Is it hard to invent a way to encode human language as writing?

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

Is it hard to invent a way to encode human language as writing? For example ... if you lived long ago, but had lots of free time do you think you could have worked something out?

People make up spoken languages, we suspect, if they don't have them.

But, does writing require some design, some technical genius?

[seanochicago@mastodon.sdf.org]

@futurebird I really like following you because you always bring up interesting ideas. It’s not -just- ants.

Shorthand, braille, and Morse code are all recent attempts to create a novel writing system based on existing written language.

My favorite weird example is dance notation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_notation

And the parallel discovery of written language in different places on the globe show that it’s not a one time thing.

[rycaut@mastodon.social]

@futurebird read about th invention of the Armenian alphabet. Which happened a bit over 1600 years ago and the monk who did it is still celebrated today (it was created to allow the Bible to be written in the local language in Armenia.

See https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240208-how-a-1600-year-old-alphabet-shaped-armenian-identity

[mattdm@hachyderm.io]

@Seanochicago @futurebird

It's also completely possible that writing was independently discovered and lost many times in the last 200,000 years, without durable evidence.