From a thread asking opinions about emoji usage.
However it happens and whomever is responsible here we are… and we’re losing ground fast. And things like emojis are leading the charge.
Should we tell them @WhyEssEff@hexbear.net is responsible?
Honestly fuck everything about that comment but especially fuck how this person seems to think that Egyptian hieroglyphics were in any conceivable way a “primitive” writing system, as opposed to a writing system so multifaceted and complicated it took the literal Rosetta Stone as well as the comparative method with Coptic and Proto-Afro-Asiatic to decipher it and understand its inner workings.
For that matter fuck that this person thinks that cave paintings are a “primitive” art form. It’s like, oh wow imagine using the bumps in cave walls to create depth and the flicker of torchlight to create the illusion of animation. Imagine painstakingly manufacturing the paint used. Imagine coordinating a community effort to help document and illustrate its own oral history using iconography that we can only theorize about. Couldn’t be me!
If anything, the problem with hieroglyphics is they weren’t simple enough. They were designed to be used by a priestly class and nobody else. Then even that priestly class thought it was too annoying to draw a whole ass picture for a syllable or a number and they invented hieratic cursive to greatly simplify the writing process.
Then Cuneiform was like "Hey, waht if we took simple arrangements of dashes and triangles and made them in to a completely illegible cluttered mess?
Saw an older biker looking guy with some viking tattoos and I was trying to sus out if he was fashy, then saw the cuneiform tattoo and was like “Oh, he’s just a history dork we’re cool”. He had some pagan stuff on, too, but it was a mixture of older new-agey stuff that you don’t really see on the fashy neo-thoraboos.
Then Cuneiform was like "Hey, waht if we took simple arrangements of dashes and triangles and made them in to a completely illegible cluttered mess?
Sumerian cuneiform might slightly predate predate hieroglyphics, and is ugly because of the limitations of the medium. Digging out the book I have about this:
David Burton - The History of Mathematics An Introduction (2005)
Cuneiform was literally also just pictures at first, and then evolved to more abstract shapes dictated by the use of clay tablet as medium, pushing wedges is way easier than drawing on it, and good scribe could do that surprisingly fast.
And if you think about it: writing above word “head” in cuneiform is 7 moves of the hand. Writing “head” in english is also 7 moves. Writing the same word “głowa” in polish is 9 moves.
here you have video showing few things and tricks about cuneiform
I love these dorks that say something vibes-based and subjective that they made up and act like it’s the most scientific fact in the world.
Humans communicate through multiple ways, Mostly through body language. When one fails to accurately describe what we want to communicate we use the other. This is normal and I would be more concerned if we only used one form of communication.
It’s just more supremacy bullshit. There always has to be something dominating to these people.
Cultural degeneration theory, huh. Wonder where that worldview leads
Uncritical support to @WhyEssEff@hexbear.net in her mission to personally destroy western civilization via emojis
Phonetic Writing and its consequences have been a disaster for man kind. The Barbarians of the west were never meant to read and write. The Caucasoid brainpan simply can not comprehend logography. Innumerable horrors have been meted upon mankind as a result of their acquisition of the pen. /s
it’s worse than that it’s all spelt according to the rules of the language we nicked it from. A greek word follows greek rules. As long as the grammer remains Germanic, English is capable of absorbing any word. Some day we will meet aliens and absorb their words into English
Logographic writing is an elitist construct, and the result of literacy being restricted to only those with relative wealth and connections.
Phonetic writing is a tool of proletarian liberation.
Phonetic writing is a way for the bourgeois class to keep the proles from communicating to each other while they (the ruling class) speak to each other using some foreign or dead prestige language that takes much more effort to learn than logographic writing. The average French of Spanish worker has a limited ability to communicate to eachother despite the fact that their languages are so similar that they could be considered dialects, while their ruling class can easily communicate each other via Greek or Latin or English, both of which are much harder to learn than a theoretical logographic romance language orthography (especially considering English is already partially logographic).
The idea that pre-industrial literacy rate in China was lower than Europe’s is some bazinga brain bullshit. In 1860 the Literacy rate for Spain was 41.7% and 11.9% for Men and Women respectively[0], “Education and popular literacy in Ching China” puts the Qing Dynasty’s literacy rate in the same period as “30~45%” for men and “2~10%” for women. It’s hard to find exact statistics for Pre-Qing dynasty literacy rates, but it’s generally accepted that literacy was much higher in the previous Ming Dynasty. Corroboratory Evidence is that Ming Dynasty was known for mass producing manuals on farming and construction whose audience would necessarily consists of the lower classes. I can’t find a western equivalent to for example 天工開物 (1637 manual on farming and industry distributed by the Ming Dynasty), or 營造法式(1103 manual on construction distributed by the Song Dynasty). This ties into the unfounded belief amongst westerners that somehow Chinese couldn’t be printed, when widespread use of printing in China predates that of the west by several centuries. Literacy in China was low before the revolution because it was an unindustrialized society, not because logography is somehow hard to learn.
How does that compare to Korea in the same time frame, though? Because both of the known times that an alphabet emerged from a logographic system it was a move to increase accessibility and enable more widespread literacy, and apparently even China considered a phonetic script as an option for attaining full literacy post-revolution only to decide against it and go with simplifying their logographic script instead.
The big thing that stands out, though, is that modern “phonetic” scripts have locked into irregularity and have started taking on some of the qualities of a logographic script as a result, and that the standard for what constitutes “literacy” varies wildly on context so while pure phonetic scripts may be the most accessible in allowing anyone to start being able to sound out words well enough to comprehend written language with minimal training, what actually constitutes full literacy in a language is massively more involved than that and may not actually differ significantly between modern “phonetic” scripts and logographic ones since both entail years of education and heavy practical use.
Or to put it another way, in English a small child can “read” and “write” phonetically with only a few weeks or months of training, but won’t be literate for another 10-15 years.
The Chinese have done well with making logographic writing accessible to the masses
While true, it’s taken a tremendous amount of effort, and from what I can find, it still takes more schooling to reach the same relative level of literacy.
The Koreans had it right in switching over.
