Language and writing are not the same (although people now confuse them), and the former is far older than the latter. Human spoken language developed late in the Paleolithic, probably 100,000–120,000 years ago, whereas true writing—the representation of language, element by element, in a permanent medium—was not invented until about 5,200 years ago.
Our current estimate of when language itself evolved is based on skeletal evidence for a swift evolutionary push toward the modern human vocal tract during the Upper Paleolithic. These changes—away from the throat, tongue, and mouth configuration typical of other primates—made rapid spoken speech possible while making it easier to die of obstructed air passages (choking, etc.). Such …
Modern linguistics—the scientific study of language in all its aspects—began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the investigation of just such historical questions. The 2,500 years of continuous written records of Latin and the Romance languages provided one useful "laboratory" in which language change could be observed. The brothers Grimm (Jacob Grimm [178…
The most important scripts deciphered in the nineteenth century were Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Their importance came from the fact that they belonged to the two oldest traditions of true writing: the representation of connected linguistic structures rather than only single concepts or situations. Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) deciphered Egyptian hierogl…
The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, differs from the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, in that people now had domestic plants and animals, permanent open-air settlements, and stone tools ground to a fine edge instead of merely chipped. At a number of Neolithic Near Eastern sites, along with evidence for early experiments in architecture and weaving, we find experiments with clay: hundreds of tiny balls,…
Egyptian writing maintained its predominantly religious character to the very end, even though faster cursive forms of the script were eventually devised for writing mundane secular documents. But the Egyptian script never became simpler, retaining its many hundreds of signs until it fell out of use in Roman times. When a script contains hundreds of signs and considerable ambiguity, an individual …
But there was a new bottleneck: the high cost of a printing medium. Vellum and parchment were very expensive and paper a little-explored craft (although invented long ago by the ancient Egyptians and Chinese). With the invention of pulp paper late in the eighteenth century, however, books could be printed so cheaply that even lower-class workers could afford them, carrying in their pockets not jus…
Barber, E. J. W. Archaeological Decipherment: A Handbook. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974. Discusses history, theory, and methods of archaeological decipherment. ——. The Mummies of Ürümchi. New York: Norton, 1999. Discusses literature on early Chinese loans from Iranians and other evidence for early trans-Eurasian contact. Daniels, Peter, and William Brigh…
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Linguistics Language and Literacy - Language, Linguistics, Writing, Origin Of Writing, Spread Of Writing And Literacy, Alphabetic Literacy