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The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts
C’è un libro di duecento pagine che nessuno ha mai letto. Lo chiamano Manoscritto Voynich, dal nome di un mercante polacco che lo comprò nel 1912 a Frascati: tra piante immaginarie e profili di donne svestite, contiene caratteri sinuosi e arzigogolati mai visti prima. È possibile decifrarlo? E poi che cosa sono gli occhi, animali, mani e utensili che gli scribi minoici incidevano sui sigilli di pietra e sulle barre di argilla, a Creta, nel secondo millennio a.C.? È la prima scrittura europea e ancora non la capiamo. Ma anche la prima scrittura cinese è avvolta nel mistero, come quella più recente degli abitanti dell’Isola di Pasqua.
Silvia Ferrara studia le scritture oggi indecifrate e ce le racconta in un viaggio sorprendente, non solo tra i misteri della storia, ma anche nei meandri della nostra mente. Che la scrittura sia stata inventata da zero più volte ormai è quasi sicuro. Questo significa che il cervello umano è arrivato allo stesso risultato in diverse epoche e regioni del mondo. Ma come si è arrivati a questa invenzione? E, soprattutto, perché? In breve: che cosa ci porta a scrivere?
Se oggi usiamo WhatsApp più del telefono e gli emoji più delle parole, non vuol dire che siamo tornati ai geroglifici, ma che stiamo ricorrendo all’iconicità, uno strumento necessario per comunicare oggi come lo era nelle prime scritture inventate migliaia di anni fa. Non siamo tornati indietro. Stiamo, invece, andando avanti, fedeli alla nostra natura, conformi alle regole della nostra evoluzione.
Questo libro è un viaggio mai raccontato, fatto di lampi di genio nel passato, della ricerca scientifica di oggi e dell’eco, vaga e imprevedibile, della scrittura del futuro.
Silvia Ferrara studia le scritture oggi indecifrate e ce le racconta in un viaggio sorprendente, non solo tra i misteri della storia, ma anche nei meandri della nostra mente. Che la scrittura sia stata inventata da zero più volte ormai è quasi sicuro. Questo significa che il cervello umano è arrivato allo stesso risultato in diverse epoche e regioni del mondo. Ma come si è arrivati a questa invenzione? E, soprattutto, perché? In breve: che cosa ci porta a scrivere?
Se oggi usiamo WhatsApp più del telefono e gli emoji più delle parole, non vuol dire che siamo tornati ai geroglifici, ma che stiamo ricorrendo all’iconicità, uno strumento necessario per comunicare oggi come lo era nelle prime scritture inventate migliaia di anni fa. Non siamo tornati indietro. Stiamo, invece, andando avanti, fedeli alla nostra natura, conformi alle regole della nostra evoluzione.
Questo libro è un viaggio mai raccontato, fatto di lampi di genio nel passato, della ricerca scientifica di oggi e dell’eco, vaga e imprevedibile, della scrittura del futuro.
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First published October 31, 2019
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March 21, 2022
Bloody Babel
Silvia Ferrara tells a fascinating story about writing using the device of nine as yet undeciphered scripts of the ancient world. Each of these scripts is fascinating in its own right. And Ferrara recounts what we know about each in a way that is both authoritative and playful. She is clearly a master of her trade and therefore confident enough to be poetic, humorous, and speculatively self-reflective in her exposition of what might be the most creative as well as productive of any human act, the invention of writing.
I can’t tell my agglutinative from my fusionals not to mention from my polysynthetics in linguistics. But I think there is also another story contained within Ferrara’s exposition of the nine scripts more accessible to the linguistic unprofessional. This is a 5000 year saga of linguistic sociology that is much more engrossing than the research results of the various linguists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and practitioners of geodesy and geomatics who are involved in Ferrara’s work.
This other story is somewhat subtly placed but it is there in her book. So her insistence on some established facts - that writing is a collaborative and experimental invention, that it creates enduring (but not all) societies, that it is the fundamental technology of our species which has allowed us to successfully engage in evolutionary competition - isn’t primarily about her trope of undeciphered scripts. Rather, what she shows is that writing is a tool of alienation as well as empathy, a decidedly mixed blessing just as the biblical story of the Tower of Babel suggests.
As I read Ferrara, this paradox of a linguistically generated empathy and alienation is inherent in written language itself. The paradox doesn’t assert itself suddenly but, like the slowly boiling frog, through an incremental process of development (except for Chinese which had the equivalent of the miraculous Virgin Birth in linguistic terms). For her, writing begins with drawing, particularly drawing of the things of everyday life - animals, plants, parts of the body, natural features. These are images that are purely expressive. They may evoke a response in others but their meaning is solely in that response. They are not functionally dissimilar to, for example, the warning call of the blackbird in my garden announcing ‘there are bipeds on the loose in the area.’ Except, of course, that in writing the warning can be communicated without the sound.
From that starting point, again as I read Ferrara, written language binds people together but at the cost of divorcing them from the rest of the world, including other people, and perhaps even themselves. Linguistic signs (hieroglyphs, ideographs, letters) emerge from the shapes of things drawn. In a sense, drawing promotes a sort of identification, perhaps even a spiritual sympathy, with the things depicted. But these innovative written signs ‘stand for’ something other than what they are. They indicate, or denote, or, direct.
That is to say, signs come gradually to exist in their own right - and clearly so, there on rock or papyrus, turtle shells, or in clay tablets. They ease into a new status of icon. Continuing the evolutionary process, the icon is transformed into a logogram. The logogram is a sort of independent icon, a free radical in chemical terms perhaps, which can change its meaning without changing its sound. Logograms attach themselves to other logograms like molecules of hydrogen and oxygen to form the equivalent of water in new linguistic substances. Writing has then become liberated from speaking and an entirely new world is opened up as linguistic ‘things’ proliferate.
Logograms most significantly form into the revolutionary (as well as evolutionary) invention of syllables. Syllables are the building blocks of all language, much like prime numbers are the building blocks of mathematics. They can be mixed and matched in any number of ways. They are structured into words (or sometimes combined with pictograms in a sort of rebus) which are then mixed according to emerging rules called grammar. What might have been vocal convention now becomes a linguistic requirement of writing, which, while not entirely fixed, is much slower to change.
Freed from speech, logograms also can have different sounds without changing their meanings, as with many Chinese characters. Or, more problematically, they can retain their links to sounds and have multiple meanings. These are the homophones which exist in abundance in English as well as Chinese. English relies almost solely on context to distinguish meaning while Chinese developed special marks to denote what would be vocally ‘tones’ and so kept writing competitive, as it were, with speaking. And as Ferrara points out: “Using this one, small, versatile unit of meaning [the logogram], we can express two things on completely different ends of the semantic spectrum, and create humor.”
At some point grammar intrudes and provides structure. Written marks with no sound at all, - like the so-called ‘determinants’ which indicate the grammatical class of a word or the tonal designations in Chinese. Cases and declensions emerge directing how words relate to each other rather than to things that are not words. Words are created for things that aren’t even things - emotions, relationships, abstract concepts, God. Each step in the evolution of writing takes it further from the drawing which was a mere appreciative expression of the natural world.
In time, written languages start to breed with each other, as with Sumerian cuneiform and Akkadian script. Most remnants of any original ‘natural’ symbology are obscured or erased entirely (except, once again, in Chinese!). The array of written symbols themselves becomes totally abstract. In many definite ways they become the new nature in which we exist. Is it the laws of society that control us through language, or the laws of written language that controls us through society? It’s hard to tell.
Having become independent of speech, writing became a universal mark of social class and power. Simply being human is the only requirement for speech. Wealth, position, and education are necessary for writing. Nothing about writing is natural. It is the ultimate artifice, the primal human technology. No matter how much writing describes, recounts, or even directs the world, it is not of the world but an entirely human convention about the world to create “An infinity of fictions, one layered atop the other.” And many of these fictions are meant to manipulate, constrain, and control.
The undeciphered scripts analysed by Ferrara are actually evidence that we have no certainty about how writing emerged or when. Her story is one of those infinity of fictions which writing itself promotes. And it is a fiction with theological resonance. In addition to being our fundamental technology, written language is also our fundamental religion. It seems to have created itself ex nihilo, out of nothing. We cannot imagine a world without it. It keeps us safe and it oppresses us with complete impunity. It is everywhere simultaneously and at every time and yet nowhere definite and timeless. It is within us, around us, and totally separate from us in the manner of the Christian Trinity. We trust it but we are wary of its capacity to deceive. When we pray, we honour it. When we recite a creed, we extol its power. We worship it through education in the hope of a better, fairer, more peaceful life… or just to survive.
We recognise not language itself but written language as the ultimate source of power. It is the power of contracts, of the design specs for nuclear bombs, of worldwide literary culture. And through science and engineering it is power over the natural world certainly, but also power over each other. Those brought together by language compete against others bound through other languages. Within each language ‘tribe’ we compete for power with each other, mainly the power over language itself in legislation, policy, rules of recognition and advancement. Particularly in democracy, power is sought through the language of persuasion and promise and exercised in written laws, regulations and codes.
The written word has become so dominant that we find it difficult to distinguish it from the natural world at all. The Egyptians scratched out the written names of people and animals on graves and monuments to neutralise their threat. The ancient Chinese created “flash fictions,” prophecies which gained credibility by being carved on turtle shells. Hebrews and Christians published bogus biblical genealogies to establish royal lineages. Isaac Newton devoted as much time to the arcane texts of alchemical magic as he did to his experiments in physics. Randolph Hearst single-handedly sparked the American War against Spain through his newspapers. And, of course, Donald Trump controls the American Republican Party, and Putin the Russian state through patent falsehoods via the internet, written words carried by the technologies built on and by previous written words.
