted using characters for syllables in Cuneiform versus consonants in Egyptian
hieroglyphs. Two technical details got cut here.
First, the writing direction. We later mention, when we get to China, that “where words
go and where they stop” matter in writing. We were going to be a bit more specific for
hieroglyphs - showing you that when you’re reading hieroglyphs, you read into the bodies.
Sometimes materials will tell you “into the faces”, but, even when there’s no
face around, body parts still face against the direction you’re reading. Fun fact!
And for Cuneiform, we had a whole section on Josh’s favorite Cuneiform quirk - those
Sumerograms and Akkadograms that evolved as the script was passed around the Fertile Crescent.
That didn’t fit well into the script, but it became its own video and this clip from
that video made its way into the documentary when we talked about how the early choice to
use syllables shaped every later version of the script.
So there was also an important question to ask here, and one that hits rather close to home. Is
it surprising or novel that the later scripts around the Mediterranean - the ones that lead
to our alphabet - end up using consonant segments like the Egyptians had already been doing?
On to determinatives. This revolved around Chinese and spills over into the part on Maya,
but it’s really worth taking some time to read up a bit on how this happens in other scripts and how
they use determinatives - Egyptian and Cuneiform actually use them, too. It’s one of the reasons each
section in this story is structured around a specific development in the history of writing.
We’re looking at these as common solutions to problems faced by multiple scripts, not just cultural
tics. The other reason is we wanted to jump around to exotic locales, because traveling is fun - even
if it’s just in a cartoon!
Anyhow, determinatives! I lumped classifiers and determinatives and radicals together.
If you’re interested in pulling these concepts apart, I recommend starting with this paper
on the use of complementation in the Maya script.
Basically, it argues that we should use the term “determinative” for a meaning-sign
that helps us choose the spelling of the word, and “classifier” for a meaning-sign that
tells us which category the word belongs to.
Another thing when it comes to China is stroke order, the way of writing characters. Josh
thinks that this is so important he wants to write a whole separate script and do a different video for it.
I know he recorded a rant (a really long one!)
I don’t know if he’s planning on animating it. But if you're
interested, you might want to let him know.
Oh yeah, both Chinese and Maya remind us that sound writing isn’t the “right
way” to write: the arrow of history doesn’t inevitably point from meaning to sounds. Inventing
phonetic characters does not mean that you abandon logographs. Innovations and traditions can
hold hands in a mixed writing system. A lot of you picked up on that, but I wanted to make sure
that we specifically put that out there.
From Central America we flew to Egypt. Which reminds me, we’re going to stand by this title
for now. Provocative, yes, but not misleading.
Oh, I will say one other thing about Egypt. By focusing on the trajectory to OUR
alphabet, we totally missed out on another thread that was in the initial story plans: from
Sogdian to Mongolian. I don't know about you guys, but I personally would love to
have seen what kind of fun, crazy characters Josh came up with for covering
Mongolian. Gengis Khan is one of my favorites!
The same “aww, man!” came up later, too, when we didn’t get to tell the stories of
Tocharian and Ethiopic alphasyllabaries. Although, at least, the abugida did squeeze in there
for one quick little exercise at the end of India.
Speaking of alphabets, I really like the way Greece turned out. Josh wants you to know he thinks
it's a bit funny that the Greeks in Thoth’s Pill know “etic” stuff that wasn’t common
“emic” knowledge in ancient times. Your newfound friend talks about Troy and the ancient
Greek script that actually predates the alphabet, but he stops short of calling it Linear B.
Truthfully, it’s already an anachronism that he knows about the script in the first place and can
mention how it works, since early documents written in the Greek alphabet suggest that Greek civilization
fell into complete illiteracy. Essentially, they all forgot how to write.
And that brings us to an interesting idea that actually didn’t make the cut. It’s
one I mentioned to Josh when he shared his outline the first time: people losing writing.
This animation looks at writing as a series of inventions and improvements. But what about
the steps backwards and sideways, and even away from writing. What impact did those have
on writing? To get a grasp of the strangeness here, think about the use of pictures and
non-verbal layout of information on websites. In what other ways do we supplement or move
away from the written word?
