Homepage News & features History of Writing Poem of the week web Design Baseball umpire Search site Map favorite Links		Concrete poetry is the word as image. It evolves from writing, but it is more like painting, audio or cinema. If the history of humanity can be divided into two great eras: before writing and after the invention of writing, then concrete poetry is at the dawn of a new age or maybe somewhere in between. Before writing human communities practised an oral tradition. With writing communities created the law, history and literature. Verba volent, scripta manent -- but in the age of the Internet does this adage still hold true?     During the First World War, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote to a friend to thank him for a review of his concrete poetry: Concerning Calligrammes they are an idealisation of free verse poetry and a typographic precision at a time when typography terminates brilliantly its career, at the dawn of new means of reproduction which are film and the phonograph.     Perhaps because of pure inertia typography did not disappear with the advent of film and the phonograph, but calligrammmes, revealed a refreshing link between writing, poetry, art, and music that was unsuspected. Film became the seventh art. And now, eighty years later, "film and the phonograph" have become the World Wide Web. Millions of people are starting to have access to the accumulated library of human knowledge. But what language do they use? An abbreviated international English and the icons on their computer terminals. What remains of these fleeting electronic transmissions? The images and process of learning. What language will they use in the future? Let us examine how this came about. words     Words are things unto themselves. We use words to find things within our own mind. Things are not in our mind. They are in a world that does not obey the workings of our mind. But words are the closest we can get to these things of the world. Words can never be things of the world. That is why we can use so many words to describe the same things. Mankind may never find enough words to describe the things of this world. But one word per thing could be enough, if our minds were capable of making all the correct associations of the thing with its world. Then no other words would be necessary, and the thing would exist as a word in our minds and in the world. As it is, from our point of view, the word is the thing.     A thing could be a rose, for example. But a rose of what color? Is it a sweet smelling rose, or a wild rose briefly smelling of pollen? Is it a thorn behind the rose which hurts, or a soft petal on the cheek which is kept in the recesses of our mind when we think rose? The word rose is in our mind perhaps with all these attributes, and that is the rose that exists in our mind. Can that rose suffice for all roses, or is the next rose we meet a completely new discovery? Is the rose we saw yesterday the same rose we see today or tomorrow?     Words are like pictures in our mind. Pictures are always of symbols, things or beings. A great painter can use color to present things or beings in new light. He can tell stories with the symbols he represents. A photographer can do much the same with images taken from the real world and captured, printed and developed to give us a new perspective on things and beings. But what do these artists intice from our mind with their art? Words! They use light to invoke words in our mind for the things and beings and symbols they portray.     Words are music in our mind. All words can be spoken or sung. Great musicians make their instuments speak, to communicate feelings and ideas, symbols and stories. They put words to their music to enhance the words or to enhance the music -- to create in our mind other words for their compositions.     Words are sculpture in our mind. When we can touch and feel the things around us we understand them and they become familiar to us. The plastic forms of sculpture add depth and form to ideas. A great sculptor can then add texture, light and movement to express symbols to us.     Words are smells and tastes in our mind. A great chef brings out the best of his ingredients and then gives them pleasing or elaborate names for his creations.     Said in another way, words are complex structures built in our mind from the experience of our senses. Learning builds words in our mind. symbols     Symbols are a way of transmitting ideas, stories or words over time and distance. The oldest man-made symbols date from the middle of the last ice age. They are perhaps not yet a system of writing, but they are a system of notation.     Some symbols have names. The name invokes the symbol. Sometimes the names and definitions change but the symbol remains. In the arcane language of mathematicians the symbols are precise representations of concepts, laws and theorums. Ideas and feelings have names, even if our vocabulary may be too limited yet to know what they are. Maybe that is the job of poets, to put words to things we have not yet understood.     Names are words that represent people, places, things, beings, states of being, concepts (ideas), laws, theorums or stories. Another type of word is a verb -- that describes a transformation (movement from one state to another), a state of being or a process. All other types of words support, connect, describe, qualify or modify names or verbs. Different languages have elaborate rules for putting words together. See A definition of terms for some of the types of languages. Language is communication. We recognize now that even animals have languages, and even plants. Human languages use words. Not all human languages can be written.     