TecC 16 - Outsourcing the Mind: A Striking Impression

Underscoring an underrated invention that rewrote the rules of knowledge

In this exploration of human innovation and progress, we have started right from scratch, from the earliest modifications of nature to suit human needs and wants. We’ve progressed through the earliest technological ages, but you might be justified in saying that what we’ve covered are all in the mists of time. Today will be a leap into something slightly more familiar. No more ‘mistery’!

Today we’re making history! Or rather, this is a history about history, a story of how history started! Insofar as ‘history’ is defined as the written record of what happened in the past, here I’m writing about writing. So that’s as meta as I can get I guess in this writeup!

It goes without saying, or writing!, that writing is one of the most remarkable of all technological leaps in our history existence. So it might help to understand how it began. So yes, let’s start from scratch, a different scratch this time!

Starting from Scratch

As before, we have our friend Bryan and his trusty canine companion Bruno who will take us through what might have happened one fine day. We have seen, in previous episodes, Bryan playing with mud and clay, but picture this scene. He’s got to work out how many sheep he’s owed by his neighbor (in exchange for jars of Bryan’s fermented berry “beverage”!) In previous years, Bryan has tried to keep track of it using the fingers of his hand to keep track, but that’s been about as effective as Joey of Friends writing down critical to-do reminders (“pick up granny at airport tomorrow”) on his forearm and forgetting to look them up!

He needs a better way. So while sat in the yard (next to the fire and the logs, remember) Bryan is brooding over the problem whilst Bruno turns up with a stick/log in his mouth wanting to play that stick-fetch game. Bryan is like “not now Bruno, can’t you see I have a pressing¹ issue here, I can’t always count on my fingers to keep track of sheep!”

But he can’t resist Bruno’s puppy-eyed pleas, so he throws the stick, Bruno fetches it and drops it on the mud next to Bryan, mud slightly wet from some recent rain. Dropping the log on that bit of mud makes a scratch of sorts. Another throw-fetch-and-drop, and lo there’s another scratch / imprint on the mud next to the previous one. And it happens to coincide with Bryan’s realization that he’s owed a second sheep. Bryan looks at the two marks, looks away and looks back! 🤯 He’s got the answer! He’s sure of it when the next day he inspects that patch of the ground and the mud has hardened in the heat of the sun, leaving the marks intact, in fact secure.

Well, that’s how it might have started (at least I kept my promise of starting from scratch!)² The key intellectual leap here is the notion that we can use external devices to represent what is stored in the mind. It might have started off with something rather handy: yes, I mean the fingers of the hand (after all the decimal system we still use is modeled on our fingers) but from there early humans might have moved on to things like marking up to 4³ lines “||||” on some surface and possibly scratching a cross-section for the 5th one, a scoring pattern we still use in games.

There is another couple of important intellectual progressions in the invention of writing that are also worth appreciating. Let’s go back to Bryan to explore this evolution.

Bryan’s now the hero of the local group. He’s solved a vexing problem, how to keep score of things (I’m not saying this is the only way it could have turned out for this particular problem, people could have come up with a bunch of stones or pebbles to do the counting, and so on). So while resting on his laurels one day, Bryan comes up with the thought that he could now count not just sheep, but other animals too. He could potentially draw the image of an animal, alongside the scoring, on such wet mud then heat-treated to harden once impressed upon. He can then sell these, yes clay tablets, as documents with records, he shall be the first accountant, he shall be a financial wizard, he shall mint money!

Seeking Alpha

No, there is a serious point to this, just stick with me a bit more. So Bryan’s considering a transaction of 3 oxen between two of his, well, now clients! He says to himself: an ox is different from a sheep, so let me think of a clever way of drawing an ox. It’s not hard to imagine what happens next: he draws a very rough head with two horns. Over time, this gets simplified, gradually, because there’s no time to draw all the features of the ox’s head, besides it’s not necessary, the stylized and simplified version which roughly resembles two horns on a head should, especially over time as they get used to it, do to denote an ox or a bull.

Now if you think I’m making this story up, I’m not. This is not bullshit, or oxshit! Because, and I’m serious, we still have to this very day this exact depiction of that very ox-derived symbol. It is none other than our: A !

I’ll show you how it comes about. But let’s first appreciate the serious point I promised to make: all writing started off as drawings of objects, physical, tangible objects. This happened independently wherever writing arose: in the Mayan writing system, of course in Chinese writing, and even in the ancestral developments of most of our⁴ scripts: in the Near East. We know this quite well, from all those Egyptian hieroglyphics which have survived in their splendor to this day.

Apart from the stylized simplification (which also happened within the Chinese system – 人 means “man”, any guesses how that came about?), the additional intellectual leap in the Near East was to transform the idea of an image to that of a sound.

Before I demonstrate that let me show you the evolution of our first letter: A or alpha.⁵

Historically, a Semitic people from Canaan (you may recall the Canaanites mentioned in the Bible) are surmised to have been in contact with the hieroglyph-inscribing Egyptians and said to have adapted one of their hieroglyphs that was the symbol for ‘ox’ - and yes, they ended up with a rough head shape and two horn jutting above. The Phoenicians, another Semitic group, further slightly modified that Proto-Canaanite / Proto-Sinaitic symbol by twisting it around somewhat 90° (talk about grabbing the ox by the horns!).

The Phoenicians who were prolific sea-faring merchants introduced the idea of writing to the Ancient Greeks, who twisted it once more (did they think this ox was kebab?) into a form we recognize. The Semitic word for ox, and thus the symbol, was ‘aleph’ which in Greek became ‘alpha’!

The 3 stages of this evolution can be visualized at this footnote.⁶

Alongside the stylized simplification when encountering and adapting the more complex hieroglyphic system to the needs of their (fairly distinct language), these early Semitic people are said to have made that other leap: image or symbol to sound.

A Sound Logic

This could follow what is called the Rebus Principle, seen across cultures, and something we still use today, usually playfully. Can you read this⁷ out aloud:

👁️❤️🐑

Here of course ‘eye’ becomes the symbol for ‘I’ (working only in English because of the coincidence of those two words in sound), and likewise ‘ewe’ > ‘you’. This system of association is useful because in language there are a great number of words representing abstract ideas, whereas when we start with an image-based system, we only have concrete objects.

So let’s take an actual historical case of this (‘alpha’ is just half the story of the... isn’t it?!)

In the same encounter with the Egyptians mentioned, the Semitic people took the symbol for ‘house’, discarding what might be the Egyptian word for it, and gave it their own word. Over time, they applied what’s called acrophony - used that symbol to represent just the initial sound of the corresponding word. Thus anywhere, you need that sound, just use that word. You might have guessed by now, I’m talking about ‘beta’. And you’re right. The Semitic word for ‘house’ is ‘beth’,⁸ which we recognize from a whole bunch of Biblical terms and names including Bethlehem and Bethel.⁹ When the Greeks were testing it, it became ‘beta’.¹⁰

Giving Voice a Voice

I’ll end this historical account with one final innovation, the one I think is the most outstanding of them all. The writing systems that the Semitic peoples developed, including Hebrew and Arabic, focused solely or mainly on the consonants.¹¹¹² Even where the need for vowels was recognized, these were, literally, tacked on above, under, before or after the consonant,¹³ whether seen in Hebrew today; or the Brahmi that developed similarly, ancestral to most scripts in South and South-East Asia, all based on Sanskrit.

It was Greek genius to repurpose a few of the Phoenician-adopted symbols which in Greek had no phonetic equivalent, into vowels. Thus the ‘aleph’ we have seen was not exactly a vowel in Semitic, but ‘alpha’ is! Why this is genius, or at least why this matters, will become apparent when I come back to this point about 2000 years later!

The Write Choice

I will also emphasize another point I’ve made elsewhere. Human language is essentially spoken language. Language is an ‘instinct’, it’s a genetic capability all humans have, that we can all use, except in a few unfortunate cases of disability. Specifically, we are genetically wired to acquire and apply the overall system that makes up linguistic expression, not any particular language per se.

Nevertheless, we tend to associate language with writing, a language with the script it is written in. While useful, this is somewhat misleading. For, writing is a technology, a man-made artefact, and any script can be used to render the sounds or meanings of any other script. The Sanskrit language, which I mentioned above, was a purely spoken language when it was the native language of its speakers, and any contemporary imposition of a single script is just that, an imposition.

This is not to underplay the importance of writing, both for its technical and practical merits, and by extension the cultural and other value we associate with scripts. As hinted earlier, writing allowed humans to delegate the storage of knowledge off their brains – for the human brain is not designed to be a memory store as much as a pattern-matching and reasoning apparatus.¹⁴

There have been great traditions of oral histories with large corpuses of culturally or religiously valued compositions passed down for several generations orally: the Koran is still recited by the adherents word for word; Homer carried a large body of otherwise-lost history of good times centuries past on his shoulders or rather vocal chords and dactylic meters; the verses of the Rig-Veda, another large¹⁵ volume of oral composition was handed down unchanged in content¹⁶ for an estimated full 2000, yes, two thousand, years, orally intact before it was formally written down!

Still, oral histories depend on the people reciting and handing down the oral compositions. Writing, which can let us record and persist our thoughts across time and space, gives our minds a certain immortality!

\(- finis -\)

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1. No pun intended, until the 1400s!

2. The word for ‘write’ in a great many languages are derived from an original meaning of ‘scratch’ ‘carve’, including Latin ‘scrib-’ > German ‘schreib-’, Greek ‘graph-’, Sanskrit ‘rikh- / likh-’ and quite possibly our own ‘write’

3. Or perhaps after 3 lines as in Roman numerals arguably because it gets harder to distinguish and count many lines single-glance. Likewise, cf. Chinese 1-4: 一, 二, 三, 四

4. The vast majority if not all of the non-Cuneiform, non-Chinese-derived scripts of Eurasia

5. Keep in mind, the lower case or cursive forms, such as ‘a’ came much much later.

6. From Ox to A:

7. The third character is ‘ewe’ not ‘sheep’. Except perhaps in Wales!

8. In slight variations across the specific languages

9. “House of Bread” and “House of God”

10. That one’s for the software engineers!

11. To this day, for example, Arabic writing with no marking of the vowels can be found

12. A hint of this sound distinction is seen in the Latinate word ‘consonant’ itself which literally means ‘with sounds’, implying ‘with vowels’

13. A system called ‘abugida’

14. I’ll come back to this, but look up the core principle of Dave Allen’s GTD if you want to know what I mean

15. Said to be larger than the Iliad and Odyssey combined

16. The Rigveda, Jamison & Brereton, 2014 - representing some of the latest findings in an on-going endeavor of applying scientific methods of scrutiny to the preservation and transmission of the composition (pg 14-18)