Greetings Economists, Hi CB! Let me see if I can make this writing history come clear.
On Feb 15, 2006, at 7:10 AM, Charles Brown wrote: Counting is usually done in a line when written. 1,2,3,4... And arithmetic too, 1 + 2 = 3,although it can be linearly vertical also. Doyle, Hmmmm...??? I'm thinking. We have a certain clarity being familiar with math now that the ancients didn't. Usually they had to practice something quite a bit before they got things to a certain degree of efficient design. Early math was numbering 'stock', and the representations could be pebbles in a jar. Or with land the concepts of math looked to them like geometry or picture like with numbers on the dimensions marking say 'feet' or strides or something relatively regular about knowing the landscape, building their living places and villages etc. Writing linearly was an accommodation to clarity and simplicity over time when new ideas came along. So writing linear expressions of math wasn't all that compelling early on. This linearization of writing was a long process, in which the earliest writing was not so much trying to capture the sound of vowels at all because they are such brief events to hear, but syllables and individual consonants and conventions of meaning from earlier literal images grafted onto writing. Early writing is often not exactly linear as a confused jumble by individuals. These early attempts ended up having often times more than a hundred different writing elements to construct 'words' which vastly complicated how to learn literacy. If they had the concept of 'word' which we take for granted now, but is actually a problematic invention later on. It was the semitic innovation from the Egyptian example that finally settled upon a small number of symbols for consonants and vowels around the time of Abraham of the bible. It is not clear if the Phoenicians (who established Carthage later on who were centered in present day Lebanon then) or the Jews who invented the alpha bet. Linearization doesn't make math grammatical as much as it shares a hand/eye work history with writing in which the cleaned up process of visually displaying counting or writing concepts compelled certain practices to triumph over others as more and more people used 'writing' as a means of communicating. It's clear that writing besides imitating the sound of speech also divides words into noun phrases and verb phrases. This sets writing apart from numerical expressions. Expressing action like verbs do was exceedingly hard to communicate by numbers. The numerical means to expression motion really rest upon the calculus invented thousands of years after writing depicted verbs. I use the metaphor that grammar reflects the body to set it apart from the math that depicts motion. Knowing motion through words that 'describe' motion is a reflection of us 'knowing' motion by touch, sight, and sound. The intrinsic properties of that knowledge are radically different from number theory. CB: I believe the idea is that the cueiform were alphabetical. It is not picture writing. Doyle, Alphabets (a to end of symbols list) came about two thousand years after the first writing systems. The simplicity of the practical achievement of alphabets made it much easier to teach than say cuneiform. Genuine writing scripts can't be picture writing, they must 'reflect' sound. The problem being that still pictures can't capture in a regular way potential or actual 'motion' or emotions that we describe as states of being in people, animals, or other hidden motions. Motion is the big problem of writing, and math. It's still a stumper to adequately define 'time'. Time is an abstract 'invisible' component of motion that visual space can't 'show'. I have two books I rely upon to refer to the current state of writing understanding, one a history of scripts written by an instructor in Japan, and the other a world history of major languages. Ancient languages being mostly known through their scripts. I can cite them if need be here. CB: I'm thinking writing arises simultaneously with the advent of the first ruling class. And yes, "priests" soon follow. Doyle, Numbers and accounting probably accompany the first ruling class. Then really large cultures like Babylon and Egypt invented writing. That seems to be the pattern, first number records of some sort, then writing. The ability to record the sound and to clearly express motion was the technical obstacle that took a lot of practice to achieve and a lot of wealth to support for writing to emerge as a tool. I think the relationship between priest religion and writing is not so accidental. Writing is a picture of the mind as it were where religion holds sway in ancient cultures as the chief means of expressing the community blah blah. Numbers I suspect could have been used by the commons people. The people who shared their wealth, because numbers don't require nearly the infrastructure to arise as does language reproduction. take care, Doyle
