Writing before Alphabet?

[OldStyle]

I don't know if this has been commented before, but isn't it illogical to have writing before the alphabet? Or is this a "chicken or the egg" type of argument? I haven't read the civilopedia, so I do not understand the rationale given, but it was one of those "huh.....?" moments in the game.

 

[Janos]

Olde English used to be written how it sounded... some of the Shakespearean texts (original) just look weird. But yeah they need to have alphabet for that... you prove a good point, that was a strange decision to put it in in that way i must admit.

 

[Ariks]

First there were signs that were generally understood but not standardised which then developed into alphabets later.

 

[opkoad]

Would Alphabet before Writing make any sense?

Realize that "Writing" could include pictograms...which can be much older than our alphabet..

In Civ3 Alphabet came before Writing, but I think "Writing" there intended to be the more sophisticated form, whereas I believe Writing in Civ IV means ... I can take a stick and carve little squiggly symbols in mud...

 

[AngelLeliel]

Alphabet is invented after Hieroglyphs.
We can say Hieroglyphs is a kind of writing, right?

 

[grzesl]

Guess it's one of the chicken-and-egg kind of problems. If you had Alphabet before Writing, whiat would you use it for?

 

[pilight]

Writing predates alphabets. The first writing was pictographic, like Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs.

 

[combathanger]

Alphabet is the stage when writting advances to a small set of characters (26 in English for example) that can be used to represent any and all words, even ones that havnt been invented yet.

Writting is not ubiquitous with the alphabet. Writting can mean pictograms and such, where each word gets its own symbol....not very easy to learn

 

[Arkalius]

Yeah alphabets in fact are more of a modern way of representing written language in the grand scheme of things. Many languages today do not even have alphabets. Japanese uses a syllabary which is similar to an alphabet but not the same thing. Heiroglyphs and pictograms as people have mentioned are far older and while they don't see widespread use today, they were the dominant form of written communication in ancient human culture. Many oriental languages also use symbols similar to pictograms... I forget what they're called.

Heiroglyphs and pictograms etc developed as sort of a natural intuitive way to represent things in a written medium. Alphabets are born out of a concious effort to develop an efficient way of representing the sounds that make up words. Japanese syllabaries (Katakana and Hirigana) are similar to alphabets in that words are made up of combinations of symbols that represent sounds, but are different in that many sounds are repeated in different symbols. Therre's a level of redundancy there.

 

[Meffy]

Egyptian hieroglyphics include alphabetic, syllabic, and non-phonetic symbols -- all mixed into a complicated misch-masch that's mighty hard to understand, even after years of study. But there are other pre-hieroglyphic writing systems that are not alphabetic at all. Alphabets are simpler and easier to learn than a syllabaries or other, more complex notational systems, and might be expected to provide a higher rate of literacy.

... All of which is so much pedantry when it comes to Civ. I'd guess the two are divided simply to make the game play come out as the designers intended. Not everything in a game must reflect the real world with 100% fidelity.

 

[pilight]

Heiroglyphs and pictograms as people have mentioned are far older and while they don't see widespread use today, they were the dominant form of written communication in ancient human culture.

Hieroglyphs are rare, but pictograms are quite common even today. This is a common example:

http://www.upplandslokaltrafik.se/_images/photos/pictogram.jpg

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I don't know if this has been commented before, but isn't it illogical to have writing before the alphabet? Or is this a "chicken or the egg" type of argument? I haven't read the civilopedia, so I do not understand the rationale given, but it was one of those "huh.....?" moments in the game.

This is the first Civ to get this Right. Alphabet is a type of Writing.

Your question is like:
Government before Democracy?
or
Weapons before Guns?
or
Trade before Credit Cards?

All of those would actually be the Proper orders for those techs.

 

[panzooka]

thats not weird, i actually did paper before writing...

guess that civ has no written language, all they do is drawing picture and graphs...

chinese only adapted alphabet last century called pinyin.

 

[Arkalius]

Hieroglyphs are rare, but pictograms are quite common even today. This is a common example:

http://www.upplandslokaltrafik.se/_images/photos/pictogram.jpg

True... but symbols like that are not used in writing, nor are they commonly associated as a depiction of a word in the language. In fact symbols like that are usually pretty language-neutral.