Speaking of alphabets, we brought up the correspondence between symbols and sounds and then the birth
of the Latin alphabet. We originally wanted to go down the road a bit and discuss historical
spelling. English and French spelling are notorious for this, but, over time, the “alphabetic
principle” can get a little lax, since a word might be spelled the way it was when
the system started, even when its pronunciation is modernized in flagrant disregard for the
ancient tongue. The example we planned to show for this was from Irish, and it went
like this: “write the word /xua/.” “Yeah, that's right!”
Oh, and yeah! We totally hear you that we did not cover uppercase/lowercase. It’s definitely a topic that we want to go
into, but we didn't have time to fit it into Thoth's Pill. It really is worth a video of its own.
On to abjads. The papyrus trader was reminder that writing back in the day wasn’t some
guy grunting and making crude marks. There was already an entire industry behind
each stroke of the pen or press of the stylus into clay. Think of all that it took to
make an ancient Mediterranean text: harvesting the papyrus, cutting the stalks open and cutting
it into strips, gluing layers of those strips together crosswise to make a sheet, using well-developed
trade networks to distribute that paper overseas... The Phoenician merchant was a mental prick
to help remind you of the obvious - that writing leans on the development of civilizations,
the materials, resources, trade routes. It was also a way of getting you to think of the economy
of writing, and extending that, to get you to ask questions about how the economy shaped
the look, the use and eventually even the dispersal of writing - writing on the horizontal recto,
or front of the papyrus, instead of the vertical verso of the papyrus; or how ancient letter shapes
changed from chiseled to inky.
On the Mediterranean map, we see some scripts pop up. One of them is in
Iberia. Well, the rather unique Paleo-Iberian scripts are semi-syllabaries, derived mainly
from Phoenician with some possible Greek influence.
Ok, time is getting away from us here. I promise I’ll just mention a few more goodies. In Phoenicia
we tackled matres and pointing, and originally asked a bunch of questions for you to ponder:
what’s better in a writing system? Optional extras, like vowels, added in only when you
really need to set things straight? Or a system that demands clarity even when that clarity
is superfluous?
Hmm… let’s skip ahead to King Sejong who’s heard exotic tales of the west, of
India. This was a nod to the concept of India as the West in East Asia. The most well-known
example of this reference is the Chinese novel Journey to the West, but, if you start reading,
you can dig up a whole history of relationships. Here’s another hint: the gojuuon of Japanese
kana have an order strikingly reminiscent of the layout of devanagari
used to write Sanskrit.
Yeah, ok, so in Korea, since “featural alphabets” get treated as a separate type of writing
system, we thought it was worth including in our Major Moments. Some of you definitely disagreed.
Korea is also the location of our technical error that just stands out like a sore thumb: Josh
switched the name of two of his shape keys, so these Korean characters got swapped
out in the final cut.
After Korea, we end with a look back, but our idea of a “look ahead” at the future
of writing didn’t make it: what about changes in how we communicate, like pictograms on
signs or relying more on videos and images to communicate? What about emojis? Are we communicating
better info faster now, so writing is just less necessary and it's not doing the same job it once did?
Wes Cecil shared a similar thought in his talk about the Future of Language, and it’s been on
our minds. Oh, and do different scripts do different things to our brains? How does growing
up with a different writing system impact anything else, like the way you think about
language or ideas or even the way you store words?
Finally, and Josh has been trying to get me to stay quiet about this, but I want to tease and say that there are
a decent number of easter eggs scattered around the world he built. I don’t know if all of them
showed up in the final camera angles and whatnot, but a lot of them do, so keep an
eye out for those.
Alright, so that wraps this up. I just want to thank you guys so much for taking this journey with us!
I'm really glad I got roped into this. I was very hesitant at first. I said they're not
going to want to hear a different voice on this channel. But you guys were so welcoming and your
feedback in the community has just been fantastic
If you’re interested in seeing more of me, or learning how your everyday life is made
up of code - or hopefully both - you can check out my new channel, CompChomp!
Josh is going to be over there animating, making stuff fly around
the screen and coming up with a lot of the cool topics that we do on that channel as well.
And if you haven't already - and you definitely should - subscribe to NativLang and encourage Josh
to keep doing videos about language. Otherwise I'm going to steal him and he's only going to be doing
computer stuff now. I know he's
really busy with classes and has some other projects, but your encouragement, when it's genuine,
it really matters. Even if, you know,
you just have him get some quicker, sketchy art out there. The videos are fun!
Anyway, subscribe for language! And, now, subscribe for PROGRAMMING language fun, too!
CHOMP!