how letters were invented?

[demagogic_schizoid]

yes before we start I do have waaaaay too much time on my hands.

ok so this is probably a known theory, but I don't know it, and the pleasure of finding it out for myself is preferable to reading it from someone else.

I was thinking about putting "shapes to sounds", ebcause I'm into phonetics, being al anguage student, growing up with different accents around me, trying to imitate them, etc. etc. I'd always considered letters evolved pretty randomly. however, I believe that the "K" sound, for example could only be represented by "K" in my mind, or its corruption "c"...because I was thinking about the image that sound brings up. and it's the shut mouth, which explosively opens up. So:

| represents the "wall" of the closed mouth, and < represents the explosive opening of the mouth to make that violent sound. and c is really just a corruption of <. So, |< it is.


Now "A" I thought, because I was thinking mainly for spanish and not English, should be an inverted pyramind V, because the mouth falls open for the "a" sound, making a sharp "v" shape, different from the rounder "u" shape; perhaps it should be closed off at the top to differentiate from u.

Now the "T" sound is like your tongue hitting your teeth, air hitting a wall, so I visualised it as:

-| (no gap necessary). I can see over time how this could become "T".

"L" is like the tongue hitting the teeth and then sliding down, so I visualised:

-l\ (though the diagonal dash should begin at the level where the straight horizontal line hits the straight vertical line)

"M" struck me as continuous, really just ________, but to differentiate it from a mere line, I decided on
|-------|

"r", remember this was for spanish, hits the roof of the tongue and goes up, so, really, it's pretty much r, but with the vertical stem resembling /, and the horizontal stem going off at a 45 degree angle upward. though htis is just pettiness, r pretty much suffices.

S, I came on, is like a hiss eminating from a closed mouth. So |~ or alternatively, "|" with a zig zag.

N hits the tongue and goes back into the mouth (really it's like L), so >|?

G, I found to be the already best shape for that sound, because it's soft, so should be a curve not a line such as "T" "K", and the does an outward turn, like the stem of the letter.

I could go on buit you get my drift.

So in all, I discovered letters at the age of 20. who'd have thought it? :)

[slacker]

I think your intuition might be biased by subconscious association

[demagogic_schizoid]

I think your intuition might be biased by subconscious association


Obviously I considered that, but I did my best not to be. what more can I say? do you think sounds and images can be linked regardless of subconscious association, or not?

[slacker]

Well, if your concept holds merit, you should be able to pick up an alphabet that you're unfamiliar with, and try to figure out the sounds from the shapes? Does this also apply to Sanskrit, Arabic, Cyrillic etc.?

[file cabinet]

have you heard of cuneiform ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script

[demagogic_schizoid]

thanks for the file cabinet, I'm onto it. I'll reply to that when I've read it properly and understood it.

slacker: well firstly I would think that our sounds are based onthe way romans pronounced their letter, being the Roman alphabet, and I imagine being Spanish it would be similair to their pronunciation. Now "r", to me, is pretty much the shape of the tongue against the roof of the mouth when you make that sound in Spanish. It mayjust be coincidence but it's worthnoting that if I wanted to depict that oral process in a simple form, I'd use r or the variation of it in my post.

S is another interesdting one. In our culture, ~, the squigle, represents air. So is S is an exhalation, I can see why it is a squigle. Now is this subconscious association or does ~ inherentl;y mean "air" to us? I'm not eduacated enough to answer that question I'm afraid. But I don't think it's "solid" enough to be a straight line, or hard enough to be a short dash. a "hiss", I guess, is kind of unstable, like a squiggle, its floats, it's air, like gas.

the m sound, again, is monotonous and continuious, a line, or:

|---------|

I can see a rational explanation for this above and beyond subconscious association. a humming sound on a sound graph is represented as a straight line I believe?

Now, regarding other languages, again I am no expert, but I believe some are based not on mechanically reducing sounds down to physical processes and then building words from them, but from a perhaps more "spiritual" approach of viewing sounds simply as expressions of the things they represent,. therefore in some alphabets, perhaps the symbols for sounds are derived from the things that made those sounds and from the uses of those sounds in words based on this, rather than on the isolated sound itself.

It's hard for me to say for sure.

[Ferrus]

If I am correct the modern alphabet has its orgins in the Greek alphabet - which in turn has its origins in the Phonecian alphabet. The Hebrew and Arabic scripts are just deviations of that. I believe even the Mongolian and Devanagari script have similar origins to the same writing scripts. So it is quite possible that all the worlds major scripts, except the Japense and Chinese are related.

Now, Phonecian seems to have been a corruption of the Egyptian script. The Egyptians had a logogram system - but they needed a phonetic system to record the names of slaves they captured from Nubia, the Levant and so on. Given the evidence from graffiti it would seem that this was passed down to the slaves and that it later devolped into the semitic system used by the Hebrews. Now, almost all our letters have heiroglyphic origins (from about 3000-3500 years ago). The letter 'A' orginally represented an Ox, for example.

