This is world history; my name is Dr. Long.
This video deals with written languages.
Language is one of the most important things
that distinguished early human beings from
the animals.
Yet, while humans could communicate orally,
in prehistoric times humans did not have written
languages.
Since historians rely so heavily on written
primary sources, most of our knowledge about
prehistoric humans comes from the finding
of other disciplines – such as archaeology
and anthropology.
This also illustrates that world history is
an interdisciplinary – or has an interdisciplinary
focus.
Written language came about with the rise
of civilizations and agriculture, which gave
a settled way of life; trade; and organized
government.
People who came into contact with other people
with written languages often borrowed that
written language from them.
This borrowing, or blueprint copying as scholar
Jared Diamond calls it, has been very common
in human history.
This is especially the case for peoples in
Eurasia – Europe and Asia, who had contacts
with many other peoples and borrowed and modified
writing systems from time to time.
Peoples that were isolated from other civilizations
tended to be less likely to develop their
own written languages.
Both Egypt and the Sumerians in Mesopotamia
developed written languages around 3000 BCE.
Because of the much greater number of Sumerian
texts and the close proximity of Egypt to
Mesopotamia, some scholars think the Sumerians
may have influenced the earliest form of Egyptian
writing.
Some scholars think that the Egyptians may
have conscientiously borrowed from nearby
Sumeria.
For its part, China developed a written language
independently of other civilizations around
1200 BCE.
The first written language in the Hebrew language
dates from about 900 BCE.
In the Americas, the Mayans also developed
their own independent writing system around
300 BCE.
In India, written Sanskrit dates back to approximately
150 BCE.
Written Sanskrit, in turn, influenced all
of the early languages used in India and areas
in Asia influenced by Indian religion and
culture.
Now written languages grew up as a way to
relay messages over long distances and to
pass down information over time.
Written languages also help keep a record
of material things – such as a record of
fees; grain holdings; inventory of tools;
the sale of goods; taxes; and so forth.
Almost all of the very earliest written records
are of this type.
In addition, written languages also recorded
religious texts and stories.
Written languages were very useful in early
civilizations where scribes served as bureaucrats
to keep records of grain holdings; keep accounts
of royal decrees and laws; and produce royal
propaganda.
Learning to read and write was very difficult
and only scribes could complete this task;
it required hours on hours of intense study
in ancient Mesopotamian Egypt, and therefore
very few people had the ability to read and
write – or the money to train to learn to
read and write.
Those who learned this skill – scribes – were
very valuable in ancient civilization because
they had such a rare skill.
The first writing system was based on pictograms.
Now a pictogram is a picture used to represent
a whole word or a phrase, these generally
evolved into logograms; a logogram is a symbol
or a character used to represent a word or
a phrase.
In Mesopotamia, scribes used cuneiform to
write.
Cuneiform was a wedge-shaped clay tablet that
– put in the sun – would harden, and leave
a permanent record.
Now archeologists have found thousands and
thousands of cuneiforms from Mesopotamia.
The ancient Egyptians extended this principle
further, using hieroglyphics – an elaborate
form of pictographs, which were carved into
stone on walls, and written down on papyrus
– a plant that grew along the Nile River
and that could be formed into paper.
For their part, the Greeks called papyrus
‘byblos’ after the Phoenician port city
that exported it to Greece.
The term ‘byblos’ and ‘biblion’ were
the first term for book, which in turn were
also used to describe the Bible.
Besides clay tables, stone, and papyrus – ancient
people sometimes used animal hides to write
upon.
The Chinese invented the paper as we know
it today, roughly around the year 100 BCE.
For their part, the Chinese invented a logarithm
system based on characters to represent words.
Today the Chinese language has about fifty-thousand
different characters, but many of these are
rarely used.
In fact, the standard Chinese dictionary only
has about seven-thousand characters.
One can be functionally literate in Chinese
with only a few thousand characters.
The Chinese character system also influenced
Japan and Korea, who both adopted it for their
own languages.
So thus, the Chinese system, the Chinese character
system, became the dominant writing system
used in all of East Asia; China; Korea; and
Japan.