So Ferrara is absolutely correct when she calls writing the greatest invention, or rather inventions since they were discovered independently in probably a half dozen places. Arguably it is written language which is the sine qua non of what we mean by civilisation, the collecting together into cities. And it written language that has enabled empires, industrial progress and vastly increased human numbers and longevity. But it is also written language which may eventually eliminate our species either through mutual self-destruction or the destruction of the minimal conditions for human living. Writing tears us apart as vigorously as it binds us together. Bloody, bloody Babel.
Silvia Ferrara tells a fascinating story about writing using the device of nine as yet undeciphered scripts of the ancient world. Each of these scripts is fascinating in its own right. And Ferrara recounts what we know about each in a way that is both authoritative and playful. She is clearly a master of her trade and therefore confident enough to be poetic, humorous, and speculatively self-reflective in her exposition of what might be the most creative as well as productive of any human act, the invention of writing.
I can’t tell my agglutinative from my fusionals not to mention from my polysynthetics in linguistics. But I think there is also another story contained within Ferrara’s exposition of the nine scripts more accessible to the linguistic unprofessional. This is a 5000 year saga of linguistic sociology that is much more engrossing than the research results of the various linguists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and practitioners of geodesy and geomatics who are involved in Ferrara’s work.
This other story is somewhat subtly placed but it is there in her book. So her insistence on some established facts - that writing is a collaborative and experimental invention, that it creates enduring (but not all) societies, that it is the fundamental technology of our species which has allowed us to successfully engage in evolutionary competition - isn’t primarily about her trope of undeciphered scripts. Rather, what she shows is that writing is a tool of alienation as well as empathy, a decidedly mixed blessing just as the biblical story of the Tower of Babel suggests.
As I read Ferrara, this paradox of a linguistically generated empathy and alienation is inherent in written language itself. The paradox doesn’t assert itself suddenly but, like the slowly boiling frog, through an incremental process of development (except for Chinese which had the equivalent of the miraculous Virgin Birth in linguistic terms). For her, writing begins with drawing, particularly drawing of the things of everyday life - animals, plants, parts of the body, natural features. These are images that are purely expressive. They may evoke a response in others but their meaning is solely in that response. They are not functionally dissimilar to, for example, the warning call of the blackbird in my garden announcing ‘there are bipeds on the loose in the area.’ Except, of course, that in writing the warning can be communicated without the sound.
From that starting point, again as I read Ferrara, written language binds people together but at the cost of divorcing them from the rest of the world, including other people, and perhaps even themselves. Linguistic signs (hieroglyphs, ideographs, letters) emerge from the shapes of things drawn. In a sense, drawing promotes a sort of identification, perhaps even a spiritual sympathy, with the things depicted. But these innovative written signs ‘stand for’ something other than what they are. They indicate, or denote, or, direct.
That is to say, signs come gradually to exist in their own right - and clearly so, there on rock or papyrus, turtle shells, or in clay tablets. They ease into a new status of icon. Continuing the evolutionary process, the icon is transformed into a logogram. The logogram is a sort of independent icon, a free radical in chemical terms perhaps, which can change its meaning without changing its sound. Logograms attach themselves to other logograms like molecules of hydrogen and oxygen to form the equivalent of water in new linguistic substances. Writing has then become liberated from speaking and an entirely new world is opened up as linguistic ‘things’ proliferate.
Logograms most significantly form into the revolutionary (as well as evolutionary) invention of syllables. Syllables are the building blocks of all language, much like prime numbers are the building blocks of mathematics. They can be mixed and matched in any number of ways. They are structured into words (or sometimes combined with pictograms in a sort of rebus) which are then mixed according to emerging rules called grammar. What might have been vocal convention now becomes a linguistic requirement of writing, which, while not entirely fixed, is much slower to change.
Freed from speech, logograms also can have different sounds without changing their meanings, as with many Chinese characters. Or, more problematically, they can retain their links to sounds and have multiple meanings. These are the homophones which exist in abundance in English as well as Chinese. English relies almost solely on context to distinguish meaning while Chinese developed special marks to denote what would be vocally ‘tones’ and so kept writing competitive, as it were, with speaking. And as Ferrara points out: “Using this one, small, versatile unit of meaning [the logogram], we can express two things on completely different ends of the semantic spectrum, and create humor.”
At some point grammar intrudes and provides structure. Written marks with no sound at all, - like the so-called ‘determinants’ which indicate the grammatical class of a word or the tonal designations in Chinese. Cases and declensions emerge directing how words relate to each other rather than to things that are not words. Words are created for things that aren’t even things - emotions, relationships, abstract concepts, God. Each step in the evolution of writing takes it further from the drawing which was a mere appreciative expression of the natural world.
In time, written languages start to breed with each other, as with Sumerian cuneiform and Akkadian script. Most remnants of any original ‘natural’ symbology are obscured or erased entirely (except, once again, in Chinese!). The array of written symbols themselves becomes totally abstract. In many definite ways they become the new nature in which we exist. Is it the laws of society that control us through language, or the laws of written language that controls us through society? It’s hard to tell.
Having become independent of speech, writing became a universal mark of social class and power. Simply being human is the only requirement for speech. Wealth, position, and education are necessary for writing. Nothing about writing is natural. It is the ultimate artifice, the primal human technology. No matter how much writing describes, recounts, or even directs the world, it is not of the world but an entirely human convention about the world to create “An infinity of fictions, one layered atop the other.” And many of these fictions are meant to manipulate, constrain, and control.
The undeciphered scripts analysed by Ferrara are actually evidence that we have no certainty about how writing emerged or when. Her story is one of those infinity of fictions which writing itself promotes. And it is a fiction with theological resonance. In addition to being our fundamental technology, written language is also our fundamental religion. It seems to have created itself ex nihilo, out of nothing. We cannot imagine a world without it. It keeps us safe and it oppresses us with complete impunity. It is everywhere simultaneously and at every time and yet nowhere definite and timeless. It is within us, around us, and totally separate from us in the manner of the Christian Trinity. We trust it but we are wary of its capacity to deceive. When we pray, we honour it. When we recite a creed, we extol its power. We worship it through education in the hope of a better, fairer, more peaceful life… or just to survive.
We recognise not language itself but written language as the ultimate source of power. It is the power of contracts, of the design specs for nuclear bombs, of worldwide literary culture. And through science and engineering it is power over the natural world certainly, but also power over each other. Those brought together by language compete against others bound through other languages. Within each language ‘tribe’ we compete for power with each other, mainly the power over language itself in legislation, policy, rules of recognition and advancement. Particularly in democracy, power is sought through the language of persuasion and promise and exercised in written laws, regulations and codes.
The written word has become so dominant that we find it difficult to distinguish it from the natural world at all. The Egyptians scratched out the written names of people and animals on graves and monuments to neutralise their threat. The ancient Chinese created “flash fictions,” prophecies which gained credibility by being carved on turtle shells. Hebrews and Christians published bogus biblical genealogies to establish royal lineages. Isaac Newton devoted as much time to the arcane texts of alchemical magic as he did to his experiments in physics. Randolph Hearst single-handedly sparked the American War against Spain through his newspapers. And, of course, Donald Trump controls the American Republican Party, and Putin the Russian state through patent falsehoods via the internet, written words carried by the technologies built on and by previous written words.
So Ferrara is absolutely correct when she calls writing the greatest invention, or rather inventions since they were discovered independently in probably a half dozen places. Arguably it is written language which is the sine qua non of what we mean by civilisation, the collecting together into cities. And it written language that has enabled empires, industrial progress and vastly increased human numbers and longevity. But it is also written language which may eventually eliminate our species either through mutual self-destruction or the destruction of the minimal conditions for human living. Writing tears us apart as vigorously as it binds us together. Bloody, bloody Babel.
November 10, 2021
I’m the first to rate and review this book. An objectively smart book I subjectively didn’t quite love. But for the purposes of this review, I shall strive for objectivity.
I love historical nonfiction books told through objects. I’ve read ones done through vehicles, guns (USA, of course), etc. At a glance, this book looked to be a perfect combination of that and linguistics, another interest of mine. And so, it’s difficult to say why exactly it didn’t quite work for me, but let’s try…
First off, it’s important to mention it’s likely not to be the book’s fault and you certainly can’t fault the author. In fact, the writing here is good enough to qualify for literature…in fact, the author may have wanted to (or maybe ought to have) write a literary book instead of nonfiction. Either way, the writing’s very good, very eloquent, engaging, all that. But then, and perhaps because it’s so literary, it does its best to stay on topic, but constantly veers off in wildly discursive tangents. It’s almost like it’s a book about a book about linguistics and manuscripts.
I admit, for me the manuscripts were the major draw, secret and otherwise, decipherable or not, they absolutely fascinate me. And they are featured in the book, just not as prominently as I would have liked. But the book really is more about writing itself, writing, according to the author (and it’s difficult to argue) is our greatest invention. That’s the contention belabouredly asserted throughout the book.
Funny thing, it doesn’t feature anywhere near even the top ten of most polls on the subject, nowhere near the wheel, tv, internet, etc. But then again, we don’t live in the smartest of times and so it’s easy to overlook the granddaddy of them all – the written word. And yet, where would we be without it.
The author gets it, she’s an expert, what she doesn’t know about linguistics may not be worth knowing, and her passion for her subject certainly comes across and yet somehow the book was strangely underwhelming while overwritten. It is, most likely, a personal author/reader chemistry thing and shouldn’t affect the enjoyment of others.
Overall, though it dragged at times, The Greatest Invention was still an enlightening and educational read, and one featuring an excellent amount of black and white photos and images to tell the additional thousands or words, and so worth the time. Thanks Netgalley.
This and more at https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/
I love historical nonfiction books told through objects. I’ve read ones done through vehicles, guns (USA, of course), etc. At a glance, this book looked to be a perfect combination of that and linguistics, another interest of mine. And so, it’s difficult to say why exactly it didn’t quite work for me, but let’s try…
First off, it’s important to mention it’s likely not to be the book’s fault and you certainly can’t fault the author. In fact, the writing here is good enough to qualify for literature…in fact, the author may have wanted to (or maybe ought to have) write a literary book instead of nonfiction. Either way, the writing’s very good, very eloquent, engaging, all that. But then, and perhaps because it’s so literary, it does its best to stay on topic, but constantly veers off in wildly discursive tangents. It’s almost like it’s a book about a book about linguistics and manuscripts.
