Discovery-it Art&History

Scripture: a mode of human communication?

Writing is undoubtedly one of humanity's most important inventions, it satisfies our need to collect, manipulate, archive, communicate and disseminate information.
Everything happens through a symbolic representation system of signs, with which we can transmit to other people, ideas and complex images.

Scholars pose around 6,000 B.C. the birth and invention of the great systems of writing of antiquity, through an evolution of the signs and writing could have been invented in three different parts of the world: the Middle East, in China and in Mesoamerica, even if at different times. [1]

We have already analyzed in previous articles of discovery-it, that about 35 thousand years ago, the first rock engravings, mostly zoomorphic drawings, are classified as pictographic writing and represent the beginnings of writing the pictogram therefore, it is a sight, recognizable, unambiguous and of clear meaning, such as a killed or wounded animal or a hunter that captures it.
The pictogram corresponds to an easily readable symbol or graphic character.
In the evolution of communication, man will go to the use of the ideogram, which corresponds to a word or a concept, which allows communication between populations of different languages.
The ideogram is also distinguished in logogram, that is when they indicate a sound or a word, then the ideogram indicates the thing seen and felt.

The graffiti practiced, therefore, evolve in ideographic writings, composed of many pictographic symbols. Pictographic characters are drawings of objects; hieroglyphics, or ideographic writing, pass from the description of objects to the representation of concepts, as Arthur Koestler stated "the pre-verbal stage of writing involves the awareness of being able to transfer the mental image to others" [3].
We have therefore gradually established the pre-requisite for the subsequent transmission of ideas with sounds through an alphabet.

In summary we have over a period of about 30,000 years the following steps:

1-graffiti (zoomorphic figures)
2-pictograms (intuitively understandable images)
3-ideograms (representation of concepts without phonemes)
4-alphabet (graphic signs representing phonics and phonemes of languages).

Four inventions have change our information and communication systems over time:
1-the alphabet
2-the birth of the book
3-the movable type printing
4-information technology and word processing.

We know that with the diffusion of the books, the communication took place in several countries in a capillary way. This communication method was strengthened with the invention of the movable type printing machine in China in 1041 and in Europe in the second half of the 15th century with Gutenberg and it didn’t suffer great transformations for 500 years.
The question that is at the base of contemporary communication, to which many scholars are already trying to answer:
Who will write in the future?
In 2015 an article published in Associated Press appeared with the signature not of a journalist, but incredibly of an AI-Automated Insights, a technology that transforms data into clear and human (more or less) narratives, for any field, sector or application, industrial, financial or technological.
We are not talking about simple reports of finance or economy, but of aggregations of stories and contents with human implications, connaturalized by feelings and emotions, even if they do not really prove them.
A group of researchers headed by Hitoshi Matsubara of the "Future University of Hakodate" [2] writed two stories with Artificial Intelligence to attend a Japanese Literary Prize and surprisingly with one they overcame two selections, fortunately without winning.
The central point of the debate on the possibility of "artificial" creative writing is precisely in the word "creativity", that is a capacity inherent only in man, among other things difficult to explain scientifically and not applicable to the computer, at least for the moment.
Therefore, a writer of feelings and emotions mixed with the artist's soul, which distinguishes the human being is still not emulated by a computer, still very far from the transmission of emotional content.
We are very close, however, to the loss of creativity and the pleasure of writing, suddenly supplanted by phrases, acronyms, abbreviations and debasement of the richness of the contents of words and the color of words. We go inexorably extinguishing our moods, emotions and concepts in cold pictograms without art and passion, the "Emoticons" that enclose in a smiley face or symbolize an entire sentence, symbols alien to the memory of man.

Links:

