From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 18:16:45 MDT
On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 04:41:08PM -0700, Damien Sullivan wrote:
> On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 10:27:00AM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> > likely. As Diamond pointed out, invention of writing is hard and has
> > happened only a few times, but once it is done it is easily copied and
> > spreads rapidly. The known rapid spread of written languages from a few
>
> Did he? I thought picture-writing, ideograms, was invented pretty frequently,
> with syllabaries second, and the alphabet apparently unique, except maybe for
> the Korean hangul but that's ambiguous.
In _Guns Germs and Steel_ he lists Sumer and Mesoamerica as undisputable
independent inventions, with China and Egypt as likely and possibly
independent. All others are descended from these, either through
"blueprint copying" (the alphabet is copied, such as Linear B from
Linear A) or "idea diffusion" (the basic idea of writing is copied, such
as in Cherokee). I have not seen any evidence against this, although
some of the oldest links might be unclear (where did Linear A come
from?).
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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