I admit, for me the manuscripts were the major draw, secret and otherwise, decipherable or not, they absolutely fascinate me. And they are featured in the book, just not as prominently as I would have liked. But the book really is more about writing itself, writing, according to the author (and it’s difficult to argue) is our greatest invention. That’s the contention belabouredly asserted throughout the book.
Funny thing, it doesn’t feature anywhere near even the top ten of most polls on the subject, nowhere near the wheel, tv, internet, etc. But then again, we don’t live in the smartest of times and so it’s easy to overlook the granddaddy of them all – the written word. And yet, where would we be without it.
The author gets it, she’s an expert, what she doesn’t know about linguistics may not be worth knowing, and her passion for her subject certainly comes across and yet somehow the book was strangely underwhelming while overwritten. It is, most likely, a personal author/reader chemistry thing and shouldn’t affect the enjoyment of others.
Overall, though it dragged at times, The Greatest Invention was still an enlightening and educational read, and one featuring an excellent amount of black and white photos and images to tell the additional thousands or words, and so worth the time. Thanks Netgalley.
This and more at https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/
February 16, 2022
I received a free publisher's review copy, via Netgalley.
A very long time ago, humans devised written language. Not just once, but over and over again in vastly distant lands and different ways. Ferrara studies the development of written language, and its sociological and historical importance. Her key focus is on so-far undeciphered texts from places as
far apart as Cyprus and Easter Island.
Ferrara clearly knows her stuff, but her writing style is a little off-putting for me. It’s sometimes dense (my fault for my not-too-impressive knowledge of linguistics), sometimes hyperbolic, and often tangents all over the place without a clear organizing principle. She says she tried to write in a conversational style, and she does, but a problem for me is that the book reads as if she gave a stream-of-consciousness lecture, had it typed up and that became the book.
It’s still interesting and worth reading, but for me it wasn’t as gripping a tale as Margalit Fox’s The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, about the deciphering of the Cretan Linear B. Of course, they take different approaches, but I would suggest the Fox book if you are more interested in a tale of code-cracking than linguistics.
A very long time ago, humans devised written language. Not just once, but over and over again in vastly distant lands and different ways. Ferrara studies the development of written language, and its sociological and historical importance. Her key focus is on so-far undeciphered texts from places as
far apart as Cyprus and Easter Island.
Ferrara clearly knows her stuff, but her writing style is a little off-putting for me. It’s sometimes dense (my fault for my not-too-impressive knowledge of linguistics), sometimes hyperbolic, and often tangents all over the place without a clear organizing principle. She says she tried to write in a conversational style, and she does, but a problem for me is that the book reads as if she gave a stream-of-consciousness lecture, had it typed up and that became the book.
It’s still interesting and worth reading, but for me it wasn’t as gripping a tale as Margalit Fox’s The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, about the deciphering of the Cretan Linear B. Of course, they take different approaches, but I would suggest the Fox book if you are more interested in a tale of code-cracking than linguistics.
August 6, 2022
I am very much interested in the subject matter, or at least I thought I was. But the writing in this book was so atrocious I couldn't finish it. Halfway through I gave up. The author is a chatterbox and fills the pages with digressions and blather. I expected a serious discussion of the various scripts mentioned in the title along with many illustrations and comparisons of the unique features of each. Instead we get the author's opinions about almost everything backed up with nothing more than "It's obvious that ..." or "Everyone agrees that ..." except it's not obvious to me and I doubt everyone agrees.
The chatty informal tone is totally inappropriate and her meanderings make it hard to follow her points. She uses metaphors mercilessly and is constantly telling us what she is going to tell us instead of just telling it. Here's an example from page 42 shortly after she's told us a few paragraphs earlier that Linear B is of little interest since it's been deciphered:
Earlier I mentioned Linear B - let's talk about it, at least for a bit. The truth is Linear B isn't of all that much interest to us, since it's been deciphered. For now, we'll spare it only a few measly lines. Though we'll come back to it, I promise, since it'll be of help when we look at the process of deciphering scripts. So then, Linear B.
Not only is it repeating what she's just told us, but she takes an entire paragraph to tell us that she's going to start writing about something. Just start writing about it, for Pete's sake! You've already used up those "few measly lines." This can't be explained away by a bad translation.
She punctuates the text with pop culture references and compares rocks and clay tablets to iPhones and bedsheets. She's also dismissive of all opinions that differ from her own. She typically says things like "this is generally referred to as X but really it is Y" without a convincing explanation as to why conventional terminology is wrong. She mentioned some Japanese term and said you could tell what it means just from the sound of it. No, I couldn't, and I speak some Japanese. You get the idea. She's a perfect example of Often Wrong But Never in Doubt.
The chatty informal tone is totally inappropriate and her meanderings make it hard to follow her points. She uses metaphors mercilessly and is constantly telling us what she is going to tell us instead of just telling it. Here's an example from page 42 shortly after she's told us a few paragraphs earlier that Linear B is of little interest since it's been deciphered:
Earlier I mentioned Linear B - let's talk about it, at least for a bit. The truth is Linear B isn't of all that much interest to us, since it's been deciphered. For now, we'll spare it only a few measly lines. Though we'll come back to it, I promise, since it'll be of help when we look at the process of deciphering scripts. So then, Linear B.
Not only is it repeating what she's just told us, but she takes an entire paragraph to tell us that she's going to start writing about something. Just start writing about it, for Pete's sake! You've already used up those "few measly lines." This can't be explained away by a bad translation.
She punctuates the text with pop culture references and compares rocks and clay tablets to iPhones and bedsheets. She's also dismissive of all opinions that differ from her own. She typically says things like "this is generally referred to as X but really it is Y" without a convincing explanation as to why conventional terminology is wrong. She mentioned some Japanese term and said you could tell what it means just from the sound of it. No, I couldn't, and I speak some Japanese. You get the idea. She's a perfect example of Often Wrong But Never in Doubt.
October 14, 2020
NO, NO E ANCORA NO.
Questo libro non si salva sotto nessun aspetto:
- Impaginato malissimo, sembra la mia tesi di triennale rilegata alla bell'e meglio. Sinceramente, non capisco perché una casa editrice come la Feltrinelli abbia optato per questo look amatoriale, con immagini dai colori talmente saturi da non distinguere granché i dettagli.
- Stile orrendo e inconcludente: l'autrice ci preme a dire che ha "voluto che questo libro uscisse così, come dettato ad alta voce". E probabilmente non ha neanche più riguardato le bozze prima di consegnarle all'editore, che di sicuro non gli ha dato nemmeno un'occhiata.
Il risultato è una narrazione del tutto sconclusionata, che sembra il commento al powerpoint proiettato ad una lezione per un pubblico generico, che va mantenuto attento con digressioni e commentini. Un sacco di aneddoti slegati, citazioni random di film e pop culture, lessico specifico buttato nel testo solo per dimostrare che l'autrice se ne intende, e poi generalizzazioni e banalizzazioni indicibili.
L'esempio è il paragrafo all'insegna del "mia nonna diceva" (scusa, tua nonna era un'antropologa?, altrimenti non vedo come la sua opinione sia rilevante), contro il paragrafo di descrizione super specifica incorniciato da [inizio digressione linguistica] e [fine digressione linguistica], come se non avessi acquistato un libro appositamente per saperne di più.
Poi ci sono anche battute da quindicenni: l'autrice deve specificare che parlando di egizi, la parola "canna" è sinonimo di "giunco", oppure il giudizio sul livello di sex appeal di ogni attore maschio menzionato, ovvero Jack Nicholson (irresistibile), Javier Bardem (irriconoscibile).
Oppure il ragionamento che si conclude con "Per me questo è interessante tanto quanto fissare la lavatrice". E quindi? Lo trova alienante, interessante, fastidioso...? La scienza non ha risposte.
Da un punto di vista formale, ci sono un sacco di discrepanze o scelte stilistiche dubbie: tutte le parole in lingua straniera sono scritte in corsivo, tranne quando si tratta dell'inglese, che viene trattato alla stregua di un lessico extra per l'italiano (perché, si sappia, l'autrice ha lavorato tantissimi anni all'estero): i mobili cheap Ikea (troppo ardito usare 'economico'?), termini specifici sono usati tradotti in varie lingue ('abugida' in un capitolo, 'abjad' in una nota), divisione di composti che sono formalmente scritti come una parola sola ('tele-trasporto' anziché il comunissimo 'teletrasporto'), traduzione delle parole citate senza nessun segno distintivo (di solito si usano le virgolette per capire di che parola si tratta), ma alla trascrizione fonetica nelle // non si rinuncia, però.
- Per quanto riguarda i contenuti, non ci siamo. Zero. Non è nemmeno chiaro di cosa voglia trattare, se di storia della scrittura, paleografia, antropologia, lista di lingue non ancora decifrate.
M'intendo alquanto degli argomenti proposti, tanto da notare l'assenza nella bibliografia di tutta la scuola "tedesca", e l'autrice è riuscita nel compito difficile di confondermi, di farmi dubitare che si stesse parlando di una certa cosa. Spiacevolissimo è il fatto che ogni tot capitoli debba sponsorizzare il suo progetto finanziato all'UE, il progetto INSCRIBE, come per giustificare il senso di questo libro. Non ha senso, perché se questo libro dovrebbe dare lustro a questa equipe di studiosi, be', direi che il risultato è addirittura l'opposto.
Il fatto poi che si soffermi per pagine e pagine su cavolate, su riflessioni di contorno che vengono gonfiate in maniera inverosimile a suon di metafore trite e battutine, anziché spiegare alcuni concetti fondamentali per seguire la discussione è indecente: per spiegare la similitudine tra reperti antichi greci e le palline del sorteggio della Champions ci ha messo due pagine e due immagini a colori, invece per spiegare la struttura basilare della sillaba non ci ha pensato, seminando nomi come 'rima' e 'coda' come se fosse conoscenza comune. Idem per l'uso di logogramma/ideogramma, la cui differenza non si risolve leggendo il significato del lemma sul dizionario.
