By Jason Pickett
After the discovery of symbols for words and eventually as symbols for letters it is much easier to understand concretely linguistic origins. Writing has an interesting but almost inevitable beginning. Written language is completely linked to trade and in the next few paragraphs I shall prove it. Trade really has been happening during mankind's whole existence, but became more predominant towards the end of the ice age (during the time people were nomadic hunters and gatherers). This is when man had so much difficulty finding food that he started using wild grass, as it was now so abundant. They used this grass to make all sorts of things: making baskets, cord, and bows to name a few. With all of these tools that cord could make, it became much easier to find food in abundance, and so people lost their former nomadic habits, and settled down to have permanent residences. Women started gathering wild grasses (wheat and barley) and cooking them, and eventually invented bread. After a while of studying what made the breads, women discovered that the seeds they used to make the bread could be put back into the earth and harvest new plants. Thus agriculture began, and brought with it a need for labor. (Gonick p84, 88, 89)
Once labor was supplied another need was brought up, and that would be the need to house all of these new people. From this need was created the first communal settlements (towns). These new ways of life brought with them more needs: building materials, sewage disposal etc. etc. Eventually they needed to keep track of everyone as well, thus writing will emerge from these towns (on to that later). To use the new resources they had acquired they developed specialists for everything from spinning wool, to potters. They had so many new resources that they traded it for exotic goods that other communities had (raw), or had made. (Gonick p90)
Because of wars in nearby lands, many people moved out of where the wars were being fought, and into the Fertile Crescent, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The people irrigated the desert, drained the marshes, and created the first city, by the name of Sumer, capitol of the Sumerian Empire. The importance of trade became more important than ever before. “Trade increased in importance after the first towns appeared. Within the town the different task specialists had to trade the results of their work for the things they needed. The increasing importance of task specialization required more sophisticated arrangements of bartering so the residence could trade the results of their labor for the necessities and luxuries they desired” (Shelly, 36). The Sumerians built the cities of Kish, Lagash, Eridu Ur and Uruk. The Sumerian merchants covered a vast network of trade routes from Egypt to modern India.
In Sumer the first contracts were made; the Sumerian would take little tokens and insert them into a clay ball, to show what was sold, bought, saved and so on. The only way to find out what was saved was to break open the balls, and that would be breaking the contracts. So the merchants put pictures on the outside, to represent the tokens in the ball. Then someone came up with a great idea to just write what they traded and save all of the other hassles, and eventually this became writing, a skill without which our culture would not have become what it is today. (Gonick, p100)
The cities of the Sumerian civilization only had mud for the most part when they were first being built. This mud, although good for making clay, also was very good for making crops. Sumer had so much food that it had to export it for the things that Sumer lacked, which was namely everything: wood, stone, metal, and different foods. As Sumer flourished due to its vast supply of food, this did not go unnoticed by foreigners. Foreigners crowded the cities, and forced temples (administration centers) to put them to work. The temples employed the immigrants to be craftsmen in the building of huge monuments, some may say that a certain myth may have derived from this story and that would be The Tower of Babel, an interesting historical linguistic side note (Gonick p106, 107)
Because of the temples running the country, Sumerian priests were forced to invent writing to keep track of all of the people and their accounts. The priests opened the first schools to train scribes in proper Sumerian, called cuneiform (wedged-shaped). They were wedged-shaped because when the writing utensils used to make them first touched the clay they were large and bold and would go up and increasingly get smaller afterward in a stroke of the utensil. Cuneiform started out as pictographs and turned on its side in order to prevent smudging (the same reason that we write from left to right today). All cuneiform was written on clay tablets, and thousands of these have survived to this day (Gonick p108).
The next step was to create a system of writing that used relatively few symbols or characters to represent a wide range of meanings; this is different from cuneiform in that each symbol in cuneiform represents a word. When a language is broken up into phonetic sounds to create a word it requires much less memorization, and thereby makes it much easier to learn. This originated in English through ancient Phoenician, which owns the basis of the modern alphabet. The Phoenicians were a race of Semites, who were renowned for their trading and when they traded with Greece, they brought their alphabet with them. The Phoenician letters originally were only pictographs which grew to represent more abstract things than just what they made pictures from. The Greeks borrowed the idea from the Phoenicians and flipped all of the symbols around. Even though the pictures were hiding in the Greek alphabet the symbols lost all of the original meaning to the Greeks. An interesting point to note is that the Phoenician alphabet as well as modern and ancient Semitic alphabets did not contain vowels, because it was assumed that when their texts are read that the vowels will automatically be entered in the proper places. The Greeks felt they needed vowels in the language and thus invented them (Gonick 240)
Greek writing gave the basis for Etruscan writing. The Etruscans ruled Rome for a few hundred years and consequently the Romans adopted a derived form of the Etruscan alphabet. We still use the Roman alphabet today, which is now known as the “Latin alphabet”. Though the Latin alphabet is over two thousand years old, it is relatively unchanged today, and will most likely continue to be unchanged and still used long into the future.
A next important step for writing would be printing. Before printing, writing was a tedious job that could take very long stretches at a time. It was relatively difficult to find written media particularly after the fall of the Roman Empire. Though the printing press was originally invented in ancient China, it was practically useless as Chinese had so many characters that to store all of the type-pieces necessary for one text would be futile. The real credit for a practical printing press goes to Johannes Gutenburg. Gutenburg was a goldsmith who took two old ideas and combined them to make an invention that has changed world history since. He took the old idea of a winepress and combined it with alphabetic type-pieces to write on pages. He first printed the Bible in Latin, but it was not long before his contemporaries were using his technology to print other texts. Along with the advent of printing, more ideas were better able to spread quickly and society developed at a much more accelerated rate than ever before (Carruth, p 1203-1205)