Cover not available
Article published In:
Written Language & Literacy
Vol. 20:2 (2017) ► pp.194–226

A computational model of the discovery of writing

| Google, Inc.
This paper reports on a computational simulation of the evolution of early writing systems from pre-linguistic symbol systems, something for which there is poor evidence in the archaeological record. The simulation starts with a completely concept-based set of symbols, and then spreads those symbols and combinations of these to morphemes of artificially generated languages based on semantic and phonetic similarity.
While the simulation is crude, it is able to account for the observation that the development of writing systems ex nihilo seems to be facilitated in languages that have largely monosyllabic morphemes, or that have abundant ablauting processes. We are also able to model what appears to be two possible lines of development in early writing whereby symbols are associated to the sounds of all morphemes linked to a concept (as seems to have been the case in Sumerian), versus just one morpheme linked to a concept (as seems to have been the case in Chinese). Finally, the model is able to offer an account of the apparent rapid development of writing in Mesopotamia that obviates the need to posit a conscious invention of writing, as proposed by Glassner.
The proposed model thus opens a new approach to thinking about the emergence of writing and its properties, something that, as noted above, has scant direct archaeological evidence.
The software is released open-source on GitHub.
Keywords: early writing, computational simulations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Preliminaries
    • 2.1What is writing?
    • 2.2Why is writing hard to discover?
  • 3.The model
  • 4.Experiment 1: Simulating different phonological conditions
  • 5.Experiment 2: Symbols representing concepts versus morphemes
  • 6.Experiment 3: Was writing “invented”?
  • 7.Conclusions and future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 9 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00004.spr
References (51)
References
Barbeau, Marius. (1950). Totem Poles. Anthropology Series 30, National Museum of Canada Bulletin 119, vol. 1–21. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada.Google Scholar
Baxter, William. (1992). A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, no. 64. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baxter, William, & Sagart, Laurent. (2014). Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [URL]. DOI logo
Bliss, Charles. (1965). Semantography. Sydney: Semantography (Blissymbolics) Publications.Google Scholar
Boltz, William. (1994). The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. American Oriental Series, no. 78. New Haven: American Oriental Society.Google Scholar
. (2000). Monosyllabicity and the origin of the Chinese script. Tech. rept. 143. Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin.Google Scholar
Buckley, Eugene. (2008). Monosyllabicity and the origins of syllabaries. In: Linguistic Society of America. [URL].
Dalley, Stephanie. (2005). The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer by Jean-Jacques Glassner; Translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. Technology and Culture, 46(2), 408–409.Google Scholar
Daniels, Peter. (1992). The syllabic origin of writing and the segmental origin of the alphabet. Pages 83–110 of: Downing, Pamela, Lima, Susan, & Noonan, Michael (eds), The Linguistics of Literacy. Typological Studies in Language, no. 21. Amsterdan and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Charles. (1859). The Origin of Species. New York: Mentor. Mentor edition (1958).Google Scholar
DeFrancis, John. (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
. (1989). Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
DeHaene, Stanislas. (2009). Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Englund, Robert. (2005). The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer by Jean-Jacques Glassner; Translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 125(1), 113–116.Google Scholar
ETCSL. (2006). Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. [URL].
Farmer, Steve, Henderson, John and Witzel, Michael. (2002). Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History. Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 721. 48–90.Google Scholar
Farmer, Steve, Sproat, Richard, & Witzel, Michael. (2004). The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization. Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, 11(2), 19–57.Google Scholar
Gelb, Ignace. (1963). A Study of Writing. Second edition, University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Glassner, Jean-Jacques. (2000). Écrire à Sumer: L’invention du cunéiforme. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
. (2003). The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc van de Mieroop.Google Scholar
Goody, Jack. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Themes in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Goody, Jack, & Watt, Ian. (1968). The consequences of literacy. Pages 27–68 of: Goody, J. (ed), Literacy in Traditional Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gorman, Kyle. (2016). Pynini: A Python library for weighted finite-state grammar compilation. In: StatFsm.Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. (1974). Ever Since Darwin: Reflections on Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton. Chapter 12, pages 103–110.Google Scholar
Jackson, Anthony. (1990). The Pictish Trail. Orkney Press.Google Scholar
Keightley, David. (1978). Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kirby, Simon. (1999). Function, Selection and Innateness: the Emergence of Language Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Levenshtein, Vladimir. (1966). Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady, 10(8), 707–710.Google Scholar
Li, Hsiao-Ting. (1968). 從六書的觀點看甲骨文 (Viewing the Oracle Bone inscriptions from the point of view of the ‘Six Writings’). 南洋大學學報, 21, 84–106.Google Scholar
Mallery, Garrick. (1883). Pictographs of the North American Indians: A Preliminary Paper. Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, no. 4. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Available from Google Books.Google Scholar
Morris, Henry. (1974). Scientific Creationism. San Diego: Institute for Creation Research.Google Scholar
Niyogi, Partha. (2006). The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oppenheim, A. Leo. (1959). On an operational device in Mesopotamian bureaucracy. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 181(121–128). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paley, William. (1826). Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Oxford: J. Vincent.Google Scholar
Perfetti, Charles, Nelson, Jessica, Liu, Ying, Fiez, Julie, & Tan, Li-Hai. (2010). The neural bases of reading: Universals and writing system variations. Chapter 6, pages 147–172 of: Cornelissen, P., Kringelback, M., & Hansen, P. (eds), The Neural Basis of Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Powell, Barry. (2009). Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Roark, Brian, Sproat, Richard, Allauzen, Cyril, Riley, Michael, & Jeffrey, Sorensen. (2012). The OpenGrm open-source finite-state grammar software libraries. Pages 61–66 of: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Robson, Eleanor. (2005). The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer by Jean-Jacques Glassner; Translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. American Journal of Archaeology, 110(1), 171–172.Google Scholar
Sampson, Geoffrey. (1985). Writing Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. (1996). How Writing Came About. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Seidl, Ursula. (1989). Die babylonischen Kudurru- Reliefs. Symbole mesopotamischer Gottheiten. Universitätsverlag Freiburg.Google Scholar
Sproat, Richard. (2000). A Computational Theory of Writing Systems. ACL Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
. (2010). Language, Technology, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
. (2014). A Statistical Comparison of Written Language and Nonlinguistic Symbol Systems. Language, 90(2), 457–481. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stauder, Andréas. (2010). The earliest Egyptian writing. Pages 137–147 of: Woods, Christopher, Teeter, Emily, & Emberling, Geoff (eds), Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. Oriental Institute Museum Publications, no. 32. Chicago: Oriental Institute.Google Scholar
Steels, Luc. (2012). Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steinthal, Heyman. (1852). Die Entwicklung der Schrift, nebst einem offenen Sendschreiben an Herrn Professor Pott. Berlin: Ferd. Dümmler’s Verlagsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Wang, Haicheng. (2014). Writing and the Ancient State: Early China in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Whittaker, Gordon. (2009). The Principles of Nahuatl Writing. Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, 161, 47–81.Google Scholar
Wieger, Léon. (1965). Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification. A Thorough Study from Chinese Documents. New York: Dover Publications. Translated by L. Davrout.Google Scholar
Woods, Christopher, Teeter, Emily, & Emberling, Geoff (eds). (2010). Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. Oriental Institute Museum Publications, no. 32. Chicago: Oriental Institute.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Sproat, Richard
2018. Peter T. Daniels, 2018,An Exploration of Writing. Written Language & Literacy 21:2 ► pp. 269 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.