Vogliamo concludere il tour con una perla dell'autrice? Cito: "Il risultato di questo esperimento è che, quasi senza accorgermene, ho scansato la cosa di cui stavo scrivendo" .
Non so gli altri, ma per me che l'autrice abbia pubblicato un libro con la consapevolezza di aver imbrattato carta a vanvera mi manda in bestia.
Questo libro non si salva sotto nessun aspetto:
- Impaginato malissimo, sembra la mia tesi di triennale rilegata alla bell'e meglio. Sinceramente, non capisco perché una casa editrice come la Feltrinelli abbia optato per questo look amatoriale, con immagini dai colori talmente saturi da non distinguere granché i dettagli.
- Stile orrendo e inconcludente: l'autrice ci preme a dire che ha "voluto che questo libro uscisse così, come dettato ad alta voce". E probabilmente non ha neanche più riguardato le bozze prima di consegnarle all'editore, che di sicuro non gli ha dato nemmeno un'occhiata.
Il risultato è una narrazione del tutto sconclusionata, che sembra il commento al powerpoint proiettato ad una lezione per un pubblico generico, che va mantenuto attento con digressioni e commentini. Un sacco di aneddoti slegati, citazioni random di film e pop culture, lessico specifico buttato nel testo solo per dimostrare che l'autrice se ne intende, e poi generalizzazioni e banalizzazioni indicibili.
L'esempio è il paragrafo all'insegna del "mia nonna diceva" (scusa, tua nonna era un'antropologa?, altrimenti non vedo come la sua opinione sia rilevante), contro il paragrafo di descrizione super specifica incorniciato da [inizio digressione linguistica] e [fine digressione linguistica], come se non avessi acquistato un libro appositamente per saperne di più.
Poi ci sono anche battute da quindicenni: l'autrice deve specificare che parlando di egizi, la parola "canna" è sinonimo di "giunco", oppure il giudizio sul livello di sex appeal di ogni attore maschio menzionato, ovvero Jack Nicholson (irresistibile), Javier Bardem (irriconoscibile).
Oppure il ragionamento che si conclude con "Per me questo è interessante tanto quanto fissare la lavatrice". E quindi? Lo trova alienante, interessante, fastidioso...? La scienza non ha risposte.
Da un punto di vista formale, ci sono un sacco di discrepanze o scelte stilistiche dubbie: tutte le parole in lingua straniera sono scritte in corsivo, tranne quando si tratta dell'inglese, che viene trattato alla stregua di un lessico extra per l'italiano (perché, si sappia, l'autrice ha lavorato tantissimi anni all'estero): i mobili cheap Ikea (troppo ardito usare 'economico'?), termini specifici sono usati tradotti in varie lingue ('abugida' in un capitolo, 'abjad' in una nota), divisione di composti che sono formalmente scritti come una parola sola ('tele-trasporto' anziché il comunissimo 'teletrasporto'), traduzione delle parole citate senza nessun segno distintivo (di solito si usano le virgolette per capire di che parola si tratta), ma alla trascrizione fonetica nelle // non si rinuncia, però.
- Per quanto riguarda i contenuti, non ci siamo. Zero. Non è nemmeno chiaro di cosa voglia trattare, se di storia della scrittura, paleografia, antropologia, lista di lingue non ancora decifrate.
M'intendo alquanto degli argomenti proposti, tanto da notare l'assenza nella bibliografia di tutta la scuola "tedesca", e l'autrice è riuscita nel compito difficile di confondermi, di farmi dubitare che si stesse parlando di una certa cosa. Spiacevolissimo è il fatto che ogni tot capitoli debba sponsorizzare il suo progetto finanziato all'UE, il progetto INSCRIBE, come per giustificare il senso di questo libro. Non ha senso, perché se questo libro dovrebbe dare lustro a questa equipe di studiosi, be', direi che il risultato è addirittura l'opposto.
Il fatto poi che si soffermi per pagine e pagine su cavolate, su riflessioni di contorno che vengono gonfiate in maniera inverosimile a suon di metafore trite e battutine, anziché spiegare alcuni concetti fondamentali per seguire la discussione è indecente: per spiegare la similitudine tra reperti antichi greci e le palline del sorteggio della Champions ci ha messo due pagine e due immagini a colori, invece per spiegare la struttura basilare della sillaba non ci ha pensato, seminando nomi come 'rima' e 'coda' come se fosse conoscenza comune. Idem per l'uso di logogramma/ideogramma, la cui differenza non si risolve leggendo il significato del lemma sul dizionario.
Vogliamo concludere il tour con una perla dell'autrice? Cito: "Il risultato di questo esperimento è che, quasi senza accorgermene, ho scansato la cosa di cui stavo scrivendo" .
Non so gli altri, ma per me che l'autrice abbia pubblicato un libro con la consapevolezza di aver imbrattato carta a vanvera mi manda in bestia.
April 27, 2022
This book looked very interesting, but even from the first few pages I could sense trouble. Having now finished it, I can offer a few complaints:
(1) The author never distinguishes between her speculations and opinions versus the "facts".
(2) The tone can be jarring. I personally do not find it particularly charming when a pop book uses overly cutesy language.
(3) There is not enough content. I really wanted more examples, or interesting stories, or something to grab onto. Instead, I was treated to page after page of Ferrara's unsolicited opinions and feelings about her subject. This is fine for a memoir, but seems totally out of place here.
I am just disappointed that this book didn't have more.
(1) The author never distinguishes between her speculations and opinions versus the "facts".
(2) The tone can be jarring. I personally do not find it particularly charming when a pop book uses overly cutesy language.
(3) There is not enough content. I really wanted more examples, or interesting stories, or something to grab onto. Instead, I was treated to page after page of Ferrara's unsolicited opinions and feelings about her subject. This is fine for a memoir, but seems totally out of place here.
I am just disappointed that this book didn't have more.
January 8, 2022
This title was very intriguing for me- the greatest invention being writing? Let's dive in. Overall it was worth the read, but fell flat in several areas.
What I liked:
- I enjoyed reading about the early civilizations of Mesoamerica, Egypt, and China, I teach these in my World History class and liked being able to dive deeper into the writing systems. Particularly interesting to hear about how they all invented their writing system independent of each other.
-The author used a plethora of images- it was interesting to see the artifacts she was discussing throughly in the book.
What I didn't:
-The author's writing style was very.. interesting. I gave a little grace because the book was not originally written in English. But the more I read, the more I was convinced that the author intended to write in less of an academic style and more of a literary/narrative style. It was really just distracting more than anything else.
-I also struggled with the organization of this book. In the first chapters it seemed clear how the book would be laid out- the author was going to take us in depth to several different early civilizations and their "invention" of writing. But as she did she would jump around topically and make references that were not clearly laid out. Overall it was very disorganized.
What I liked:
- I enjoyed reading about the early civilizations of Mesoamerica, Egypt, and China, I teach these in my World History class and liked being able to dive deeper into the writing systems. Particularly interesting to hear about how they all invented their writing system independent of each other.
-The author used a plethora of images- it was interesting to see the artifacts she was discussing throughly in the book.
What I didn't:
-The author's writing style was very.. interesting. I gave a little grace because the book was not originally written in English. But the more I read, the more I was convinced that the author intended to write in less of an academic style and more of a literary/narrative style. It was really just distracting more than anything else.
-I also struggled with the organization of this book. In the first chapters it seemed clear how the book would be laid out- the author was going to take us in depth to several different early civilizations and their "invention" of writing. But as she did she would jump around topically and make references that were not clearly laid out. Overall it was very disorganized.
April 19, 2020
La lettura di questo libro è resa snervante da uno stile che secondo le intenzioni della Ferrara avrebbe dovuto catturare il lettore, ma che in realtà è un insulto ad ogni persona dotata di un quoziente intellettivo nella norma. Per realizzare un testo divulgativo non è necessario semplificare l'argomento fino a ridicolizzarlo. Ci sono tanti, meravigliosi testi - accessibili anche ai non addetti ai lavori - che non per questo rinunciano all'esattezza dell'esposizione e al rigore scientifico (i lavori di Harari e Diamond, ad esempio). L'esposizione della Ferrara è invece confusionaria e contraddittoria, oltre che banale. All'inizio del libro la scrittura viene presentata come una delle più grandi invenzioni della storia dell'umanità, si arriva poi a fine lettura e si resta spiazzati nell'apprendere che l'autrice ha cambiato idea, dal momento che no, non è vero, la scrittura non è poi così necessaria, l'uomo poteva addirittura farne a meno (spoiler: no, in nessuna società realmente complessa si può fare a meno di un sistema di scrittura). Un libro inconcludente, scritto e pensato male, pretenzioso pur nella sua banalità. La vita è decisamente troppo breve per sprecarla ad affrontare letture del genere, se non altro mi consolo pensando al tempo che ha l'autrice ha buttato via per scriverlo.
September 5, 2020
Premettendo che come linguista e traduttrice magari mi aspettavo di più a livello di contenuti, non lo consiglierei neanche a chi si approccia per la prima volta all'argomento: superficiale e confuso, con uno stile di scrittura che, nell'intento di essere accessibile, diventa fastidioso.
December 26, 2021
Scattershot and hard to follow. Interesting content but not well-presented.
May 19, 2022
Silvia Ferrara, anthropologist and linguist, can't quite decide she's writing about, so she tries to do a little bit of everything: a history of writing, some analytic linguistics, and as her subtitle suggests, an examination of several of the world's still-indecipherable scripts.
The result is a mixed bag. Chatty sections on iconography and phonetics — engaging in tone, but often lacking specifics — followed by discussions of famous ancient scripts that have indeed been deciphered, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Linear B.
