bad_ronald said: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. .
Cool

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).
So, a priori, the "the encoding of linguistically significant utterances of an actual spoken language onto a durable surface" requires (drum roll, Maestro!) an alphabet or some such equivalent.
[*]An alphabet is one of about a dozen types of writing used to transcribe modern languages, and but one of a theoretically infinite set
Agreed.
[*]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)
You forgot "'Pure' Syllabaries" -- "A syllabary in which the shapes of the syllabics bear no relation to each other. Japanese Kana script is the only example in use today."
[*]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
Well, I did say he was the only source I have on hand ... Nevertheless, from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese_types.htm I read that "Semantic-phonetic compounds represent around 90% of all existing characters and consist of two parts: a semantic component or radical which hints at the meaning of the character [emphasis added], and a phonetic component which gives a clue to the pronunciation of the character."
Thus, an alphabet can at best coincide with the development of writing [emphasis added]
Actually, I think this makes the most sense ... which nonetheless leaves our tech tree in the proverbial air ...
It is not possible to have an alphabet before writing.
Sorry, even just given your previous (quoted) point, I see no QED here.
Best Regards,
Oz