1. The Evolution of Writing
2. Future University
3. Come si è giunti alla scrittura

written by Hive account@armandosodano

Logograph writing of Asia: China and Japan

About two thousand years after the birth of the first writings in Mesopotamia, in 1200 B.C. a new language arose inside south-east Asia, the Sinic, from which the most part of Asian languages originated. Then from Sinic some Sino-Tibetan idioms differentiated, forming a group of logographic languages (sometimes improperly called ideographic) that are characterized by a writing system whose elements express both the signifier and the signified. Logographic writing expresses perfectly that kind of languages made by invariable elements, because each invariable item matches with an invariable word, and cannot represent any modification of the speech (e.g. masculine/feminine; singular/plural, adjectives, conjugation, etc)
Today Chinese is the only genuine logographic language that survives, while all the others, totally or partially, changed into easier phonographic forms, where each sign meets a sound and allows terms declination.
Since Shang Dynasty (1200 B.C.) it has been developed a kind of writing which was mostly used for divination and religion, e.g. simple words written on bones, shells, plastrons of turtles and later bronze objects. Afterward Chinese writing shaped as a realistic representation of things; this function was lost around 100 A.D., when the first Chinese dictionary was created. Originally, logograms suggested concepts through the representation of a depicted image; but later they started to replicate single words and their pronunciation. This process is known as phoneticization and demarcate the true birth of writing. Actually, today we can only image (with a lot of fantasy) the likeness of kanji with the corrispective word only after knowing its meaning, but the opposite is nearly impossible. Finally, modern Chinese writing gather many Chinese dialects (at least 15), each one completely different from the others, but they become mutually understandable through logographic transcription.
On the other hand, Japan got to know the use of writing during the firsts centuries A.D. trading with China. Japaneses started to replicate Chinese characters at first with ornamental purpose; then many religious and philosophic books spread throughout the country. Anyway, oral tradition persisted until the V-VI century, when during the Suiko era many deep social, economical and institutional reforms were made to promote business and trade. So the first attempts to replicate indigenous language emulating Chinese characters were introduced. Ancient Chinese language was kept for a long time as an idiom for literature, bureaucracy and business, becoming as prestigious as Latin was for Europe. Only at the beginning of VIII century the first literary books of prose and poetry written in Japanese were published, even if they were made adapting Chinese ideograms to spoken Japanese. Nevertheless, because of intrinsic differences between the two languages, written Chinese was totally revised, adjusting better to spoken language of Japan. Original Chinese kanji were complemented by kana, a syllabic alphabet that could help declension of variable parts of the speech. This alphabets are the ancestors of the three modern Japanese writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, through which modern Japanese language can be currently expressed.

Links:

1. Introduzione alla linguistica generale
2. William G. Boltz, The Invention of Writing in China
3. La lingua giapponese antica e la scrittura cinese

written by Hive account@piumadoro

Writing and songwriting

To weave the praises of the greatest invention in the history of mankind, I decided to test myself with an important form of art: the songwriting.
Although I am, by quality, the worst exponent of this sector, I tried to write and then sing a song dedicated to writing and mistreatment that nowadays often suffer, using the musical notes of the famous song Lemon Tree, produced by the German band named Fool’s Garden.
This is because I decided to make an experiment that I think everyone should do at least once in life, that is to try to combine a set of words with the phonetics of a specific song, making everything as smooth and harmonious as possible.
In this case I referred in particular to those absurd elisions that afflict our modern languages in the era of texting and chat[1]; certainly someone could object that even the first known form of writing appeared on the face of the Earth about 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia[2], known as cuneiform, has been over time "simplified" thanks to the elimination from the daily use of many of its wedges and then of its graphemes.
In reality, however, we all know that this type of writing really needed to be simplified to be more easily understood and that, on the contrary, our modern alphabets, fruit of many centuries of evolution, are instead perfect as they are. They do not need neither one more nor one less character, to let our friends understand perfectly all our ideas and to explain to them the concepts elaborated by our mind.
Now let's see my proof, then I invite you to repeat it as soon as possible to honor any writing and vocabulary of the alphabets you prefer.
For sure it will be a fun experience and, of course, you will certainly do better than me!

Dear Mr Shakespeare I’m writing to you,
Because I want to tell you about something new
I’m breaking my mind and I cannot accept
Your language is dying and nobody cares
But nothing really changed, and I wonder…

From cuneiform writing to Egyptian signs,
Many small symbols, hard to decode
but later in time, they were decrypted
We finally have letters,from A to Z
And if you write a song,
you need to know…

I wonder why, I wonder how
we eliminate too many fu**ing letters now,
and all that I can read is just a short acronym.
Tears In My Eyes become TIME,
I’m crying, crying, crying, crying, crying to the sky
Where is my language now, is just words shortening

There are many alphabets,
We all studied them,
but we never needed,
just used a third.
Before it was engraved on the walls,
then paper came ...and google arrived
and you can just ask for, and it write it…
Oh curation, it’s very good for me
Oh curation, I don’t wanna see all these emoticons
I have to go now to show my readers
That sing is a wonderful form of art
And everything will happen, and you’ll wonder…

Personally I think that songwriting is, without any doubt, the quintessence of poetry.
Writing a text and calling it a song is in some cases reductive. You know better than me how some songs of great fame are much more than mere words, in facts they are the mirror of the soul of the author who, reflecting off the outside, takes a shape readable by everyone.
People say that sound and words are the creative forces of the universe, as well as the best cure against various forms of psycho-physical disorders[3]; for this reason, immortalizing them on paper or, given the times, on blockchain, must be an honor as well as a real pleasure.
Except for the passage I have proposed to you today.

Links:

1. SMS language
2. Cuneiform writing
3. Music therapy

written by Hive account@itegoarcanadei