When we arrive at Ferrara's "mysterious scripts," an immediate problem arises. After characterizing the nature and complexities of unknown scripts like Linear A, ancient Cretan, or the Voynich Manuscript, she doesn't have much more to say than the equivalent of … very mysterious and more research needed. The result is that only a relatively small portion of Ferrara's book is devoted to such "known unknown" writings, whether the enigmatic inscriptions of Easter Island, Indus Valley Script, or the baffling colored knots of the Inca known as quipi.
Ferrara's basic thesis is a familiar if still fascinating one. Civilization, and writing — whether to count cattle or praise gods — evolved independently in several primary locations, including Mesoamerica, Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia, and central China. Shortly thereafter, writing appears on islands in the Mediterranean, notably Crete, although whether invented in isolation or adapted from Egyptian hieroglyphics remains a subject of scholarly dispute.
The struggle to understand these scripts (sometimes distinct languages, sometimes not) often revolves around distinguishing which elements are visual icons and which indicate actual sounds. Understanding the sophisticated mix of the two, for example, was key to deciphering several of the more famous ancient languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Middle Eastern cuneiform, and Greek Linear B.
Like a dragonfly, however, Ferrara flits from one fascinating topic to another, but never alights long enough for a fully satisfying experience of linguistic and archeological discovery.
The result is a mixed bag. Chatty sections on iconography and phonetics — engaging in tone, but often lacking specifics — followed by discussions of famous ancient scripts that have indeed been deciphered, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Linear B.
When we arrive at Ferrara's "mysterious scripts," an immediate problem arises. After characterizing the nature and complexities of unknown scripts like Linear A, ancient Cretan, or the Voynich Manuscript, she doesn't have much more to say than the equivalent of … very mysterious and more research needed. The result is that only a relatively small portion of Ferrara's book is devoted to such "known unknown" writings, whether the enigmatic inscriptions of Easter Island, Indus Valley Script, or the baffling colored knots of the Inca known as quipi.
Ferrara's basic thesis is a familiar if still fascinating one. Civilization, and writing — whether to count cattle or praise gods — evolved independently in several primary locations, including Mesoamerica, Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia, and central China. Shortly thereafter, writing appears on islands in the Mediterranean, notably Crete, although whether invented in isolation or adapted from Egyptian hieroglyphics remains a subject of scholarly dispute.
The struggle to understand these scripts (sometimes distinct languages, sometimes not) often revolves around distinguishing which elements are visual icons and which indicate actual sounds. Understanding the sophisticated mix of the two, for example, was key to deciphering several of the more famous ancient languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Middle Eastern cuneiform, and Greek Linear B.
Like a dragonfly, however, Ferrara flits from one fascinating topic to another, but never alights long enough for a fully satisfying experience of linguistic and archeological discovery.
December 20, 2022
THE GREATEST INVENTION: A history of the world in nine mysterious scriptsBy Silvia Ferrara (Translated by Todd Portnowitz)
First what is challenging about this book. Ferrara begins by warning us that she is writing as if at a cocktail party. She is not making a sustained argument, nor is she writing a definite history of written language. What she is doing is standing around and talking to readers. Delighting with charming asides and fascinating anecdotes or posing puzzles to be solves, she also somehow manages to sideline the very subject of the book. The writing is beautiful but also hard to follow. Being specifically written to be conversational, I found it impossible to understand listening on Audible. I also found myself needing to Google constantly to figure out the basic outline of many of the topics she introduced.
That said, I found this to be one of the most stimulating books I have read in years.
First what is challenging about this book. Ferrara begins by warning us that she is writing as if at a cocktail party. She is not making a sustained argument, nor is she writing a definite history of written language. What she is doing is standing around and talking to readers. Delighting with charming asides and fascinating anecdotes or posing puzzles to be solves, she also somehow manages to sideline the very subject of the book. The writing is beautiful but also hard to follow. Being specifically written to be conversational, I found it impossible to understand listening on Audible. I also found myself needing to Google constantly to figure out the basic outline of many of the topics she introduced.
That said, I found this to be one of the most stimulating books I have read in years.
January 1, 2023
Humans have been speaking for thousands of years longer than there has been writing. Although Mesopotamia and Egyptian and Chinese scripts are probably the oldest that are mostly deciphered, there are other scripts that have not been deciphered that are possibly as old, such as those that are found on Easter Island, Crete, and Isthmian in Mexico. The author discusses the various material culture that physically exists and how the amount figures into the decipherment. She also includes more modern creators of writing mixed with spirituality, like Sequoyah for the Cherokee in early America and Shong Lue Yang creating the Pahawh Hmong script in Vietnam in the 1950's after a dream. She also discusses the fun, mysterious Volynich Manuscript purchased just in 1912 in Poland in a shop and the Incan "quipu" knotted thread storytelling that could be considered writing and the Harappa script found on seals that pushed back the Indus Civilization. The humor comes from her relating the jealousy of researchers past and present. She includes illustrations and a bibliography I will have to dive into as she has perked my curiosity.
May 1, 2023
As non-fiction books go, this one is rather short on facts. It's not exactly packed with insights, either. I was expecting a lot more pictures. So overall, very lightweight.
July 3, 2023
Chciałbym wiedzieć dlaczego sobie to robię 🥲
February 26, 2025
Reading about all these ancient scripts made me reflect on this learned ability of ours to stare at signs and symbols and understand the meaning encoded into them, which just doesn’t stop being fascinating to me.
August 6, 2021
J’ai lu cet ouvrage dans le cadre de recherches pour ma trilogie Bibliomancienne, mais aussi par intérêt pour le sujet. En bonne amatrice de livres, l’histoire de l’écriture me passionne tout autant ! ^^
Le sommaire de ce livre s’avère touffu : Silvia Ferrara retrace toute l’histoire des écritures (oui, au pluriel, car différents systèmes d’écriture sont nés à différents endroits du globe, à des périodes plus ou moins similaires), elle évoque des systèmes d’écriture demeurés indéchiffrés à ce jour, elle tente aussi de comprendre ce qui a pu mener à une telle invention – au regard de l’histoire de l’humanité, l’écriture est relativement récente et pourtant, on ne saurait imaginer le monde sans elle, à présent !
Très complet, La fabuleuse histoire de l’invention de l’écriture décrit également les démarches des déchiffreurs d’écriture, les étapes clés à suivre rigoureusement, et évoque les évolutions (ou non) de différents systèmes d’écriture jusqu’à nos emojis actuels.
Vous vous dites que ça doit être ardu à lire ? Eh bien, pas du tout ! L’autrice nous décrit tout cela sur le ton de la conversation, si bien que j’ai lu l’ouvrage avec autant de plaisir qu’un roman ! Pour ne rien gâcher, des illustrations en couleur ponctuent son propos.
Si je connaissais déjà certains faits dévoilés, j’ai appris des choses en lisant ce chouette ouvrage ! J’ai ainsi découvert l’écriture rongorongo de l’Île de Pâques, qui laisse encore les chercheurs perplexes, et l’histoire de la création par Sequoyah du syllabaire cherokee. Appris comment les chercheurs procédaient pour décrypter une écriture. Lu avec grand intérêt les différentes raisons avancées par Silvia Ferrara pour expliquer l’invention de cette merveilleuse chose qu’est l’écriture et ce, au fil des siècles. Car de nouveaux systèmes d’écriture sont apparus au fil du temps, en divers pays et circonstances.
Une merveilleuse invention, que l’écriture en effet, car si elle n’existait pas, ce blog non plus, pas plus que le livre que je chronique…
Pour résumé, si le sujet vous intéresse – que ce soit de près ou de loin – vous trouverez dans La fabuleuse histoire de l’invention de l’écriture tout ce qu’il y a à savoir sur le sujet, dans un style très accessible et par une autrice de toute évidence passionnée par son sujet !
Le sommaire de ce livre s’avère touffu : Silvia Ferrara retrace toute l’histoire des écritures (oui, au pluriel, car différents systèmes d’écriture sont nés à différents endroits du globe, à des périodes plus ou moins similaires), elle évoque des systèmes d’écriture demeurés indéchiffrés à ce jour, elle tente aussi de comprendre ce qui a pu mener à une telle invention – au regard de l’histoire de l’humanité, l’écriture est relativement récente et pourtant, on ne saurait imaginer le monde sans elle, à présent !
Très complet, La fabuleuse histoire de l’invention de l’écriture décrit également les démarches des déchiffreurs d’écriture, les étapes clés à suivre rigoureusement, et évoque les évolutions (ou non) de différents systèmes d’écriture jusqu’à nos emojis actuels.
Vous vous dites que ça doit être ardu à lire ? Eh bien, pas du tout ! L’autrice nous décrit tout cela sur le ton de la conversation, si bien que j’ai lu l’ouvrage avec autant de plaisir qu’un roman ! Pour ne rien gâcher, des illustrations en couleur ponctuent son propos.
Si je connaissais déjà certains faits dévoilés, j’ai appris des choses en lisant ce chouette ouvrage ! J’ai ainsi découvert l’écriture rongorongo de l’Île de Pâques, qui laisse encore les chercheurs perplexes, et l’histoire de la création par Sequoyah du syllabaire cherokee. Appris comment les chercheurs procédaient pour décrypter une écriture. Lu avec grand intérêt les différentes raisons avancées par Silvia Ferrara pour expliquer l’invention de cette merveilleuse chose qu’est l’écriture et ce, au fil des siècles. Car de nouveaux systèmes d’écriture sont apparus au fil du temps, en divers pays et circonstances.
Une merveilleuse invention, que l’écriture en effet, car si elle n’existait pas, ce blog non plus, pas plus que le livre que je chronique…
Pour résumé, si le sujet vous intéresse – que ce soit de près ou de loin – vous trouverez dans La fabuleuse histoire de l’invention de l’écriture tout ce qu’il y a à savoir sur le sujet, dans un style très accessible et par une autrice de toute évidence passionnée par son sujet !
