Creating Symbols

The Phaistos Disc remains an enigma. Discovered in 1908 at an archaeological Minoan palace-site on the island of Crete, the clay disc comprises 241 ‘tokens’ made up of 45 distinct ‘signs’ or symbols. While there have been suggestions that the disc might be a more recent forgery-hoax, archaeologists have generally accepted it as a Minoan bronze age artifact. But no one knows what it means. Is it some sort of code? Is there a written message? Without more examples that show the same symbols in other contexts, we may never know.

In the final chapter of The Writing Revolution, Amalia Gnanadesikan mentions that the disc might be the first typewritten document! So it’s possible that some form of movable type was used centuries before the Chinese or the Europeans. (Interestingly, there is a slight discrepancy with Wikipedia as Gnanadesikan mentions 242 characters and 46 ‘punches’. I haven’t done the research to resolve this.) In any case, I knew I had seen the Phaistos Disc in one of my boardgames. I looked in Thebes, and sure enough, it was one of the archaeological treasures you can dig up in Crete. I really should play Thebes again; it’s been a while!

But back to the book. In my previous post, I mentioned three early chapters I had read. Now that I’ve finished the book, I will highlight several later chapters that got me thinking about the choices and trade-offs in designing a set of symbols to store and convey information. Writing is closely tied to its technology, from the wedge-shapes of cuneiform to the constraint of the Roman alphabet typewriter, and the digital era’s diversity of fonts and symbols created by Unicode. There are many more spoken languages than written ones. For many around the world, being literate also means experiencing the dissonance of diglossia. The read-write ‘formal’ language can be distinctly different than its colloquial ‘informal’ oral use. This is true even for English, although much less pronounced than, say, for Arabic.

In Chapter 10, The Empire of Sanskrit, the author writes: “With startling speed, the literary use of Sanskrit – in a form now known as Classical Sanskrit – swept the subcontinent… To sponsor a work of Sanskrit grammar was a status symbol no self-respecting ruler would want to forego. No longer confined to brahminic liturgy, Sanskrit was used by all literary people, regardless of their caste, native language, or religion. [It] was the language of literature, of kingship, of scholarly inquiry, and of education... even in the Dravidian South… written Tamil was almost entirely eclipsed by Sanskrit. [The written was] increasingly formalized and removed from anyone’s actual spoken language. Here was diglossia with a vengeance: anyone who wanted to become literate had to learn a special language.”

The most amusing chapter in the book is Greek Serendipity. The author indulges in a fictional tale of how Greek translated and mutated (or transmutated!) Phoenician with dollops of confusion and error to give us the Greek alphabet. The novel creation: Vowels in the alphabet! The author suspects that “the Greek alphabet was created by an illiterate, not someone at home with writing Phoenician… [because] the changes made… were exactly those that a native speaker of Greek would make as mistakes.”

The author then makes an illuminating point (which wowed me!): “Creativity is rare in the history of writing, the more so among peoples with well-established literacy. Writing is so conservative in its influences that once one truly knows how to read and write it is virtually impossible to think of doing it any other way… Generally speaking, only uneducated barbarians have their own scripts. Fortunately, the Greeks at the time fit the description.” It looks like yesterday’s barbarians became today’s literati judging by the subsequent literary and intellectual output of classical Greece – still revered today in core canonic curricula in the liberal arts.

But then further mutations take place! After Greek became the language of Christianized Byzantium, the emperor received a request for someone to teach a Slavic prince and his people who had recently embraced the Christian faith. A monk named Cyril, knowledgeable in languages, but who had misgivings about the request was asked to carry out the task. “If he tried to teach an illiterate people, how quickly would his words get mutated by the oral tradition, laying the Slavs open to heresy, and himself to accusations thereof? He would go, he said, only if he could set down what he was teaching in an alphabet. Permission was granted.” The original script that Cyril designed was probably not what we refer to as Cyrillic today which derived from an attempt to mesh the Greek and Slavonic alphabets. The Cyrillic alphabet today enjoys widespread use having been also adapted to many non-Slavic languages. But there’s a catch, as Gnanadesikan points out. “The [adaptation] is therefore quite clumsy, not at all the elegant one-phoneme/one-letter system that Cyril intended. But Cyrillic is now one of the scripts of civilization, and poor alphabetic design is the price many languages have had to pay for a share in civilization.”

