Language Discovery

Let me tell you about what to me is the greatest human invention of all time: language. By language, i mean speech and alphabet. How does this capacity that enable us to communicate and persist knowledge among generations come to be?

Speech of course is the result of perfecting human vocalization and evolve from the discovery of pre-historic man of his inner capacity to emit and control sound.

Nobody knows when or how that happen but what can be said is that it was a longmaturation process until we reach the level which enable full communication and expression of abstract ideas.

Speech itself was a great step in human evolution but until we manage to code that speech for future memory it's value from the perspective of a persisting medium of communication is limited somewhat to oral tradition, so it's not adequate to mankind build upon past generations of endeavor.

What was lacking was a code, a symbolic or phonetic representation of our capacity to speech and once reached that our cognitive horizon would expand beyond the stars.

That's the main reason i assert language has the greatest human invention, because language is a pre-requisite to all other inventions and a necessary one. Civilization could not have emerged without it.

So, how do we reach that point? To talk about that we have to go back to the very beginning of historic time and even further.

Ancient Greece had a legend about which the alphabet was introduced in Europe by a Phoenician named kadmus; although the history must not necessarily be truth - Kadmus was a Greek name - it tell us about the importance of the Phoenicians to this story, but we are aheading our selfs, i come to that again in a moment.

The story of the alphabet can be accurately traced back to the beginning of civilization in the kingdoms of Egypt and Babylonia. Not that i pretend to imply that his story doesn't have roots in preceding times only that our state of
knowledge can go accurately only that far.

So, our story could have start as... In the beginning was the hieroglyphs. Hieroglyps are essentially a compound system of writing used by many ancient civilizations in different forms. It consists mainly of an ideographic system of representation associated sometimes with a phonetic and association one. Meaning that an icon or symbol could have a literal meaning has in a house picture to represent a house or a phonetic value to represent a consonant in the case of egyption writing or a syllable as other systems of writing, like the babylonian, did. The association method of representation mean that a symbol could have a non literal meaning has in the case of the use of an eagle to represent the values of persistence, liberty and freedom.

The Egyptians made use of iconographic symbols as a determinative way of help to clarify the meaning of some dubious word, meanwhile the babylonians drop it all together.

This result in a curiously conglomerate system of writing,
made up in part of symbols reminiscent of the crudest stages of
picture-writing, in part of symbols having the phonetic value of
syllables, and in part of true alphabetical letters. In a word,
this represents in itself the elements of the
various stages through which the art of writing has developed.
We must conceive that new features were from time to time added
to it, while the old features, curiously enough, sometimes were not given
up.

So our story must have started after all as... In the beginning was the picture, and the picture turn itself into an icon in symbolic (ideographic) writing. So from that we can really see that we can trace back the roots of the alphabet to the pre-historic cave man. When he learn to express himself in the paintings made in the walls of the caverns. And form that in the history roll of time we have the ideographic and phonetic systems, but that wasn't enough to reach the modern alphabet, what was steel lacking was brought to us by the Phoenician people.

Phoenicians were merchants and traders that rule over the mediterranian sea. Trough that merchant activity they reach and colonize many places including, it is believed, my hometown Lisbon. From and as a result of that they serve as messengers between different regions of the globe. One of them was ancient Greece, so when the Greeks developed their own version of the alphabet, the mother of all modern European ones, they derived it from the Phoenician.

So what was the innovation brought about by the Phoenicians in their alphabet? The use of consonants to express more than one syllable. You see, when i talk about the babylonian way of writing i told you that their system phonetically represents the use of syllables so that for each syllable was a unique symbol. That means that there was thousand of symbols to express every possible syllable in their native idiom. The same thing occurs even more frequently in the Chinese language, which is monosyllabic. The Chinese adopt a more clumsy expedient, supplying a different symbol for each of the meanings of a syllable; so that while the actual word-sounds of their speech are only a few hundreds in number, the characters of
their written language mount high into the thousands.

So the Phoenicians have the idea of abstract the use of syllables by consonants and were able to simplify so much the use of their alphabet that, with time, their version would replace all the old archaic ones and establish the standard for all future variations from whom the greek was the most well succeeded.

The Phoenician alphabet was so simplified that even vowels were excluded, so that the Greek alphabet was the first to employ the simultaneous use of vowels and consonants. From that we get latin and so on... and as they say the rest is history.