May 5, 2023
The author is giddy & vain. It's safe to say that in writing this she gratified herself in more than one way.
Reading this book is kind of like rooting through the dumpster in search of a sandwich fragment, whereas all you wind up with are a cigarette butt & a banana peel.
Reading this book is kind of like rooting through the dumpster in search of a sandwich fragment, whereas all you wind up with are a cigarette butt & a banana peel.
May 27, 2023
I didn’t mind the conversational tone, as I was listening to the audiobook while doing yard work. But about 30% of the way through I just got frustrated by the meandering nature. The author just rambled, stream-of-consciousness style, introducing topic after topic without finishing a thought.
And while I can respect a topic expert acknowledging but rejecting the modern consensus on a niche element of their field, I will not tolerate it outside their field. She can think what she wants about languages and scripts, but just throwing out the modern research on the deforestation on Rapa Nui in favor of the colonial blame-the-indigenous-people framework? No. Nope. Instant DNF.
And while I can respect a topic expert acknowledging but rejecting the modern consensus on a niche element of their field, I will not tolerate it outside their field. She can think what she wants about languages and scripts, but just throwing out the modern research on the deforestation on Rapa Nui in favor of the colonial blame-the-indigenous-people framework? No. Nope. Instant DNF.
March 3, 2020
Deludente. Gli argomenti sono presentati in modo sparso e confuso, lo stile cerca di essere brioso ma senza successo. Il sottotitolo è pure fuorviante: finirete questo libro sapendo poco più di "esistono queste scritture indecifrate. Ma ora parliamo di tutt'altro".
July 21, 2022
This small book, 277 pages of history, is much more than I thought it would be. Yes, it's a description of nine scripts and a summary of the transition from earliest signs and symbols in caves and on stones. But it's also a commentary, at a very high intellectual level, of humanity's progress over a relatively short time - some five thousand years - a snippet of time mankind has existed, to create various systems of written communication.
Progress *is* possible without writing, as evidenced by the "Inca Paradox," which created Machu Picchu, an engineering marvel. The Incas developed a complex communication system of beads and lengths of yarn, yet did not use writing, and apparently were not aware of the wheel, or of iron. The Mayan culture integrated both material and spiritual worlds from inanimate objects. These examples indicate different ways to "skin a cat," as we say. Yet writing has emerged as the dominant method to make sound visible and tangible, a way that acts intimately with our sensory system, and is connected to other human inventions including art, icons, symbols, and abstract signs.
The author, an Italian woman of early middle age, at least based on her photograph in the book, has taught at leading British and Italian universities, and certainly must have an IQ and intellectual breadth of a most impressive stature. She intertwines the basics of her subject with references to cultural icons including The Blues Brothers, Leonard Cohen, Jarad Diamond, and Noah Harari to name a handful. Her writing is chatty, cheerfully conversational at times.
This book deserves a second reading, as it's very good and very deep, all the while super-entertaining and filled with knowledge.
Progress *is* possible without writing, as evidenced by the "Inca Paradox," which created Machu Picchu, an engineering marvel. The Incas developed a complex communication system of beads and lengths of yarn, yet did not use writing, and apparently were not aware of the wheel, or of iron. The Mayan culture integrated both material and spiritual worlds from inanimate objects. These examples indicate different ways to "skin a cat," as we say. Yet writing has emerged as the dominant method to make sound visible and tangible, a way that acts intimately with our sensory system, and is connected to other human inventions including art, icons, symbols, and abstract signs.
The author, an Italian woman of early middle age, at least based on her photograph in the book, has taught at leading British and Italian universities, and certainly must have an IQ and intellectual breadth of a most impressive stature. She intertwines the basics of her subject with references to cultural icons including The Blues Brothers, Leonard Cohen, Jarad Diamond, and Noah Harari to name a handful. Her writing is chatty, cheerfully conversational at times.
This book deserves a second reading, as it's very good and very deep, all the while super-entertaining and filled with knowledge.
June 18, 2024
Another linguistics book. A really enjoyable, if at times a bit dense, book talking about the invention and development of writing across the globe. At times the translation into English was a bit clunky, but it got the point across. The focus is very heavy on Aegean scripts, but it's understandable because it's the author's main field of study. It does kind of gloss over the Mayan, Cuneiform, and Chinese scripts to focus more on the deciphering of languages in total, but I still learned a bit from this book and it's well worth the read for anyone who's ever been interested in just why we write the way we do.
April 15, 2023
Un libro fascinante sobre el origen de la escritura y sobre muchas cosas mas que me encantaría mencionar pero es que tendría que mencionar el libro entero¡ quizás para los legos en la materia se le podría poner un pero y es que va como en saltitos de tema en tema, pero al final del libro la autora le da un sentido a esa forma de narrar, mas oral que escrita y es que como dice ese es el sentido de todo, transmitir emociones y lo consigue. Por cierto, para los que leais el libro ... que bueno lo del experimento Brad Pitt¡ xD
September 27, 2025
Too bad a book about writing is so badly written. The author doesn't seem to have more of a thesis than "isn't writing awesome", she takes a quick tour of the world, never goes into detail about any of the scripts, and her thoughts are supposed to be insightful though never substantiated by even a cursory explanation, let alone proper data. The book completely falls into the popular science trap of wanting to tell everything but telling nothing.
August 4, 2022
History of Writing
The author looks are several inventions of writing. The most interesting was quipu from the Incas to me. A very interesting book.
The author looks are several inventions of writing. The most interesting was quipu from the Incas to me. A very interesting book.
abandoned
October 7, 2023Non riesco a farmi piacere lo stile dell’autrice. Fondamentalmente perché, stringi stringi, mi sembra che non dica nulla.
Avrei preferito un libro sulla storia della scrittura, o una ricostruzione delle società che hanno generato queste scritture sconosciute, ma di concreto c’è poco; molte, in compenso, deviazioni, battute, paragrafi e paragrafi di niente.
Avrei preferito un libro sulla storia della scrittura, o una ricostruzione delle società che hanno generato queste scritture sconosciute, ma di concreto c’è poco; molte, in compenso, deviazioni, battute, paragrafi e paragrafi di niente.
September 26, 2023
The author centers on writing seen both as a human ability and a transcription of oral language, and yet she very heavily refuses there to be any continuity from oral to written language, though once or twice what she says, like in her fifth step about “assigning sounds to signs,” is exactly the reverse of what Homo Sapiens did when he developed writing: he assigned signs to sounds. No matter what way it works for a decipherer and for Homo Sapiens, when he developed some writing system for his/her/their language, and his/her/their language alone in 6-8,000 BCE, the connection between an oral language and its written version are connected, but flexible so that it can be easily replaced by another written code for the very same oral utterances, like the Phoenicians developing the first real consonantal alphabet to replace, for Semitic languages, the Cuneiform writing of the Sumerians (Indo-Iranian) and Akkadians (Semitic), and later on the Greeks adding the vowels of Indo-European languages to the Phoenician alphabet that only had “alep” and only when it was the initial sound or letter of a word. She alludes to signs in painted caves, hence going back to 45,000 BCE, and all over the world, but she does not exploit it. We know, thanks to Alexander Marshack, all the diacritic and geometric signs in those caves, and on portable bone, stone or even wooden artifacts there were the recording of counting observations of moon cycles, or probably menstrual cycles. She ignores it all and thus neglecting the 40,000 years that preceded what she calls the invention of writing around 3,500 BCE. She acknowledges there were six cradles in the world and does not give them in chronological order, hence does not link them to the general evolution of the concerned human groups, and she neglects the fact that Egyptian writing and Sumerian writing developed at the same time or so but with a strong link between them: the Akkadians were the scribes of the Sumerians and they were Semitic like the Egyptians, whereas the Sumerians were Indo-Iranian coming down from the Iranian Plateau and settling in Mesopotamia before moving on. She mistakenly declares them Turkic, or speaking Turkish, an agglutinative language.
In this review I will continue my own research on the transition between pre-Sapiens Hominins and Homo Sapiens, a transition proved by some recent discoveries in Zambia to have taken place in Black Africa, and no longer around 300,000 BCE but at least 475,000 BCE. Mutations selected naturally transformed the foot, the larynx, the respiratory system, the articulatory system, the subglottal zone and its innervation of the pre-Sapiens Hominins concerned to enable Homo Sapiens to become what they are, long-distance bipedal fast runners. The development of oral language is a collateral consequence of these mutations. As soon as Homo Sapiens started using durable medium for their representational and entoptic geometric or other diacritic elements we have to follow Genevieve von Petzinger and state that these are signs and they have a function, counting for the repetitive elements, and all of these rockface paintings were there to illustrate the story the painters or other special individuals (probably sha-women and a few shamans) who could speak to the spirits behind the rockface were telling the fascinated audience. These paintings were “writing” a story on the rock in the caves. Alphabetical or syllabary writing is the simple development of all that we know had been going on for 40,000 years before the development of writing, and we should understand Homo Sapiens had been speaking a language or languages in Black Africa that was or were being developed simultaneously following a phylogeny that was dictated by the very nature of human articulated language: three articulations, three phases, and writing came from various languages that have to be identified phylogenetically and each writing system was perfectly adapted to the language concerned, at least at the beginning. It is only later on that real alphabetical systems developed from what had been developed before.
Following the book chapter after chapter, it is possible to see how the lack of phylogeny blocks the real vision necessary to understand these facts, and that the reference to “bureaucracy” in big cities was the cause of this development, according to Silvia Ferrara. But the very term “bureaucracy” is anachronic. If we speak of recording discussions, decisions and various “documents” we have to deal with memory in the oral language of the community. The people who specialized in remembering this data, could we call them a bureaucracy in 2023, with the highly pejorative paradigmatic meaning the term conveys? Of course not. Silvia Ferrara is politicizing and socializing the topic of her book. All that because she did not ask the basic questions: Where did the people who developed some writing system come from, and What language or languages did they speak? Writing was not a discovery because it was not found on a tree or in a cave. Writing was not an invention because there is no break from pure oral language to written language via representational drawings, and iconic first, totally abstract then signs used to transcribe the oral language into a durable (the media) and sustainable (to be learned by anyone and taught to anyone) script.