That last phrase is haunting. Maladapted design is a price one pays for advances in civilization. Is there a better way?

In the majority of cases, a single written version constrains the expression of many spoken languages. But in rare cases, the opposite occurs. This brings us to the interesting chapter on Japanese: Three Scripts are Better than One. The Japanese literati first learned the Chinese language and accompanying script. But there were significant difficulties with adapting the Chinese (kanji) script to writing in the Japanese language: syntax, inflections, name pronunciations, honorifics, etc. Interestingly, it was poetry that finally led to the significant development of a new script. This further evolved into the hiragana and katakana scripts, a result of parallel developing cultures among aristocratic women on the one hand, and Buddhist (male) monks on the other hand. Because of the functional differences in all three scripts, today’s Japanese is an interesting combination. (Below is the word for Japanese written in the three scripts.

A showcase of elegant design comes from an unprecedented moment in history. In another fascinating chapter, the author traces Korean back to King Sejong’s One-Man Renaissance. A scholar literate in Chinese, he revitalized an academy by inviting the participation of elite scholars (apparently also instituting academic sabbaticals!) to further his renaissance. Confucian teaching was compiled. Meteorological and geographic surveys were commissioned. Technology was invented to increase food production. A calendar was invented. A medical school was opened. But “Sejong was repeatedly stymied by the fact that his subjects couldn’t read. How could they learn about advances in technology? How could they benefit from moral philosophy?” And thus in stealth, knowing his literati would oppose the idea, he set about creating a new script that “matched the Korean language and could be easily learned by everyday people.” Sure enough, when he was done, the academy was concerned about endangering political relationships with China, lead to cultural illiteracy and lower standards, and asking “why would the king of a self-respecting country want to imitate barbarians?” However, history has vindicated King Sejong and the script he invented is “a wonder of simplicity and linguistic insight.” As with the evolution of the Japanese scripts, the author details the massive undertaking required by Sejong in “systematically analyzing the phonology of his language… from scratch”.

The elegance of the Korean script could have been lost with the invention of the typewriter. Having read engaging descriptions of languages and evolving scripts around the world, I was particularly impressed by how Gnanadesikan closes her book. The final chapter is titled The Alphabet Meets the Machine. After tracing the different technologies of writing, we get to the invention of the typewriter. Whether or not the Phaistos disc is the world’s oldest typewritten document, the 1873 Remington typewriter was clearly “an alphabetic machine”. And just as writing in longhand had served administrative purposes for millennia, “typing made bureaucracy, administration, and commerce run more smoothly. In the newly global economy that came in the wake of colonialism and saw the growth of new multinational corporations, the result was to advantage those nations whose scripts fit easily onto a typewriter keyboard.” Korean, not so much.

Thankfully, the new technology of computer word processing came along as “an equalizing force for the world’s scripts, undoing some of the damage done by the typewriter.” You can pretty much get to any major script with the appropriate software installation. But perhaps something has been lost with the formal encoding of all scripts, electronically or otherwise. The Japanese thought that “handwriting is a window to the soul”. Unique individuality has been replaced with a typeset font. Although today’s word processors have many fonts to choose from along with an accompanying array of accompanying accents and emojis, they are typeset nevertheless.