So no, there was no phonetic origin.

[Ellipsis]

My theory: Aliens did it...

Other theory: God did it....

Which is more likely.....hmmmmm

Though I like your theory too Schizoid....though the only type that could have invented them that way was an INTP ...

[squirrel]

Ferrus is on the right track. Almost all modern alphabets are derived in some way from another alphabet, and from another, so on back to ancient times. According to Omniglot (http://www.omniglot.com/) (a wonderful writing system reference), Phoenician (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/phoenician.htm) is likely the ancestor of most modern alphabetic and consonantal writing systems (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, etc.).

Needless to say, none of these derived alphabets in any way represent the position of the mouth. They're almost all designed based on ease of writing. Writing systems that evolved from "nothing" (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphs) were probably just pictorial representations of objects whose names started with that sound (I remember reading this somewhere but I don't have a source to back it up off-hand.)

One interesting exception though is modern Korean (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/korean.htm). Their alphabetic writing system was invented from scratch in the 15th century. The shapes of the nine basic consonants were designed to match the shape of the mouth. For example, g is written with two perpendicular lines meeting in the upper-right hand corner, evoking the position of the tongue when making these sounds in a left-facing mouth, while m is written as a square, representing closed lips.

Of these nine consonants, the four plosives (g, d, b, and j) and the one fricative (s) can be doubled to represent "fortis" sounds. The four plosives can also be written with an additional (or extended, in the case of b) horizontal stroke representing aspiration. Pure aspiration (h) is written as the symbol for ng with two additional short strokes above.

The Korean vowels have a phonetically derived system also. Of the six basic vowels, the four back vowels (a, eo, o, and u) are written with a perpendicular short and long stroke. They each can be turned into high-to-mid diphthongs with the addition of a short stroke, whereas the addition of a long stroke turns a and eo into front vowels, and o, u, and eu (the mid vowel) into front-moving diphthongs. Furthermore, o and u can each be suffixed with a or eo, respectively, to form mid-to-low diphthongs. Non-conflicting combinations of these modifiers are allowed. A long stroke by itself represents (predictably) the high front vowel i.

The further amazing thing about Korean is that these 19 (basic and derived) consonants and 21 (basic and derived) vowels are written in "blocks", each containing up to three individual symbols (C+V+C) and forming a single syllable. This gives Korean alphabetic writing the same "look and feel" as the Korean ideograms.

So modern Korean is a great example of a language whose shapes are phonetically derived. And for that reason it is my favorite writing system :)

[stopharian]

Squirrel beat me to it .


....So your theory would hold water if you were a native speaker of Korean

[azurwarrior]

Here's an insane thought.:devil: How about the letter "O" and the shape of the lips (O) and its relation to gender in the romance languages and in part to English.
And that relation to sex and sex acts. More specifically "fellatio..."

[Ferrus]

*Cough* Phonecian was by no means the earliest ancestor, though it was the most promiscuous because of the Phonecian's seafaring ways (and they gave writing to the Greeks). I think the evidence presented herewith destroys DS's argument altogether.

http://www.virtual-egypt.com/newhtml/articles/Discovery&#37;20of%20Egyptian%20Inscriptions%20Indicates%20an%20Earlier%20Date%20for%20Origin%20of%20the%20Alphabet.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/521235.stm

http://www.archaeology.org/0001/newsbriefs/egypt.html

http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/00_12/egypt.html

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/fghij/gardiner_alan.html

http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/alfabet2.html

http://www.cedarseed.com/water/alphabet.html

http://www.biblescripture.net/Hebrew.html

http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html

Come on, we're NTs, lets look for historical justification not just idle astrological suppositions like some airy NF.

[squirrel]

*Cough* Phonecian was by no means the earliest ancestor, though it was the most promiscuous because of the Phonecian's seafaring ways (and they gave writing to the Greeks).

Interesting links! I stand corrected on my Phoenician statement. Omniglot only went so far as to mention a possible link between Egyptian script and Phoenician, so I didn't mention it.

[Ferrus]

Interesting links! I stand corrected on my Phoenician statement. Omniglot only went so far as to mention a possible link between Egyptian script and Phoenician, so I didn't mention it.
Actually you're not entirely wrong. The scripts would believed to be connected primarily to Egyptian heiratics. The exact development of this script is unknown, and whilst there are a few formal connections with heiroglyphics the archaeological evidence suggests it may have developed earlier than them and developed separately. Certainly Heiratics were more commonly known and used by more people, the Heiroglyphs mainly being used and read by the Egyptian elite whereas the majority of documents were made in Heiratics. One of the biggest errors which is an assumption that clouds many minds is that a phonological alphabet is 'superior' - which is only true with respect to the time it takes to read. Logographic scripts including Chinese take longer to learn but actually incre , so there is not necessarily a straight line of 'improvement'.

[demagogic_schizoid]

Here's an insane thought.:devil: How about the letter "O" and the shape of the lips (O) and its relation to gender in the romance languages and in part to English.
And that relation to sex and sex acts. More specifically "fellatio..."

shape of the lips, definitely. gender relations...why?