What a shame Silvia Ferrara followed an ideological slope instead of taking the high road leading to discovering the phylogeny of language starting in 475,000 BCE and still developing today.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
VERSION FRANÇAISE
L’auteure se concentre sur l’écriture considérée à la fois comme une capacité humaine et une transcription du langage oral, et pourtant elle refuse très catégoriquement toute continuité de l’oral au langage écrit, même si elle le sous-entend une ou deux fois, comme dans sa cinquième étape concernant l’objectif d’« assigner des sons à des signes », ce qui est exactement l’inverse de ce que faisait Homo Sapiens lorsqu’il développa l’écriture : il assignait des signes à des sons. Quelle que soit la manière dont cela fonctionne pour un déchiffreur et pour Homo Sapiens, lorsqu’Homo Sapiens a développé un système d'écriture pour sa/leur langue, et sa/leur langue seule, entre 6 et 8 000 avant notre ère, le lien entre une langue orale et sa version écrite est réel car elles sont connectées, mais flexibles de telle sorte que les système d’écriture peuvent être facilement remplacés par un autre code écrit pour les mêmes énoncés oraux, comme les Phéniciens développant le premier véritable alphabet consonantique pour remplacer, pour les langues sémitiques, l'écriture cunéiforme des Sumériens (Indo- iraniens) et akkadiens (sémitiques), et plus tard les Grecs ont ajouté les voyelles des langues indo-européennes à l'alphabet phénicien qui ne comportait qu’« alep » et seulement lorsqu'il s'agissait du son ou de la lettre initiale d'un mot. Elle fait allusion à des signes dans les peintures rupestres, remontant donc à 45 000 avant notre ère, et partout dans le monde, mais elle ne les exploite pas. Nous connaissons, grâce à Alexander Marshack, tous les signes diacritiques et géométriques de ces grottes, et sur des objets portables en os, en pierre ou même en bois, enregistraient des observations de comptage des cycles lunaires, ou probablement des cycles menstruels. Elle ignore tout cela et néglige ainsi les 40 000 ans qui ont précédé ce qu’elle appelle l’invention de l’écriture vers 3 500 avant notre ère. Elle reconnaît qu'il y a eu six berceaux dans le monde mais ne les donne pas en ordre chronologique, donc ne les relie pas à l'évolution générale des groupes humains concernés, et néglige le fait que l'écriture égyptienne et l'écriture sumérienne se sont développées en même temps ou presque mais avec un lien fort entre elles : les Akkadiens étaient les scribes des Sumériens et ils étaient sémitiques comme les Egyptiens, alors que les Sumériens étaient des Indo-iraniens descendus du plateau iranien et s'installant en Mésopotamie avant de poursuivre leur route. Elle les déclare à tort turkiques, ou parlant le turc, une langue agglutinante.
Dans cette revue, je poursuivrai mes propres recherches sur la transition entre les Homininés pré-Sapiens et Homo Sapiens, une transition prouvée par certaines découvertes récentes en Zambie comme ayant eu lieu en Afrique noire, non plus vers 300 000 avant notre ère mais au moins 475 000 avant notre ère. Les mutations sélectionnées naturellement ont transformé le pied, le larynx, le système respiratoire, le système articulatoire, la zone sous-glottique et supra-glottique et leur innervation chez les Homininés pré-Sapiens concernés pour permettre aux Homo Sapiens de devenir ce qu'ils sont, des coureurs rapides bipèdes de longue distance. Le développement du langage oral est une conséquence collatérale de ces mutations. Dès qu’Homo Sapiens a commencé à utiliser un support durable pour ses éléments géométriques figuratifs entoptiques et autres éléments diacritiques, nous devons suivre Geneviève von Petzinger et affirmer que ce sont des signes et qu'ils ont une fonction, compter pour les éléments répétitifs, et toutes ces peintures sur les parois rocheuses. étaient là pour illustrer l'histoire que les peintres ou d'autres individus spéciaux (probablement des femmes chamanes et quelques chamanes) qui pouvaient parler aux esprits derrière la paroi rocheuse racontaient au public fasciné. Ces peintures « écrivaient » une histoire sur la roche des grottes. L'écriture alphabétique ou syllabaire est le simple développement de tout ce que nous savons qui s'est déroulé pendant 40 000 ans avant le développement de l'écriture, et nous devons comprendre qu'Homo Sapiens parlait une ou plusieurs langues en Afrique noire qui étaient en cours de développement simultanément suivant une phylogénie dictée par la nature même du langage articulé humain : trois articulations, trois phases de développement, et l'écriture émergeait de langues diverses qu'il faut identifier phylogénétiquement et chaque système d'écriture était parfaitement adapté à la langue concernée, du moins au début. Ce n’est que plus tard que de véritables systèmes alphabétiques se sont développés à partir de ce qui avait été développé auparavant.
En suivant le livre chapitre après chapitre, on peut voir comment le manque de phylogénie bloque la vision réelle nécessaire pour comprendre ces faits, et que la référence à la « bureaucratie » dans les grandes villes aurait été la cause de cette évolution, selon Silvia Ferrara. Mais le terme même de « bureaucratie » est anachronique. Si nous parlons d’enregistrer des discussions, des décisions et des « documents » divers, nous avons affaire à la mémoire dans la langue orale de la communauté. Les gens qui étaient spécialisés dans la mémorisation de ces données, pourrait-on les qualifier de bureaucrates en 2023, avec le sens paradigmatique très péjoratif que véhicule ce terme aujourd’hui ? Bien sûr que non. Silvia Ferrara politise et socialise le sujet de son livre. Tout cela parce qu’elle n’a pas posé les questions fondamentales : D’où venaient les gens qui ont développé un système d’écriture et Quelle(s) langue(s) parlaient-ils ? L’écriture n’a pas été une découverte car on ne l’a pas trouvée ni sur un arbre ni dans une grotte. L'écriture n'a pas été une invention car il n'y a pas de rupture entre le langage oral pur et le langage écrit via des dessins figuratifs, et des icônes d'abord totalement abstraites puis des signes utilisés pour retranscrire le langage oral dans un langage durable (le média) et « sustainable », signifiant autonome et auto-développant (à apprendre par chacun et à enseigner à tous).
Quel dommage que Silvia Ferrara ait suivi une pente idéologique au lieu de prendre le route qui monte et qui mène à la découverte de la phylogénie du langage dès 475 000 avant notre ère, une phylogénie qui se développe encore aujourd'hui.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
In this review I will continue my own research on the transition between pre-Sapiens Hominins and Homo Sapiens, a transition proved by some recent discoveries in Zambia to have taken place in Black Africa, and no longer around 300,000 BCE but at least 475,000 BCE. Mutations selected naturally transformed the foot, the larynx, the respiratory system, the articulatory system, the subglottal zone and its innervation of the pre-Sapiens Hominins concerned to enable Homo Sapiens to become what they are, long-distance bipedal fast runners. The development of oral language is a collateral consequence of these mutations. As soon as Homo Sapiens started using durable medium for their representational and entoptic geometric or other diacritic elements we have to follow Genevieve von Petzinger and state that these are signs and they have a function, counting for the repetitive elements, and all of these rockface paintings were there to illustrate the story the painters or other special individuals (probably sha-women and a few shamans) who could speak to the spirits behind the rockface were telling the fascinated audience. These paintings were “writing” a story on the rock in the caves. Alphabetical or syllabary writing is the simple development of all that we know had been going on for 40,000 years before the development of writing, and we should understand Homo Sapiens had been speaking a language or languages in Black Africa that was or were being developed simultaneously following a phylogeny that was dictated by the very nature of human articulated language: three articulations, three phases, and writing came from various languages that have to be identified phylogenetically and each writing system was perfectly adapted to the language concerned, at least at the beginning. It is only later on that real alphabetical systems developed from what had been developed before.
Following the book chapter after chapter, it is possible to see how the lack of phylogeny blocks the real vision necessary to understand these facts, and that the reference to “bureaucracy” in big cities was the cause of this development, according to Silvia Ferrara. But the very term “bureaucracy” is anachronic. If we speak of recording discussions, decisions and various “documents” we have to deal with memory in the oral language of the community. The people who specialized in remembering this data, could we call them a bureaucracy in 2023, with the highly pejorative paradigmatic meaning the term conveys? Of course not. Silvia Ferrara is politicizing and socializing the topic of her book. All that because she did not ask the basic questions: Where did the people who developed some writing system come from, and What language or languages did they speak? Writing was not a discovery because it was not found on a tree or in a cave. Writing was not an invention because there is no break from pure oral language to written language via representational drawings, and iconic first, totally abstract then signs used to transcribe the oral language into a durable (the media) and sustainable (to be learned by anyone and taught to anyone) script.
