[The following is a guest post by Jim Unger (J. Marshall Unger), who wrote it in response to my invitation to him to draw up a Stammbaum to show the relationships of the world's scripts.]<\/p>\r\n
The rationale for tree structures in language history is that languages never completely converge. When speakers of two languages come into contact, there are always clues in the resulting language(s) that reveal the identity of the input languages: apart from the effects of contact, languages diverge over time.<\/p>\r\n
In the case of writing, one must first of all distinguish graphic methods per se from writing systems. The adaptation of existing graphic methods that originated in one time and place to a different time, place, and, usually, language, does not, in my opinion, show the spread of a writing system<\/i>, just the diffusion of a technology.\u00a0 It only makes sense to speak of a writing system<\/i> with respect to a particular language at a particular time and place.\u00a0 This is a corollary of the fact that every practical and learnable writing system co-extensive with the potential output of a natural language necessarily utilizes a certain amount of phonography with respect to that language (unless the system is contrived expressly for cryptographic purposes).\u00a0 Logography arises because of sound changes that obscure the motivations for some previously phonographic inscriptions, the purposeful suppression of certain phonographic information for the sake of brevity, or, as in the case of Chinese, historical accidents that militated against the adoption of an abjad, abugida, or alphabet.<\/p>\r\n
Furthermore, the diffusion of knowledge of graphic methods has become less and less tightly tied to the diffusion of the graphic methods themselves.\u00a0 I think DeFrancis was right:\u00a0 full<\/i> writing originated just three times in human history.\u00a0 (There's a little evidence of very early Egyptian writing prior to contact with Mesopotamia, so perhaps there was a fourth kind of ab ovo writing.)\u00a0 Not counting the Cree and Cherokee syllabaries, for instance, as \"ab ovo\" is legitimate because they are very late historically and were obviously motivated by (though not merely copied from) European writing. [*See the first two comments below.]<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [The following is a guest post by Jim Unger (J. Marshall Unger), who wrote it in response to my invitation to him to draw up a Stammbaum to show the relationships of the world's scripts.] The rationale for tree structures in language history is that languages never completely converge. When speakers of two languages come […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-systems"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53144"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53152,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53144\/revisions\/53152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
For these reasons, I think the best one can do is a historical survey that describes how graphic methods originated, been borrowed, been imitated, and, in some cases, died.\u00a0 Here is a short overview<\/a>* I put together for an exhibit at Ohio State in 2009.<\/p>\r\n