Naming is an inate ability of our species. The objects and events around us are identified for comprehension and memory processing by their names. The mental associations with the name become the value of the experience for future processing and reaction under a new set of circumstances. This is the essential power of the species -- memorize and react in time.     The other inborn characteristic of our species is mathematics. Even unborn children have been observed with the ability to count and solve mathematical problems by deduction and instant communication of the results.     Mathematics and naming are totally abstract (human) concepts. Their reality in the world remains unproven. But these two processes are the only human ways of understanding the world. Humans who understand this process can communicate more effectively with other species.     Human naming can be verbalized or remain mute (like mystic understanding of the "unnamable") -- which is a capability of other species. Verbalization is a method of learning and understanding. Humans excell over the other species in this domain only in their capacity for verbalization -- and more recently writing.     We don't know when human languages first appeared. We can only assume that because of the characteristics of our species (and the other humanoids that preceded us), language and communication have always been necessary for humans to live in groups. Communication by signs and gests is useful for hunting parties. Whole gestural languages have been conserved by North American Indians and the Chinese. Danse and music are coded systems that are used in some cultures to preserve history and traditions. Other systems of notation include tatoo, scarification, drums (Africa and Melanesia), colored knots (Inca quippus), carved sticks (Scandinavia and Australia), wampum (North America), and pictographs.     The oldest pictographs yet discovered are dated around 35,000 BC. Mnemotechnic incisions on bones and cave paintings have been found all over the world dating from the end of the Mousterian (100,000 to 35,000 BC), throughout the Aurignacian (30,000 to 20,000 BC) and the beginning of the Solutrean (20,000 to 15,000 BC). This is the period, during the fourth great glaciation (Würm), that homo sapiens sapiens replaced homo sapiens Neanderthalensis and other pre-sapiens in Europe, Asia and into North America (35,000 to 20,000 BC).     We have found from this period negative images of hands painted in caves, probably created by spitting a colored liquid while holding a hand against the cave wall. These images have been found in Spain, France and even Argentina. Most of the hands are missing one or more fingers. Some researchers have concluded that these wall paintings may be related to a gestural language. The conclusion is that if this is a form of writing, then it represents a language of gests and not palabras (spoken words).     The Solutrean and the Magdalenian (15,000 to 9,500 BC) mark the end of the Würm glaciation. Some researchers have classified pictographs from these periods into male and female forms. Is this an expression of eternal truisms or a struggle for dominance? Heads of animals evolve from whole animals (synecdoche) and pictographs are combined to suggest hunting scenes. Story-telling is evident. The immediacy of the gestual is replaced by the dimension of time and space offered by the pictoral. writing     Most scholars put the dividing line between pictographs and ideograms as the invention of writing. Ideograms are a systemized way of associating symbols with ideas. This was a significant moment for humanity. Before writing the oral tradition existed (perhaps aided by the representations of symbols, sculpture, design and pictographs). After the invention of ideograms, man enters the era of the written tradition (laws, history, religion and culture). Other specialists associate the first writing with the formation of cities.     Writing is a series of symbols invented by humans to represent words. Because writing uses symbols, it enhances the communications possibilities of languages -- sometimes to the point of total confusion for those that can't associate symbols or those who make too many associations. Dyslexia and memory aberrations are examples of impediments to acquiring the symbolism of writing. In the case of ancient languages, where the meanings of the symbols have been forgotten, only the symbols now exist.     The first written human languages identified words with pictographs. Each pictograph represents a whole idea or event. This is called synthetic writing or ideenschrift.     As communities became more complex and people assumed specialized functions, it became necessary for more and more people to use writing to communicate over time or distance. The scholar/priests who detained the secret of writing had to share it with the soldiers or merchants who needed it to conduct their campaigns or their affairs. More words needed to be recorded. People had to learn how to read and write faster. Sumer     We know very little about the birth of writing. Scholarly myth holds that the oldest known form of writing developed in Mesopotamia at the beginning of the third millenium BC. The Sumerians founded a brilliant civilization in Babylonia. The significance of Sumerian writing for us is in the process of discovery.     