What a shame Silvia Ferrara followed an ideological slope instead of taking the high road leading to discovering the phylogeny of language starting in 475,000 BCE and still developing today.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
VERSION FRANÇAISE
L’auteure se concentre sur l’écriture considérée à la fois comme une capacité humaine et une transcription du langage oral, et pourtant elle refuse très catégoriquement toute continuité de l’oral au langage écrit, même si elle le sous-entend une ou deux fois, comme dans sa cinquième étape concernant l’objectif d’« assigner des sons à des signes », ce qui est exactement l’inverse de ce que faisait Homo Sapiens lorsqu’il développa l’écriture : il assignait des signes à des sons. Quelle que soit la manière dont cela fonctionne pour un déchiffreur et pour Homo Sapiens, lorsqu’Homo Sapiens a développé un système d'écriture pour sa/leur langue, et sa/leur langue seule, entre 6 et 8 000 avant notre ère, le lien entre une langue orale et sa version écrite est réel car elles sont connectées, mais flexibles de telle sorte que les système d’écriture peuvent être facilement remplacés par un autre code écrit pour les mêmes énoncés oraux, comme les Phéniciens développant le premier véritable alphabet consonantique pour remplacer, pour les langues sémitiques, l'écriture cunéiforme des Sumériens (Indo- iraniens) et akkadiens (sémitiques), et plus tard les Grecs ont ajouté les voyelles des langues indo-européennes à l'alphabet phénicien qui ne comportait qu’« alep » et seulement lorsqu'il s'agissait du son ou de la lettre initiale d'un mot. Elle fait allusion à des signes dans les peintures rupestres, remontant donc à 45 000 avant notre ère, et partout dans le monde, mais elle ne les exploite pas. Nous connaissons, grâce à Alexander Marshack, tous les signes diacritiques et géométriques de ces grottes, et sur des objets portables en os, en pierre ou même en bois, enregistraient des observations de comptage des cycles lunaires, ou probablement des cycles menstruels. Elle ignore tout cela et néglige ainsi les 40 000 ans qui ont précédé ce qu’elle appelle l’invention de l’écriture vers 3 500 avant notre ère. Elle reconnaît qu'il y a eu six berceaux dans le monde mais ne les donne pas en ordre chronologique, donc ne les relie pas à l'évolution générale des groupes humains concernés, et néglige le fait que l'écriture égyptienne et l'écriture sumérienne se sont développées en même temps ou presque mais avec un lien fort entre elles : les Akkadiens étaient les scribes des Sumériens et ils étaient sémitiques comme les Egyptiens, alors que les Sumériens étaient des Indo-iraniens descendus du plateau iranien et s'installant en Mésopotamie avant de poursuivre leur route. Elle les déclare à tort turkiques, ou parlant le turc, une langue agglutinante.
Dans cette revue, je poursuivrai mes propres recherches sur la transition entre les Homininés pré-Sapiens et Homo Sapiens, une transition prouvée par certaines découvertes récentes en Zambie comme ayant eu lieu en Afrique noire, non plus vers 300 000 avant notre ère mais au moins 475 000 avant notre ère. Les mutations sélectionnées naturellement ont transformé le pied, le larynx, le système respiratoire, le système articulatoire, la zone sous-glottique et supra-glottique et leur innervation chez les Homininés pré-Sapiens concernés pour permettre aux Homo Sapiens de devenir ce qu'ils sont, des coureurs rapides bipèdes de longue distance. Le développement du langage oral est une conséquence collatérale de ces mutations. Dès qu’Homo Sapiens a commencé à utiliser un support durable pour ses éléments géométriques figuratifs entoptiques et autres éléments diacritiques, nous devons suivre Geneviève von Petzinger et affirmer que ce sont des signes et qu'ils ont une fonction, compter pour les éléments répétitifs, et toutes ces peintures sur les parois rocheuses. étaient là pour illustrer l'histoire que les peintres ou d'autres individus spéciaux (probablement des femmes chamanes et quelques chamanes) qui pouvaient parler aux esprits derrière la paroi rocheuse racontaient au public fasciné. Ces peintures « écrivaient » une histoire sur la roche des grottes. L'écriture alphabétique ou syllabaire est le simple développement de tout ce que nous savons qui s'est déroulé pendant 40 000 ans avant le développement de l'écriture, et nous devons comprendre qu'Homo Sapiens parlait une ou plusieurs langues en Afrique noire qui étaient en cours de développement simultanément suivant une phylogénie dictée par la nature même du langage articulé humain : trois articulations, trois phases de développement, et l'écriture émergeait de langues diverses qu'il faut identifier phylogénétiquement et chaque système d'écriture était parfaitement adapté à la langue concernée, du moins au début. Ce n’est que plus tard que de véritables systèmes alphabétiques se sont développés à partir de ce qui avait été développé auparavant.
En suivant le livre chapitre après chapitre, on peut voir comment le manque de phylogénie bloque la vision réelle nécessaire pour comprendre ces faits, et que la référence à la « bureaucratie » dans les grandes villes aurait été la cause de cette évolution, selon Silvia Ferrara. Mais le terme même de « bureaucratie » est anachronique. Si nous parlons d’enregistrer des discussions, des décisions et des « documents » divers, nous avons affaire à la mémoire dans la langue orale de la communauté. Les gens qui étaient spécialisés dans la mémorisation de ces données, pourrait-on les qualifier de bureaucrates en 2023, avec le sens paradigmatique très péjoratif que véhicule ce terme aujourd’hui ? Bien sûr que non. Silvia Ferrara politise et socialise le sujet de son livre. Tout cela parce qu’elle n’a pas posé les questions fondamentales : D’où venaient les gens qui ont développé un système d’écriture et Quelle(s) langue(s) parlaient-ils ? L’écriture n’a pas été une découverte car on ne l’a pas trouvée ni sur un arbre ni dans une grotte. L'écriture n'a pas été une invention car il n'y a pas de rupture entre le langage oral pur et le langage écrit via des dessins figuratifs, et des icônes d'abord totalement abstraites puis des signes utilisés pour retranscrire le langage oral dans un langage durable (le média) et « sustainable », signifiant autonome et auto-développant (à apprendre par chacun et à enseigner à tous).
Quel dommage que Silvia Ferrara ait suivi une pente idéologique au lieu de prendre le route qui monte et qui mène à la découverte de la phylogénie du langage dès 475 000 avant notre ère, une phylogénie qui se développe encore aujourd'hui.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
March 28, 2023
I had a really insightful review typed out two weeks ago when I finished the book and it all deleted and it took me this long to build back up the energy to restart it. So! This was the last book in my Dewey Decimal Challenge where I read one book from every section of the Dewey Decimal System finishing on 400: Language with this beautiful volume.
And how this spoke volumes on the beauty of language! All its "coup of contour" and ability to "to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower" while constantly reimagining itself through the Diderot Trap of invention.
"A script's success does not lie in its simplicity, its graphic agility, its structural economy, or how easy it is to learn. Its success lies in repetition, diffusion, and the social cooperation of those who use it in the enduring force of interaction."
"Writing is sound made visible and tangible. And as such, it interacts intimately with our sensory systems: our ears, our eyes, our hands, tongue, which in no way makes it an innate faculty. Quite the contrary, it merely makes it human."
"But time is a breath, ethereal, ephemeral, made of air. Think again of the images from 40,000 years ago. The paleolithic symbols in caves. We can still see them. They are still there. The evidence of someone's emotions. Perhaps someone who wished to be remembered forever. As long as there are emotions, there will be written letters, living letters."
And how this spoke volumes on the beauty of language! All its "coup of contour" and ability to "to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower" while constantly reimagining itself through the Diderot Trap of invention.
"A script's success does not lie in its simplicity, its graphic agility, its structural economy, or how easy it is to learn. Its success lies in repetition, diffusion, and the social cooperation of those who use it in the enduring force of interaction."
"Writing is sound made visible and tangible. And as such, it interacts intimately with our sensory systems: our ears, our eyes, our hands, tongue, which in no way makes it an innate faculty. Quite the contrary, it merely makes it human."
"But time is a breath, ethereal, ephemeral, made of air. Think again of the images from 40,000 years ago. The paleolithic symbols in caves. We can still see them. They are still there. The evidence of someone's emotions. Perhaps someone who wished to be remembered forever. As long as there are emotions, there will be written letters, living letters."
August 8, 2022
I’d give it 3.5, if I could. My review is mostly due to my own limitations in its areas of study. Still, I found the book fascinating and thought-provoking at times, causing me to look at an aspect of the world and my life differently. For that, I’m grateful it was written and I read it.
December 16, 2021
The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts by Silvia Ferrara and translated by Todd Portnowitz is a fun and informative romp through the history, but more so the importance, of writing.
This is a hybrid of sorts in that it does get into some detail and some specific terminology (though they are explained in a straightforward manner) but is presented rather informally. Yes, it is meant for a popular readership but even aside from that the tone and flow is more like conversation (or a lecture as she states) rather than a tightly constructed argument. I found it engaging but some may prefer something closer to the typical popular science book. I didn't always catch the importance of what seemed like asides to me, but they did make me stop and think about how they might fit. While I did usually make the connection, I think the more valuable benefit was that I actually had to think about what I was reading from a perspective other than my initial one.
This is not a textbook so not every school of linguistic thought is going to be mentioned. Nor should they be if they don't contribute to Ferrara's overall purpose. If this were a book to teach us the details of every manuscript and language, maybe so. But this is as much an argument for the value of the written word as it is a basic history. If you want a plain history that shows how thought has developed over the years, there are a lot of textbooks for you. If you want to feel the exuberance of a scholar for her subject, accompanied by interesting analogies and scientific facts, this may appeal to you. Just know ahead of time that this is more like having someone tell you what they think, albeit an expert in the field, than reading an academic thesis.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
This is a hybrid of sorts in that it does get into some detail and some specific terminology (though they are explained in a straightforward manner) but is presented rather informally. Yes, it is meant for a popular readership but even aside from that the tone and flow is more like conversation (or a lecture as she states) rather than a tightly constructed argument. I found it engaging but some may prefer something closer to the typical popular science book. I didn't always catch the importance of what seemed like asides to me, but they did make me stop and think about how they might fit. While I did usually make the connection, I think the more valuable benefit was that I actually had to think about what I was reading from a perspective other than my initial one.
This is not a textbook so not every school of linguistic thought is going to be mentioned. Nor should they be if they don't contribute to Ferrara's overall purpose. If this were a book to teach us the details of every manuscript and language, maybe so. But this is as much an argument for the value of the written word as it is a basic history. If you want a plain history that shows how thought has developed over the years, there are a lot of textbooks for you. If you want to feel the exuberance of a scholar for her subject, accompanied by interesting analogies and scientific facts, this may appeal to you. Just know ahead of time that this is more like having someone tell you what they think, albeit an expert in the field, than reading an academic thesis.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 132 reviews