[charred_heart]

were letters of any language even invented or were they stolen from some other older language?

yeah schiz, your thread is a waste of time. If I have any to waste I'll drop by and add some input.

EDIT: Crap! Ferrus beat me to it...

[squirrel]

were letters of any language even invented or were they stolen from some other older language?

Korean letters were. I'm sure there are others but that's the only one I know off the top of my head (besides conlang scripts like Shavian, Klingon, or Elvish, or various ciphers which were meant to be original).

[charred_heart]

Korean letters were. then again, they do share a resemblance to Chinese and Japanese script.

[squirrel]

then again, they do share a resemblance to Chinese and Japanese script.

They were designed to blend in with the ideograms already used in Korea (by writing them in blocks), which are indeed related to Chinese. But the letter shapes themselves are wholly arbitrary (and simple), influenced only by the traditional calligraphic style of east Asian writing.

[azurwarrior]

shape of the lips, definitely. gender relations...why?
Perhaps the round "O" shape of the phallus? Or the thrusting (and therefore male?) force of the breath when producing the spoken "O?"
What about archetypal language?

[kmill31415]

An interesting study that showed that there may be an innate ability to "know" how certain shapes should sound involved consulting isolated tribes of people and asking them whether rounded and spiky shapeds should be called "bouba" or "kiki." There was a statistically significant correlation between rounded sounds like "bouba" for rounded shapes and sharp sounds like "kiki" for sharp shapes. This study showed that this association may not be strictly cultural. This could be a potential evidence for your observations of letter shapes and sounds.

[Ferrus]

This study showed that this association may not be strictly cultural. This could be a potential evidence for your observations of letter shapes and sounds.
Yes I did read that, and it would suggest that early language (before it is juggled about by culture and language exchange) is somewhat onomatopoeic, though obviously not with perfect correlation. But the alphabet is largely disconnected from the actual sounds, the mediation between the two is the orthography which can vary dramatically even between languages using the same alphabet (just compare English with French).

[Llenyd]

An interesting study that showed that there may be an innate ability to "know" how certain shapes should sound involved consulting isolated tribes of people and asking them whether rounded and spiky shapeds should be called "bouba" or "kiki." There was a statistically significant correlation between rounded sounds like "bouba" for rounded shapes and sharp sounds like "kiki" for sharp shapes. This study showed that this association may not be strictly cultural. This could be a potential evidence for your observations of letter shapes and sounds.

Have you heard of Synaesthesia? In some people the correlation between senses is very high.

I was going to post the link to some tests (which include the bouba/kiki test) but apparently I need more posts to prove it's not :spam:. I'll post the links later.

[azurwarrior]

Have you heard of Synaesthesia? In some people the correlation between senses is very high.

I once had a music professor who experienced sounds as colors.
He is also also one of the world's finest percussionists and has performed with top musicians from around the globe.
He described when he first began experiencing colors coming out of music from stereo speakers.
IMO synaesthesia (sp.) helped him to be extraordinarily creative and successful.
(I tried to duplicate the result myself with LSD, but the results weren't as good). LOL.

I was going to post the link to some tests (which include the bouba/kiki test) but apparently I need more posts to prove it's not :spam:. I'll post the links later.

I'll look forward to it.

[kmill31415]

I've heard about synesthesia, and have been very interested in it. Actually, I learned about it in the same Scientific American article that mentioned the bouba/kiki test. I think it should be possible in some way to retrain the senses and learn to see sounds, hear smells, or have the more common grapheme synesthesia (letters => color). A lot of people would disagree with this, but the brain is a very malleable system. In fact, blind people have learned to see with their hearing using sounds created from a camera through a computer. This could arguably be a form of learned synesthesia.

[euterpenc]

magic mushrooms did it

[Kathara]

May I suggest Saussure to everybody? There is no connection between sounds and the concepts they describe - with the excaption of onomatopoeics of course.

As to the alphabet, as far as I know - and I havent double checked this info - the Phoenicians simplified the Egyptian hierogliphs, turning the pictures into lines.

The Roman numbers are derived from hand positions.

[LastRailway]

The Roman numbers are derived from hand positions.

I didn't know that.
I know about Arab numbers that the number of the lines compiling each symbol equals to that number.
For instance 1: one line
2, two lines, etc.
(think of it in handwritten form)

edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu-Arabic_numerals
(it doesn't mention what I said, however, so it might be a "folk ethymology" too.

[Kathara]

Ups, I think I have just fed you a folk ethymology. Sorry!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals

[LastRailway]

Ups, I think I have just fed you a folk ethymology. Sorry!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals

Oh, well. I feel slightly disappointed.

[Kathara]

Oh, well. I feel slightly disappointed.

Me too, that was something my Latin teacher told me. Guess he should have checked it as well, I wonder now how much of my school info is compromised?

[LastRailway]

Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about what I said in the above post either (I made an edit). I might as well check it too.