From what we know, Sumerian writing evolved from contracts. Stones representing abstract counting were enveloped in clay balls. A contract for delivery of six sheep, for example, involved selection of small stones representing the number six, which were encased in a clay globe, baked and deposited with local authorities awaiting conclusion of the contract. The authorities, local tax collectorss and lords, marked the soft clay with pictographs to identify the contractors, contents (sheep, sacks of flour, slaves), quantity and dates. Originally marked with finger impressions, the use of a stick or calamus was particularly adapted to creation of identifying marks in clay. These marks, resembling tracks or nails, became cuneiform ideograms.     Sumerian pictographs and ideograms evolved in a manner similar to Chinese (see below). Sumerian is an agglutinative monosyllabic language. Each ideogram became a symbol for a concrete or abstract reality. In combination they could communicate and codify the spoken language as well as abstract notions of mathematics and naming, unrelated to pictographs.     Each ideogram has a spoken word, a palabra, associated with it. This is called wortschrift or analytic writing. By recording with writing the first scholars realized they could pass on information over distance and to future generations, and so these written languages took on a life of their own. Those who could read and write took on important and powerful positions in their communities. As writing developed it became more and more important to the community to preserve its culture, its history, to conduct its affairs and run its economy.     The writing of Sumer shares many similarities with another civilization from the Indus valley at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, which unfortunately has left no known descendants. We know nothing of the spoken language of these non-Indo-Europeans and have not decyphered their writing. What we do know of these two civilizations is that their symbols were used on pottery and later in inscriptions. Both Sumer and the Indus valley civilizations were theocratic city-states.     Sumer is the home of the legend of the flood (2800-2600 BC). After the flood the cuneiform characters are all rotated ninety degress to the left. Writing passes from the vertical on monuments to the horizontal (left to right) on clay tablets. Syllabism is noted by representation of each moneme in the agglutinative language.     By 2600 B.C. the Sumerians had added phonetic values to their signs (150 phonetic syllables) and another 450 ideograms (pictures of things) and logograms (symbols for a concrete or abstract reality). Akkadia     Sumerian ideograms developed in a similar manner to Chinese and probably would have continued to do so without the invasion of their neighbors from the north west, the Akkadians. The Akkadians were semites from northern Arabia, Upper Syria and the region between the Sinai and the Dead Sea. Sargon the Elder (2370-2314 BC) from his capital in Akkad, conquered Sumer around 2345 BC. The Akkadians adapted Sumerian writing to their own multisyllabic inflexive language. Their empire was short-lived, they were overthrown by the Goutis from Kurdistan in 2230. But the barbarian Akkadians retained Sumerian as the language of science and religion and Akkadian as the language of everyday affairs and commerce until the time of Christ, thanks to their writing.     The transformation of writing from an agglutinative monosyllabic language to an inflexive multisyllabic language required a major modification. The Akkadians adapted Sumerian ideograms by acrophony to represent the sounds of their syllables. Vowels are of little significance in semetic languages so all the new meanings for the Akkadian ideograms were consonnants. By representation of the initial palabric monemes of selected Sumerian ideograms, the Akkadians could transcribe the consonnants of their language.     By 1800 B.C. the scribes of King Hammurabi were noting on clay tablets a cuneiform alphabet of up to 500 phonetic and ideographic signs in Akkadian. In the city of Ougarit scribes created a cuneiform alphabet of 30 signs -- all consonants -- to record their religious literature. This system was later copied by the Aramaeans, the Hebrews and the Phoenicians who spread it all over the Mediterranean world. The genius of the Greeks was to add ideograms for vowels. Egypt to be continued... China     Chinese is a monosyllabic language particularly suited to pictographs for writing. As Chinese became more complex it is believed that it evolved by adding tones -- each syllable is sung with a varying tone. Languages that developed from ancient Chinese have differing numbers of tones.     A Chinese sentence is a series of analytic phonemes where each may be a noun, adjective or verb in function of their position in the sentence. Syllabism is impossible because the monosyllables cannot be decomposed. to be continued...
Homepage News & features History of Writing Poem of the week web Design Baseball umpire Search site Map favorite Links
Homepage News & features History of Writing Poem of the week web Design Baseball umpire Search site Map favorite Links
Homepage News & features History of Writing Poem of the week web Design Baseball umpire Search site Map favorite Links
Homepage News & features History of Writing Poem of the week web Design Baseball umpire Search site Map favorite Links
Homepage News & features History of Writing Poem of the week web Design Baseball umpire Search site Map favorite Links
Homepage News & features History of Writing Poem of the week web Design Baseball umpire Search site Map favorite Links