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The Origin of Writingby: Roy Harris
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Notes for this articlea short but insightful book. It starts with the "Just So Stories" story of the invention of spelling, moving on to how Tarzan decoded the bugs in the English Primer.
The basic claims:
1. The origin of writing is not to write down speech. He is sympathetic to the idea that writing originated from counting/accounting.
2. The alphabetic writing was not invented to represent phonology; to the contrary, the reason why the Phonecian script did not represent vowels is because they didn't want to create a separate written word for each inflected form of the "same word". So the idea is -- to represent the word, just like logography or syllabary would do.
Some very interesting comparisons between drawing and writing.
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