 

[pilight]

True... but symbols like that are not used in writing, nor are they commonly associated as a depiction of a word in the language. In fact symbols like that are usually pretty language-neutral.

Pictograms never related directly to single words. How could they, words didn't exist when pictograms came into usage. They've often relayed concepts rather than definite objects or actions.

 

[dh_epic]

Writing definitely came before the alphabet. Symbols and stamps and etching and markers. It was more of a counting system first, and became more linguistic afterwards.

 

[Ozymandias]

OK, according to the only source I have on hand (Akira Nakanishi's "Writing Systems Of The World"), "writing" is accomplished using Alphabets, Syllabaries (where a character has a given sound but contains no inherent, specific meaning), and/or Ideograms ("Any picture, stylized picture, or abstract symbol used in writing a language [emphasis added] and representing a meaning rather than a sound ... [includes] ... Chinese characters, hieroglyphics, and pictograms" (wherein, say, a circle might = the sun).

Any of these are required for writing, so Heavens only knows what the folks in charge of the tech tree were thinking.

dh_epic does raise the contemporary point that simple mathematics and pictograms (i.e., markings to note how many amphorae of wine are in a crate -- notations for inventory, in effect) precede other more advanced systems -- which themselves, by definition, precede Writing as the word is commonly used.

-Oz

 

[eldar]

One of the quoted sources was Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. This book very much puts the development of writing systems - scratching marks in clay tablets, etc. - before formalizing and standardizing those writing systems by introducing fixed alphabets that could be understood and taught beyond the initial beaureaucratic class that developed writing in the first place.

 

[Ozymandias]

One of the quoted sources was Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. This book very much puts the development of writing systems - scratching marks in clay tablets, etc. - before formalizing and standardizing those writing systems by introducing fixed alphabets that could be understood and taught beyond the initial beaureaucratic class that developed writing in the first place.

It seems we may essentially be agreeing that "Alphabet" and "Writing" are too limited, and that perhaps the tech tree should be "Notation" (e.g., to encompass the notations for inventory I mentioned) followed by "Alphabet" and "Writing" (both terms used as commonly understood). Note that this would suggest that simple mathematics probably arose from "Notation".

-Oz

 

[bad_ronald]

OK, according to the only source I have on hand (Akira Nakanishi's "Writing Systems Of The World"), "writing" is accomplished using Alphabets, Syllabaries (where a character has a given sound but contains no inherent, specific meaning), and/or Ideograms ("Any picture, stylized picture, or abstract symbol used in writing a language [emphasis added] and representing a meaning rather than a sound ... [includes] ... Chinese characters, hieroglyphics, and pictograms" (wherein, say, a circle might = the sun).

Any of these are required for writing, so Heavens only knows what the folks in charge of the tech tree were thinking.

dh_epic does raise the contemporary point that simple mathematics and pictograms (i.e., markings to note how many amphorae of wine are in a crate -- notations for inventory, in effect) precede other more advanced systems -- which themselves, by definition, precede Writing as the word is commonly used.

-Oz

I am an undergraduate majoring in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and I can assure that the writing tech should predate the alphabet tech for a number of reasons.

Some things to clarify:

• Writing is the encoding of linguistically significant utterances (i.e. sentences/phrases/words) of an actual spoken language onto a durable surface; mathematical symbols, or mnemonic symbols are not writing (they can be classified as either proto-writing, or contemporaneous separate systems)
• An alphabet is one of about a dozen types of writing used to transcribe modern languages, and but one of a theoretically infinite set
• Types of writing other than those listed by Mr. Nakashini include abjads (where only consonants are written), alpha-syllabaries (which have a base symbol for a syllable and secondary symbols which modify the base vowel in a systemic way for all divergent onsets), and "complex" which is a cover-all term for those that don't follow the five basic paradigms (e.g. Japanese combining kanji and hiragana/katakana)
• Mr. Nakanishi is incorrect concerning the status of Chinese writing, it is not ideographic; it's primarily morpho-phonemic (~90% of the symbols), but it's best described in general as logographic (there are some that are simple representational, and some that are compound representational) – this is crucial since there are no ideographic writing systems, nor can there be

Thus, an alphabet can at best coincide with the development of writing (in the situation where the first writing system created happens to be an alphabet by chance) or come after it (when another system is made use of before an alphabet). It is not possible to have an alphabet before writing.