语言与文风2018sites.utexas.edu编辑精选
书写文字的演化史
The Evolution of Writing
导读
这篇短文梳理文字从泥筹、二维符号到表音字母的演化，讨论书写系统如何逐步抽象化。评论区补充了键盘与输入法这一当代阶段，也指出原文可能存在欧洲中心叙事和因果倒置的问题。写作者可借此理解“图画—借音—字母”的机制，并警惕把复杂历史写成过于整洁的单线进步故事。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
写演变史时，用“阶段+例外+争议”的结构，而不是把所有发展都收束成一条通往字母表的进步线。
- 02
解释抽象符号的诞生，可抓住“图画不够用→借音双关（rebus）→音节/字母”这一核心机制。
- 03
写到制度与技术的关系时，先确认能力是否已经存在，避免把“规定”写成先于“做法”的因果倒置。
- 04
把键盘、输入法等当代媒介纳入书写史，能让“文字演化”与读者当下的写作经验发生连接。
HN 评论精选
批评文章把文字演化写成以近东/埃及为中心的整洁进步史，忽略印度河、婆罗米等反例和字母的借用性质。
这篇文章试图呈现一幅整洁的图景，把一切进步和技术发展都归到某些民族的“圣地”附近，但哪怕查一下维基百科也会发现严重漏洞。印度河文字可追溯到约公元前3200年，与苏美尔和埃及文字几乎同时，有些陶片标记还可追溯到公元前3500年。如果印度河文字与苏美尔文字有关，它就不会至今未被破译。婆罗米文最早的证据来自斯里兰卡，那里离黎凡特大概和离中国一样远。有趣的是，字母文字在音节文字中的“侵入性”没有被指出，反而被默认接受，尤其是公元前1500年左右另一支侵入力量是印欧人，很可能是米坦尼和加喜特时代的印度-雅利安人。字母文字几乎没有进一步改造以更好适配语言，这显示它是借来的，而不是像婆罗米文或中文那样。文章没有提到腓尼基人把字母传给希腊人的说法，也没有讨论其起源——起源仍未知；我记得希罗多德或某人说他们来自非洲海岸，即非本地人，但大家都装作这是假的。还有那些牵强地想把一切追溯到埃及象形文字的努力，因为欧洲人也想要那份遗产。
dzhshnacct查看英文原文
while this tries to present a nice tidy picture and dump all progress and technological development to somewhere near the holy land of certain peoples even a wikipedia lookup would reveal serious flaws indus script dates back to nearly the same as sumerian and egyptian around 3200 bc with some potsherd markings dated further back to 3500 bc if indus script was related to sumerian it wouldnt be undeciphered till now the first evidence of brahmi is from lanka which is probably as far from levant as china it is funny that the intrusive nature of the alphabet amidst the syllabaries is not remarked upon but just accepted especially since the other intrusive party of the time 1500 bc are indo europeans and most likely indo aryans in the mitanni and kassite eras the near complete further non development of the alphabet to better fit the languages indicating the borrowed nature of it as opposed to say brahmi or chinese no mention of the tale that the phoenicians gave greeks the alphabet or dicussion of their origin which is still unknown herodotus or someone said they were of the african coast i believe ie not native but everyone pretends this is just fake the strained efforts to relate everything back to egyptian heiroglyphs because europeans want that heritage too
文字演化没有停在字母表，键盘和输入法构成了新的书写阶段。
文章提到文字如何经过几个阶段演化：(a) 泥筹/陶筹，(b) 被二维符号取代，(c) 演化出表音符号，(d) 稳定为二十多个字母，每个代表一个音。过去50年，通过键盘又发生了另一个阶段。键盘让95个ASCII符号容易输入，控制键还能改变字体、字号、颜色甚至显示的符号。这种变化的顶点是中文和日文的输入法：人们可以输入语音（拼音或假名）并用选择器，但显示汉字或日文汉字。对小小的智能手机屏幕很实用。
vorg查看英文原文
The article mentions how writing evolved through several stages: (a) clay tokens, (b) replaced with 2-D signs, (c) evolving into phonetic signs, (d) settling into two dozen letters each representing a single sound. Over the past 50 years, another stage has occurred via the keyboard. They allow the 95 Ascii symbols to be entered easily, and control keys enable changes to the fonts, sizes, colors, or even tokens displayed. The pinnacle of this change is the IME's for Chinese and Japanese, enabling people to type in spoken sounds (pinyin or kana) with a selector, but allow Hanzi or Kanji to be displayed. Quite useful for tiny smartphone screens.
