Just a question that came to me from Anthropology class today.
Why did a complex system of literacy develop? Why were heiroglyphics insufficient as a form of communication? I’m guessing historical records benefited in some way, as I remember reading something about Vikings kidnapping literate Celts to record their history, as runes weren’t doing an adedquate job. (Can anyone confirm/debunk this, and maybe elaborate on what happened?) And why did China and Japan develop such an incredible complex system of written characters that makes our look simplistic by comparison? What needs facilitated all this?
P.S. If something sounds awkward in my phrasing or basic understanding, recognize that I’m still trying to get a handle on all this. Correct me, if possible. I sometimes see SDMB members jump down the throats of people who make simple fundamental errors in their queries, as though they have no right to even ask such an advanced question if they haven’t got the basics. Bear with me.
If you aren’t happy with a purely oral tradition, you’re gonna need writing. A good system is not more complex than necessary. Using combinations of the 26 characters of our alphabet, you can produce any phoneme found in the English language.
The Vikings and Celts spent plenty of time warring, kidnapping, trading, and intermarrying. There was plenty of cultural exchange going on. I see no reason why the Astaru Futhark would be insufficient for the Vikings needs. Aren't both eddas written using that alphabet?
The Chinese and Japanese alphabets you mention (last I checked they were 4 Japanese alphabets), were based on pictographs and ideographs. Egyptian heiroglyphics were as well. This means that every word in the language is represented by its own character. How many words are in your vocabulary? Could you remember a character for each of them? The Roman alphabet was based on sound. This meant you needed many less characters.
I think you’ve confused several different ideas here. Hieroglyphics (ideograms) are a complex system of literacy. If you mean why did writing develop in the first place, the answer is probably for the purpose of record-keeping and business. As far as why some cultures chose ideograms, and others syllabaries, and still others alphabets, a lot probably has to do with the nature of the language. A syllabary would not work for English.
Again, I’m a bit confused. Aren’t runes Celtic? No, I can’t confirm or debunk this.
Japanese Kanji are borrowed from Chinese, where they worked fine. They didn’t fit so well with the Japanese language, so eventually katakana and hiragana (which are syllabaries, not alphabets) were developed, but kanji was established enough to hang around.
All writing systems have their inherent advantages and disadvantages, and I wouldn’t say that ideograms are necessarily more complex than alphabets or syllabaries (but they sure seem that way to non-natives!). However Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese (sort of) have all switched to either alphabets or syllabaries after initially using Chinese characters. This may be more of a matter of “fit” than the inherent superiority of non-ideograms.
Hope I was nice enough. I’m no expert in this myself, just an amateur with some interest.
Which, by the way, is the phoneticization (sp?) of the Japanese Katakana and Hiragana alphabets (or as I’ve learned here now, “syllabaries”) into Roman letters. Instead of undecipherable squiggles (to my eyes), you get an alphabet like
a i u e o
ka ki ku ke ko
za zi zu ze zo
They’re read more-or-less like English, but I think the “z” is like “zs” in “zsa-zsa gabore.”
It’s been a long time since I was a child trying to learn Japanese!
In any case, this allows the Japanese language to be written out in “western” characters writeable by “western” means. Ask yourself, how do you pronounce the symbol for the Artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince?
Both are “adequate” for representing, well, whatever speech sounds the Vikings and the Celts wanted to represent. As far as I know, there are no written alphabets which exactly match the speech sounds used in the spoken language (if only because spoken language changes faster than writing). Phoneticians use the International Phonetic Alphabet, which at least tries to represent every sound the human vocal tract can produce; as far as I know, though, no language has adopted the IPA or a subset thereof as its official alphabet. (Only as far as I know, though.)
Well, a syllabary would work for English. But it would be enormously complex. We have err… 12 different vowels, and about twice the number of consonants. Let’s use the number 36 for the number of sounds in the language. Now, our language tends to go consonant-vowel-consonant in orthography (and I’m including blends, like pr, just for simplicity’s sake.), which means we must have at minumum three little individual strokes in the syllabic symbol. That means that if we were to have a syllabary, it would require err… a few hundred symbols. Would you like to learn that in school? Me neither. Syllabaries work well for Japanese, which has a very limited soundset and a simpler orthography (consonant-vowel - club was, I think, transliterated as korabu - c-v-c turns to c-v.)
'Course, I’m a conlanger, so bring on the complexity! Grrrr! At first, I tried a syllabary for my own language-in-progress, but since it has about 16 vowels and maybe about 22 consonants, it was too hard, and I decided to stick to the ABCs (with diacritics, of course).
Just a pretentious sophomore in high school with a talent for making a fool of himself.