There is a very neat page, entitled the Evolution of Alphabets, at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html. It illustrates many of the relationships between pictographs and various single-sound symbols, and then the further evolution into the early sets into some of the modern alphabets. It’s always interesting to see that elements as abstract as alphabetic characters are rooted in something much more concrete.

Using a pointed stick to write in wet mud, Angeline showed Omakayas and Nokomis the meaningful signs, which looked like odd tracks.

“What animal would leave these?” Omakayas teased.

“Be patient,” Nokomis counseled. “Let’s find out what your sister has learned.”

“They’re letters,” Angeline said, eager to share her knowledge. “One follows the next. You look at them, just like tracks. You read them. They have a meaning and a sound.”

“Howah!” That’s a good idea! Like our picture writing,” Nokomis said.

…She also knew where certain marks had been placed upon lake rocks long ago. Some of the marks were made by the spirits, some were made by humans; others were drawn by a giant race of people who had lived on earth in the old days and had disappeared (p.190-191).

Music, graphic art, dance, sculpture, etc. have been around since forever. New technologies that enable ancient ways of knowing suggests that digital technology could encourage a return to nonlinguistic media as a dominant form of expression.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

I think you might enjoy Illich writing on the beginning of the monopoly of reading and the book in the 12 Century – In the Vineyard of the Text, if you haven’t already. It disconcerts they way you imagine the world and fits quite well with the ideas you are challenging us to think about here.

In fact, the alphabet is an elegant technology for the visualisation of sounds. Its two dozen shapes trigger the memory of utterances that have been articulated by the mouth, the tongue, or the lips, and filter out what is said by gesture, mime or the guts. Unlike other writing systems, it records sounds not ideas. And in this it is foolproof: readers can be trained to voice things they have never heard of before. p39

I’m not so kind with my take on the subject.

“There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”

I loved the ideas you have collected in this post – I am captured by notions of “object centered sociality” and I rely upon Wikipedia – both what it does and what it can make happen.

“What does it do?” takes precedence (as my fellow bogger Insouciant Femme would say over what it might mean.