Episode 33 How Far Back Can We Trace Languages

Dr John McWhorter (2019)

Film Review

Writing emerged independently in the Middle East, China and the Mayan empire.

Middle East

Cuneiform was a semi-alphabetic (part pictographs and part phonetic) writing system used by many language families (including IndoEuropean, Afroasiatic and Sumerian) over 3,000 years. Only social elites learned it.

Cuneiform first emerged around 3500 BC in the area comprising modern Iraq and Iran. It was derived from a token-based counting system dating from 8,000 BC.

The earliest surviving cuneiform manuscript is the Behistun Inscription from the sixth century BC. Transcribed (in cuneiform) in Old Persian, Acadian (a Semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia) and Elamite (possibly related to Dravidian), it describes the military exploits of the Persian emperor Darius. It’s written in three languages,

Hieroglyphics (also combining pictographs and phonetic sounds) developed as a parallel writing system in Egypt. The first Proto-Canaanite alphabet was devised by laborers in a turquoise mine in the Sinai desert. They need a way to communicate with workers on other shifts and found hieroglyphics too hard to learn.

Around 900 BC. Phoenician traders elaborated on it to transcribe Phoenician (which had no vowels.). Greeks adapted it by adding vowels.

The Phoenician alphabet was mainly spread via Aramaic, (the language Persia used in their diverse colonies) between 1,000 BC – 200 AD. Aramaic would provide the model for Hebrew, Ethiopian, Brahmi, Burmese, Lao, Thai and Javanese writing.

China

Chinese, which is based entirely on pictographs, provided the model for Japanese and old Korean script.

Mayan Empire

Mayas wrote in hieroglyphics, a combination of pictographs and phonetic sounds.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/6120000/6120068