文字演化的核心链条是图画→借音/画谜→音节→辅音字母，汉字是重要例外。
我期待这篇文章讲但没讲的一点是：文字发展有相当清晰的递进。早期文字系统似乎都始于某种图画文字。问题在于不是每个词都能用清晰图画表示，解决办法最终是某种表音双关机制（即画谜/借音原则）。甚至汉字也证明这种机制：绝大多数汉字由表音部件和表义部件组合而成。开始表音双关后，多数文字系统丢掉图画部分，变成纯粹由表音成分构成（中文是主要例外，不过日文确实演化出下一步的假名）。这些成分通常大致基于辅音—元音对，处于这一阶段的文字系统叫音节文字，但往往不是完整音节，还有表示更复杂音节的技巧（例如玛雅用CVC音节以CV-CV表示，两个元音相同）。然后在腓尼基一带发生有趣转折。由于闪米特语言的性质，音节文字形式丢掉所有元音，只表示辅音（现在叫辅音音素文字/abjad）。借走这套字母的印欧语使用者（主要是埃特鲁斯坎人和希腊人）重新利用了一些符号……
jcranmer查看英文原文
The point I expected this page to say that it doesn't really mention is that there's a fairly clear progression in the development of writing. Early writing systems all seem to start with some sort of pictography. This runs into the problem that not every word can be represented with a clear pictogram, and the solution ends up being some sort of phonetic punning mechanism (i.e., the rebus principle). Even Chinese hanzi evidences these sort of mechanism, as the vast majority of its characters are based on combining a phonetic component with a semantic component. After you start phonetic punning, most writing systems drop the pictographic portion and become solely based on phonetic constituents (Chinese being the major exception, although Japanese did evolve the next step into kana). These constituents are usually roughly based on a consonant-vowel pair and writing systems in this phase are called syllabries, but they're often not really full syllables, and there are tricks for representing more complex syllables (for example, Mayan uses the principle that the syllable pattern CVC is represented with CV-CV, where the vowel is the same in both characters.). Now, in Phoenician or thereabouts, an interesting turn happened. Because of the nature of Semitic languages, the syllabry form dropped all of the vowels and just represented the consonants (what's now termed an abjad). The Indo-European speakers (principally Etruscan and Greek) who borrowed from this alphabet repurposed some of the letters which corresponded to missing consonants (such as the glottal stop in 'aleph) to represent vowels instead, as vowels are rather more important in those languages. Other languages that borrowed from abjads indicated vowels with systematic vowel marks, such as Devanagari or Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics; these are known as abugidas. Virtually every alphabet, abjad, and abugida known to exist is believed to derive originally from this first "wrong" turn when developing syllabaries. An interesting point when discussing the history of writing systems is the development of the Cherokee script. The Cherokee script was invented by Sequoyah, who developed it entirely on the basis that he knew that the white settlers had a writing system that could be reliably read and a copy of the Bible but without any other knowledge of writing. He originally attempted to develop a mapping of word => character, but realized that the mapping is too complex, especially since the text he had got by with much fewer characters. Instead, he chose a syllabary, borrowing some of the letter forms from Latin script but not their phonetic mappings (which is why ᏣᎳᎩ is actually pronounced "tsalagi").
批评文章把制度规定写得先于技术能力，提醒写作者注意因果顺序。
关于“随着国家形成，新规定要求把产生或接收登记货物者的姓名写进泥板。人名通过意符转写……用与所需名字读音相近的词的图画（例如英语中名字Neil可以用屈膝‘kneel’的符号写）”。这里似乎有个先有鸡还是先有蛋的难题：怎么能为没人知道怎么做的事制定规定？（请不要开 dysfunctional Congress 的玩笑。）必定有人先想出了意符技术，然后才提议或颁布法令。
tabtab查看英文原文
Re: With state formation, new regulations required that the names of the individuals who generated or received registered merchandise were entered on the tablets. The personal names were transcribed by the mean of logograms...pictures of words with a sound close to that desired (for example in English the name Neil could be written with a sign showing bent knees 'kneel'). Seems like a chicken-or-egg conundrum here. How can you create a regulation for something that nobody knows how to do? (No jokes about a dysfunctional Congress, please.) Somebody must have realized the logogram technique BEFORE suggesting or making an edict.
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