As languages, Japanese and Korean are not
related to Chinese, yet they used a character-based
writing system that the Chinese invented,
and this shows how some peoples adopt the
writing system of others.
While this character-based writing system
may seem overly complicated and difficult
to those who speak languages such as English
that use an alphabet.
It’s important to note that the character-based
writing systems used in East Asia have been
used for thousands of years and are used by
over a billion people today.
Chinese alone has the largest number of speakers
in the world today, and so the use of these
characters is not going away any time soon.
Now pictographs, such as used in Egyptian
hieroglyphs or logarithms or logograms, such
as in Chinese characters, were all used by
ancient civilizations in one form or the other.
It was from pictographs and hieroglyphics
that the first alphabet developed.
The first alphabet developed in an area of
the Levant of ancient Syria and Lebanon, which
was populated by their people called the Phoenicians.
Now the Phoenicians were heavily involved
in trade.
Around 1300 BCE, the Phoenicians came up with
an alphabet that improved upon Egyptian hieroglyphics.
As a system of writing, alphabets are far
easier as one only needs to learn the letters
in order to read and write any word in the
language, instead of learning thousands of
different symbols or characters.
The Phoenician alphabet, the first created
in human history, had twenty-two letters.
Most alphabets since the Phoenicians have
used between roughly twenty and fifty-two
letters.
The Sanskrit alphabet, used in India, developed
independently from the Phoenician alphabet
and has fifty-two letters, including both
vowels and consonants.
For its part, the Phoenician alphabet had
a huge influence on several other alphabets.
The Phoenician language was a Semitic language
and its writing system had an impact on other
Semitic languages.
For instance, ancient Semitic language such
as Hebrew around 900 BCE and Arabic would
be influenced by the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians also had a tremendous influence
on non-Semitic languages – for example – on
written Greek and Latin, the language that
the Romans used.
For their part, the Greeks took the Phoenician
alphabet and modified it into the Greek alphabet
about 800 BCE.
One of the most important changes that the
Greeks made was by adding vowels to their
alphabet.
The Phoenician alphabet had not had vowels.
The ancient Greeks had colonies throughout
the Mediterranean, including in Southern Italy.
Around 700 BCE, the Romans adopted the Greek
alphabet for their own language, Latin.
The Romans made changes of their own for the
sounds and pronunciation of words in the Latin
language.
The Latin alphabet, in turn, became very important
for many other languages.
Indeed – all languages originating in Western
Europe today – English; French; Spanish;
German; Italian; Portuguese; and so forth
– use the Latin alphabet.
While the Greek alphabet influenced the Latin
alphabet, the Greek alphabet had an even greater
influence on the Cyrillic alphabet.
Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius were Christian
monks from the Byzantine Empire who were missionaries
to Slavic peoples in the 9th century CE.
Cyril and Methodius, as well as monks who
worked with them, realized that Slavic peoples,
who they were attempting to convert to Christianity,
had no written language.
Now this presented a problem for missionaries
such as Cyril and Methodius as they wanted
to translate the Bible and other religious
texts into these people’s languages.
So they invented a written alphabet heavily
based on Greek for these Slavic peoples.
This alphabet came to be called the Cyrillic
alphabet.
Slavic languages, such as Russian; Ukrainian;
Serbian; and Bulgarian today now use Cyrillic.
It is worth pointing out however, that due
to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church
in the Middle Ages, a few Slavic languages
– such as Polish; Czech; Slovak; and Croat
– use the Latin alphabet.
Interestingly enough, due to Russian influence,
the Mongolian language adopted Cyrillic script
in the 20th century while Western influence
convinced the Turks to adopt the Latin alphabet,
also in the 20th century.
So in conclusion, peoples in several ancient
civilizations developed different written
language styles to facilitate communication.
Reading and writing, especially the use of
alphabets, made reading and writing easier,
and writing greatly changed human life.
While literacy was not widespread in the ancient
world, particularly in comparison to today,
the modern world we live in is unthinkable
without written languages.
So I’ll stop here.
Thanks for watching.