Doomsayers have been predicting the death (or dearth) of reading and writing, as audiovisual communication technology gains prominence. Last century, we had the radio and television. The opening of this century has brought us YouTube and Instagram. But in the closing paragraphs, the author makes another insightful point. Reacting to the latest “Report: text messaging harms written language”, she responds: “Written text is not just a cheap substitute for speech, and it never has been. It was invented as an information technology, and while it ended up being an alternative way to express language, it is not recorded speech. Its beauty is that it is actually much less than speech.” While some things are certainly lost in translation, “text can be transmitted with much lower bandwidth than speech… It also takes less time to process it. Writing may take time and effort, but (silent) reading is very fast… The more the world relies on rapid access to information, the more it will rely on the written word.” Or at least it will rely on the efficient encoding of symbols. By digitizing the written word into Unicode, you can take advantage of search capabilities enhanced by gobs of data in the cloud.

But let me re-emphasize: Writing is about creating a set of symbols to represent, store and transmit information efficiently. The set of designs (the ‘language’) can be both creative and flexible, but could end up being haphazard and cumbersome. In reality, all languages have some of the good, the bad and the ugly.

This last chapter made me think about the language of chemistry and its symbols. There were various alchemical signs (see above) to represent chemical symbols through the years. When John Dalton revitalized atomic theory, he conceived a series of symbols (see below) to represent the atoms of each element. Combining these atomic symbols allowed the scientist to represent the composition of each substance with reference to its elemental entities. However, it was still a cumbersome system to use. 

 The translation of Dalton’s elemental symbols into the elemental symbols in our modern periodic table was undertaken by the Swedish chemist, J. J. Berzelius. The compact form in which we chemists write our chemical formulae owes a great debt of gratitude to Berzelius. While my introductory level students might disagree with me, I think the system is elegant and it’s hard for me to imagine a better one. But perhaps it is because I am acculturated into the chemicaliterati. (Hah! I just invented a new compound word.) This accords well with Gnanadesikan’s earlier statement that “writing is so conservative in its influences that once one truly knows how to read and write it is virtually impossible to think of doing it any other way.” It’s a good thing Berzelius used the Roman script, easily typeset for the typist-and-typewriter to churn out a formal chemistry article suitable for publication. I shudder to think how chemical communication might be hampered by a more cumbersome symbolic representation. Even then, it takes time for the students to become facile with chemistry’s symbolic language and pictorial representations.

As teachers, we think the visual structures of molecules aids in learning how to see the unseen. But if we wanted to encode the information for search and research, we need a language that a computer program could exploit. The number of molecules far exceeds the number of words in any language, even if you just built them from the four main elements of organic chemistry: CHON. How do you translate complex non-linear chemical structures into a linear language? We currently have two scripts: SMILES and InChi. (I’m using SMILES in a data-related project because I find it intuitive and easier to work with.) Are these optimally designed? I don’t know, but reading The Writing Revolution motivates me to take a second-look at the intricacies of the code.

This has been a very long blog post, probably the longest I’ve written so far. It took me 4-5 hours just to write a draft of the text (not counting reading, thinking and editing) over several days. It probably took you 5-10 minutes to read if you made it from beginning to end. Hopefully I’ve conveyed something interesting that at least tickled your brain. It probably took me 6-8 hours to read The Writing Revolution (mainly in 20-30 minute chunks over two weeks so I could slowly savor and digest the information). I don’t know how long it took Gnanadesikan to write the book, but I’m sure glad she did. My roughly 4 pages of text are mere quick finger-food appetizers compared to the sumptuous feast of her 300-page book; I highly recommend reading the book in full if you found any of this (or the previous post) interesting. Even as a non-expert, I found the book very readable and engaging.

P.S. This book reminded me:

·      That I enjoy and get so much more out of reading meatier material, and I should spend more time doing so rather than going for the more popular but fluffier stuff.

·      That languages, reading and writing are fascinating!

·      To think more deeply and creatively about my own field of chemistry. (I have some ideas!)

·      Who Berzelius is and how much he and others contributed to the chemical vocabulary we take for granted today.

·      That I should play (the boardgames) Thebes and History of the World soon. (The latter represents the ebb and flow of civilizations, but I think would partly mirror the evolution and spread of languages.)