Before Class-Chapters 2&3

The reading for chapter two included the descriptions of the earliest forms of alphabets, and how they came around to being used in modern day life. What caught me of guard but also fascinates me about this chapter is how it is almost completely unknown where the written alphabet started. The chapter reveals these languages in a chronological manner and includes some insight to where/ how the alphabet may have developed. It all started with the Cretan pictographs derived from the Minoan civilization. This type of writing is explained to be the starting point for what is known as the Greek alphabet. The most important discover of the Cretan pictograph system is the Phaistos disk which is a circular slab that included the entire 135 pictographs found in the Minoan civilization. After the Cretan pictographs came the North semitic alphabet. This written language came from the western Mediterranean area and was developed due to the extensive amount of trading that was being done in the region at the time. During this time period around 1500 B.C. the Semitic people, influenced by Egyptian and Mesopotamian writing developed something called Sinaitic script which is a evolved form of hieroglyphics. The Ras Shamra script is described as being an example of the Semitic alphabet and it includes thirty cuneiform signs that act as consonant sounds, which are seen as being the precursor to the Greek alphabet. One of the most visually interesting forms of writing is that of the Aramaic alphabet. This written language was developed in the tribes from Aram and uses twenty-two symbols that act as consonantal sounds. I find this writing interesting due to the way that each letter is connected to the next with an upward curving stroke, and how they abbreviated the first and last letter in the word which made it easy to see the separation of words. Aramaic writing is also the writing used for the holy book of the Muslim religion called the Qur'an. This form or style of writing kept developing but mostly went unchanged as it evolved in the more eastern civilizations. As for the west, it was the Greek alphabet that made the most impact towards the development of a sound, uniformed alphabet. This Greek alphabet evolved from the Phoenicians and according to Greek mythology it was King Cadmus that brought the alphabet to Greece. The Greeks practically just cleaned up the messy symbols/letters of the Phoenicians alphabet by giving them a more geometric shape, by doing so it made the writing crisper and led to the epic poems of the Odyssey and the Iliad. The most complex part about the Greek form of writing is this method they used called boustrophedon which meant that instead of reading left to right they wrote in the opposite direction every other line. Because of the massive size of the Greek Empire the alphabet adapted to the region it was found in leading to the development of the Latin, Etruscan and Cyrillic alphabets. The most important or most developed of the written languages is that of the Latin alphabet. Latin came into power as the Roman empire began to rise. Influenced by the Greek alphabet the Romans borrowed their alphabet with minimal changes. The Latin alphabet, at first contained twenty one letters but after the Roman conquered Greece they alphabet grew to twenty six letters. There exists two forms of writing in Latin, there is the more time consuming and important capitalis quadrata which was written slowly and carefully including precise spacing of each letter. Than there is the more sloppy quickly written form called capitalis rustica, this form is meant to save space and allows the writer to write as much as possible not worrying about the neat spacing that was used in the capitalis quadrata style. This was also used due to the expensive price of papyrus and parchment. The use of parchment paper is just another invention of the Roman empire, and it allowed for the development of the codex. The codex is the early stages of the modern day book, and because there was an embargo put in place on papyrus everyone used parchment. In some time it became evident that rolling up the papyrus paper was a messy, tedious process so instead the Roman tied sheets of parchment together. The Roman empire gave birth to great industries like architecture, engineering, art, and language and influenced the western world but I believe without the use and development of the written language none of it would have been possible. Moving away from the western civilizations and moving far East to Korea the use of written language is dramatically different. Instead of writing left to right the Koreans used syllabic blocks by combining a consonant and a vowel. It is considered as the most scientific form of an alphabet because the Koreans developed the abstract signs according to the position of the tongue in the mouth when they spoke. This view of the Korean alphabet leads perfectly into the next chapter of the book that is about the contributions made by the Asians in regards to written language.

The system of writing in the Western civilizations was always evolving, at first it was a unified system set up by the Romans but as time passed and different borders became set in place so did different forms of language. As for Asia it is the ancient Chinese form of calligraphy that is still unchanged and used today, more so than any other form of writing. Chinese calligraphy is compared to the visually vibrant form of hieroglyphics and the writing found in the ancient Mayan culture. It is not like the alphabet that contains abstract signs that act as consonants however the Chinese used simple lines together that are bound by an invisible box. The difference between Chinese calligraphy and Egyptian hieroglyphs is that the Chinese used abstract simple lines apposed to the complexity of hieroglyphics. These lines were combined together to create a character and each character represented a word or an idea, these are called logograms. The earliest writing form was conducted on the shells of turtles or the bones of large mammals and it was called chaiku-wen. Chaiku-wen is descibed as the communication between the living and the dead where a royal diviner would write a message on the shell or bone then press a hot piece of metal onto it and the marks left behind would be interpreted as a message from the dead. The next form of calligraphy is called chin-wen, which involved writing/inscribing characters onto cast-bronze. Even more abstracted then the previous ctyles was the style of hsiao chuan which was an elegant combination of lines to produce an aesthetically sound character. It was in this form that Chinese calligraphy became unified in all regions of China. The last stage/development of Chinese calligraphy is called chen-shu, and it has been in use for nearly two thousand years. I find it intriguing that this form of writing is considered more of an art then anything else due to the shear brilliance and beauty of each character. Much like the Egyptians invented papyrus the Chinese invented paper. At first the Chinese would write on bamboo slats with ink and a bamboo pen, but then a man named Ts'ai Lun invented paper by using the bark off of trees and putting it through a rigorous process of soaking and flattening. By doing so he invented a light weight durable material to not only write on but also use for wallpaper, napkins, wrapping paper and even toilet paper. Aside from the invention of paper the Chinese are also responsible for the important invention of print making. Because of this development copies of texts and important document could be easily made. There exists many different ways to go about print making, the first way used by the Chinese was a simple relief print, where an image is raised from a flat surface by subtracting the space around, then you would ink the raised image and press it onto a piece of paper. It is unknown who invented relief print making but the invention gave way to latter forms of the art. Because of print making the important documents were able to survive years of weathering due to the longevity of the paper and ink, such documents like the nine Confucian classics are still intact today.