EARLY THEORIES OF COMMUNICATION Speech Evolution of the brain differentiated humans from animals, as among other things it allowed

humans to master a very efficient form of communication - speech. Speech greatly facilitated the transmission of information and knowledge to further generations. Experiences passed on through speech became increasingly rich, and allowed humans to adapt themselves to new environments - or adapt the environments to themselves - much more quickly than was possible before; in effect, biological human evolution was overtaken by technological progress and sociocultural evolution. Speech meant easier coordination and cooperation, technological progress and development of complex, abstract concepts such as religion or science. Speech placed humans at the top of the food chain, and facilitated human coloni ation of the entire planet. Speech, however, is not perfect. !he human voice carries only so far, and sign language is also rather limited in terms of distance. "urther, all such forms of communications relied on human memory, another imperfect tool# memory can become corrupted or lost over time, and there is a limit to how much one can remember. $ith the accidental death of a %wise man% or tribal elder, a primitive tribe could lose many generations of knowledge. Symbols !he imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed easier dissemination of ideas and stimulated inventions, eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communications, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. &ll of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol#

Cave paintin s! !he oldest known symbols created with the purpose of communication through time are the cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the 'pper (aleolithic. )ust as the small child first learns to draw before it masters more complex forms of communication, so homo sapiens% first attempts at passing information through time took the form of paintings. !he oldest known cave painting is that of the *hauvet *ave, dating to around +,,,,, -*. !hough not well standardi ed, those paintings contained increasing amounts of information# *ro-.agnon people may have created the first calendar as far back as /0,,,, years ago. !he connection between drawing and writing is further shown by linguistics# in the &ncient Egypt and &ncient 1reece the concepts and words of drawing and writing were one and the same. "et#o lyphs !he next step in the history of communications is petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface. 2t took about 3,,,,, years for homo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, which are dated to around /,,,,, -*. 2t is possible that the humans of that time used some other forms of communication, often for mnemonic purposes - specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth, quipu-like ropes, tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing %huntergatherer% cultures such as those of &frica or 4ceania. "icto #ams & pictogram 5pictograph6 is a symbol representing a concept, ob7ect, activity, place or event by illustration. (ictography is a form of proto-writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. (ictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication# the most important difference between petroglyphs and

pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be ordered in chronological order. (ictograms were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 8,,, -*, when tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce, and become increasingly popular around 9,,,-0,,, -* I$eo #ams

(ictograms, in turn, evolved into ideograms, graphical symbols that represent an idea. !heir ancestors, the pictograms, could represent only something resembling their form# therefore a pictogram of a circle could represent a sun, but not concepts like %heat%, %light%, %day% or %1reat 1od of the Sun%. 2deograms, on the other hand, could convey more abstract concepts, so that for example an ideogram of two sticks can mean not only %legs% but also a verb %to walk%. -ecause some ideas are universal, many different cultures developed similar ideograms. "or example an eye with a tear means %sadness% in :ative &merican ideograms in *alifornia, as it does for the & tecs, the early *hinese and the Egyptians.

%#itin

!he oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements. .ost writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories# logographic, syllabic and alphabetic 5or segmental6; however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely. !he invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the -ron e &ge in the late :eolithic of the late ;th millennium -*. !he first writing system is generally believed to have been invented in pre-historic Sumer and developed by the late +rd millennium into cuneiform. Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the undeciphered (roto-Elamite writing system and 2ndus <alley script also date to this era, though a few scholars have questioned the 2ndus <alley script%s status as a writing system. !he original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. -y the end of the ;th millennium -*, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. !his was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate

what was being counted. =ound-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced about 3>,,-3,,, -* by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus 5hence the term cuneiform6, at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 3?,, -*. &bout 39,, -* cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian language. "inally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. -y the 39th century -*, this script had been adapted to another .esopotamian language, &kkadian, and from there to others such as @urrian, and @ittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for 'garitic and 4ld (ersian. !he *hinese script may have originated independently of the .iddle Eastern scripts, around the /9th century -* out of a late neolithic *hinese system of proto-writing dating back to c. 9,,, -*. !he pre-*olumbian writing systems of the &mericas 5including among others 4lmec and .ayan6 are also generally believed to have had independent origins, although some experts have noticed similarities between 4lmec writing and Shang writing that seem to suggest that .esoamerican writing was imported from *hina.

Alphabet

!he first pure alphabets 5properly, Aab7adsA, mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol6 emerged around 3,,, -* in &ncient Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been incorporated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium. -y 3>,, -* Egyptian writing had a set of some 33 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel 5or no vowel6 to be supplied by the native speaker. !hese glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. @owever, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. 2n the .iddle -ron e &ge an apparently AalphabeticA system is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around />,, -* for or

by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remain open to interpretation. 4ver the next five centuries this Semitic AalphabetA seems to have spread north. &ll subsequent alphabets around the world with the sole exception of Borean @angul have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants.