Phylogeny of Writing

IT TOOK (AT LEAST) 300,000 YEARS FOR HOMO SAPIENS

TO DEVELOP LANGUAGE AND WRITING FROM SCRATCH

(Silvia Ferrara’s The Greatest Invention, 2019–2022)

A Review by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

The author centers on writing seen both as a human ability and a transcription of oral language, and yet she very heavily refuses there to be any continuity from oral to written language, though once or twice what she says, like in her fifth step about “assigning sounds to signs,” is exactly the reverse of what Homo Sapiens did when he developed writing: he assigned signs to sounds. No matter what way it works for a decipherer, and for Homo Sapiens when he developed some writing system for his/her/their language, and his/her/their language alone in 6–8,000 BCE, the connection between an oral language and its written version are connected, but flexible so that it can be easily replaced by another written code for the very same oral utterances, like the Phoenicians developing the first real consonantal alphabet to replace, for Semitic languages, the Cuneiform writing of the Sumerians (Indo-Iranian) and Akkadians (Semitic), and later on the Greeks adding the vowels of Indo-European languages to the Phoenician alphabet that only had “alep” and only when it was the initial sound or letter of a word. She alludes to signs in painted caves, hence going back to 45,000 BCE, and all over the world, but she does not exploit it. We know, thanks to Alexander Marshack, all the diacritic and geometric signs in those caves, and on portable bone, stone, or even wooden artifacts there were the recordings of counting observations of moon cycles, or probably menstrual cycles. She ignores it all and thus neglects the 40,000 years that preceded what she calls the invention of writing around 3,500 BCE. She acknowledges there were six cradles in the world and does not give them in chronological order, hence does not link them to the general evolution of the concerned human groups, and she neglects the fact that Egyptian writing and Sumerian writing developed at the same time or so but with a strong link between them: the Akkadians were the scribes of the Sumerians and they were…