#evolution of writing

[linguisticalities]

What the Vai Script Reveals About the Evolution of Writing

Linguistic anthropologists are digging into evolution of the West African Vai script for insights into human cognition and society.

[ancientstuff]

Rare African script offers clues to the evolution of writing

The world's very first invention of writing took place over 5000 years ago in the Middle East, before it was reinvented in China and Central

I have the feeling that this will be interesting to a small subsection of you guys, but I think it's fascinating.

[moonlitkit]

Edited my latest SWTOR piece because I got some details sideways. Not used to writing Saphina, ngl. It's interesting writing her for several reasons:

Female sneezing, and a lot of it.

F!Inquisitor / Talos is not actually a ship I shipped even in vanilla, until now I suppose?

This story is coming to me INSANELY fast, for my standards; shy of when I was doing NaNoNo I have rarely written this fast and for points 1 and 2 this is a very weird fic for this to happen on.

She's made cameos with Umbral and Wolf but I have not in fact actually zeroed in on her so there's a lot of "getting to know you" writer/muse edition going on.

And.

I'm aaaaaatt... -checks doc- 13,013 as of me pausing to write this post, and am at CH7.... I think this is the longest snz thing I've written so far. Completed, Between Lovers with Umbral / Wolf is just under 10.5K... I do need to post that actually. But this one is not only past that, it's past that and not done.

It's not even overtly kinky, though I do feel it will develop that way because I like that and I'm the writer. XD Mostly slow burn sickfic in which she is very, very sneezy and I'm baffled by how much I like it. Idk man. You just follow where the muse takes you.

Gonna post Pt2 after this.

[probaway]

Experimenting with voice to Google docs transferred to Wordpress

Experimenting with voice to Google docs transferred to WordPress

Today I am attempting to talk into my Nexus tablet and then transfer the text document to this WordPress site, where I am experienced and comfortable with editing documents, and where I will be able to clean them up. The voice to text on the Nexus was okay, and the error rate was good enough so that later editing text on screen would be acceptable.

On this first try syncing the following document…

View On WordPress

[linguisten]

wordswilling hat gesagt: Because of this difficulty, people seem to focus more often on when oral language started to be written down. But that’s not the same question, is it?

No, that only shifts our problem. What counts as true writing and what are menmonics, pictures, etc.? Furthermore, spoken language is probably at least 10 times older than writing. We may safely assume that by the time homo sapiens started leaving Africa roughly 100000 years ago, they had (spoken) language. Writing has been invented several times throughout human history, in several places, but that was much later.

[mwgamera]

🐎→⾺→⻢→🐴

[cheesepuffunderthemountain]

FROM TABLET TO TABLET

FROM TABLET TO TABLET

  Down I etch the words on stone,

And looking on I see your rules indeed,

Regret fills me to my very bone,

Knowing these words will never be freed,

  Wings my voice has been given to echo,

In croaks to the lands of those that follow,

No time do they waste to wing words again,

Going first to the armoury to put on their chain,

Second comes their honour, lastly their last hour

,

Does the rider carry a burden or words of hope?

All that ink as black as blood on sinner’s hands,

Rendering life easy or hard for some to cope,

Know not your message but ride over the sands,

  Where my tablets lie hidden in rules forgotten,

Oh the world has been set free from this burden,

Rising from tablet to tablet to comment on our war,

Do you think tablets like what we see and hear so far?

Since they were made to bind us too, but not by God, only the mortal   few.

[newculturesofwriting]

Guest Blog: Digital Writing--The New and Improved Manuscript

Despite Muller’s cryptic writing style, I was able to decipher (I hope) a few of the points he makes in his article “The Body of the Book.” Muller mainly discusses the world’s transition from manuscript to print. His article focuses on what society lost in the elimination of the manuscript. I’d like to focus on a specific point that Muller seems to make. Toward the end of the article, he claims that “writing finally los(t) any analogy to face-to-face interaction, such as had always characterized the medieval manuscript culture” (150), which is to say that printing abolished the simulated dialogue that occurred in manuscript writing. Muller warns us to “be cautious regarding historical parallels between the advent of printing and that of electronic media”; however, I’d like to continue this conversation, and discuss the transition to digital writing that our writing culture is experiencing now—a transition that I believe responds to the transition about which Muller writes. Writing culture is now undergoing a shift toward a form of writing that does incorporate the “face-to-face interaction” of the manuscript culture; only now, since the advent of social media, the face-to-face interaction isn’t quite an analogy anymore. Now, when someone writes, whether on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or any other social networking website, everyone from everywhere can instantly respond to his or her writing, creating “digital” face-to-face interaction. Digital writing is an enlivened form of the manuscript culture; the dialogue format of medieval manuscript culture has become actual dialogue in the age and culture of digital writing. People are actually “speaking” (writing) to each other rather than one medieval author simulating the dialogue himself. Do these parallels make sense to you?

Other questions: Muller discusses the diminished quality of printed material as opposed to manuscripts. How does this argument translate to the quality of digital writing? In thinking about this question, consider the following quote from Muller’s article:

Multiplication was one of the main points in the praise of the new invention [of printing]. But very soon the other side of the coin was discovered, the “overabundance of writing,” the fact that everything was printed with little concern for selection and correctness, “for profit alone,” and as a “great scam.” Books lost value everywhere and along with them the scholars, who were now replaced by “rude people” (144). 

  Here’s a few videos and an article about the evolution of writing that I think add to this discussion: 

This first video is an interview with Nicholas Carr, writer of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHH9aBSPig

He also relates the invention of the printing press with his perspective on modern writing in this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203893404577098343417771160.html

This next video is entitled “The Evolution of the Book.” I think it relates to Muller’s concern about the quality of writing content after the advent of printing.  Make sure you read the video description. It helped me make a little more sense of it. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF9Q3LcOAQ8