GREATEST INVENTION

A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts. Is writing the word's greatest invention? Calling it an invention could be misleading unless, like Hildegard of Bingen, an individual in isolation develops a code with symbols. To illustrate the moment when a depiction becomes a name for something, the author takes us back to the palaeolithic period, when a symbol might mean a horse but could also mean a lot of other things. The transitional moment was about five millennia ago, when our ancestors discovered that a sound can be attached to different things and thus exists in its own right. A coherent and ordered system is slowly built up thereafter. The author covers the decipherment of a range of languages including Linear B, the only language whose decipherment, by Michael Ventris in 1952, was achieved solely on statistical analysis of the script's signs, without help from parallel texts in known languages, such as the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. Linear A remains one of the world's still undeciphered languages, like the Rongorongo language of Easter Island, which the author was working on during the course of writing this book, establishing that it is a logo-syllabary language in which signs represent words, like most invented languages. Another little-known example of a syllabary language is Woleai of the Caroline Islands. Contrary to what we may assume, there are cultures where writing never develops, and codes that have never been cracked, such as the code in the 15th century chimerical Voynich manuscript. The author's argument is that writing is cultural, created by us and transmitted by us. "It is not biological, it is not in our genes. It is, in short, a cultural gizmo." It needs to be learned and eventually the rules of the game become pervasive and seem natural to us. Language, in the sense of face to face communication, is a well-oiled code, but writing is in a different category. 14.7 x 21.7cm, 289pp, photos.