Post 12: Communication

Being someone who is hopelessly unilingual, this subject intrigues me. Communication is the conveying of a meaningful message from one person to the other, in any form. This topic focuses on non-alpabetic systems of writing that can be read- for example, hieroglyphics from Egypt (see photo). Other types of communication that do not use and alphabet are: logographic (uses signs to represent a morpheme- Ex. Chinese), logophonetic (signs denoting syllables-Ex. Japanese) and syllabic (many signs each having a phonetic value-Ex. Cree).Common features of these language system is that each symbol represents some sound instead of a letter. A difference is that the type of sound mean by each symbol is different, some denote a syllable while others denote a phoneme.Writing was invented independently in at least three places, Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica. While evolutionists like Tylor may think that a non-alphabetic language is inferior to an alphabetic language, modern anthropologists know that having a writing system "is not a marker of civilization". An interesting point made by the author of this website is that even english is somewhat logographic because we do not read a word by looking at each letter individually. We read by seeing the word as a whole like a picture.
Another interesting point he makes is that we may not be able to fully understand the full meaning of language of ancient times. Although Shakespeare's time was not that long ago his poems don't rhyme the way we think rhymes work. But in that time period they rhymed perfectly. So we might think we understand ancient language, but understanding ancient language fully may be impossible.

Picture found here.