PTD recycled an old, unpublished talk of his for a submission to
Language Log:

Script origin and typology, part 1 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64775

Script origin and typology, part 2 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64822

Some interesting thoughts in there, e.g.:

If, however, a language is not monosyllabic—as in, for instance,
Indo-European or Semitic or Uralic or Altaic—the chances are
rather less good that the picture put for one word would have the
same sound as another word or one very like it, as with the
Sumerian ti example. And that is why writing could get started
in Sumerian, in Chinese, in Maya, and probably in Dravidian; while
the best candidate for writing where it didn’t get started—the
Inca civilization—did not use a monosyllabic language, and so
came up with quipus for accounting, but not with writing.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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XPost: alt.usage.english

On 7/8/2024 4:26 PM, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

PTD recycled an old, unpublished talk of his for a submission to
Language Log:

Script origin and typology, part 1 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64775

Script origin and typology, part 2 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64822

Some interesting thoughts in there, e.g.:

If, however, a language is not monosyllabic—as in, for instance,
Indo-European or Semitic or Uralic or Altaic—the chances are
rather less good that the picture put for one word would have the
same sound as another word or one very like it, as with the
Sumerian ti example. And that is why writing could get started
in Sumerian, in Chinese, in Maya, and probably in Dravidian; while
the best candidate for writing where it didn’t get started—the
Inca civilization—did not use a monosyllabic language, and so
came up with quipus for accounting, but not with writing.

has anyone had an exchange with PTD lately?

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