Writing was invented independently across multiple places and times.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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Geniouses all over the place!! /j
Considering that the concept of writing has been invented independently so few times in the world, especially in the form I'm talking about, they are not all over the place.
So few? There are hundreds of forms of written script. Some are logographic like hieroglyphs, some are syllabary like like Cherokee, some are alphabetic like Arabic.
independently
Yes, most of those writing systems were developed independently.
Downvoting someone for asking you a question is pretty childish.
See my other comment, but naturally evolving writing systems arose from drawing pictures over millennia; noone just started writing letters.
thanks? but I didn't deny it.
It means there almost certainly never was such a genius.
The closest was probably the guy who invented the Korean alphabet. Dude looked at the scribes and scholars struggling to fit Chinese characters to a language they don't mesh with at all in terms of phonetics and grammar and said "fine, I'll do it myself".
Indeed, but he understood the concept of writing already, and several existing scripts (besides Chinese) were known to him and his court, so he could consciously take those ideas and work with them.
That's also how the Cyrillic alphabet came to be
Cyrillic was at least based on Greek, for Korean it looks like mostly original glyphs
Right? I just mean, to a modern person it seems obvious and simple, but when I really thought about it, if I had never had an example of writing in front of me, the concept wouldn't have been obvious to me at all.
And yet we’re all born with an inherent ability ‘to language’.
Like, it’s in the firmware.
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The Chinese just made a symbol for each word/concept
That is not how Chinese writing works; characters represent morphemes, which are smaller than words. There are tens of thousands of words required for proficiency in a language, but only a few thousand required symbols for proficiency in writing Chinese. ("Words" here also counts different inflections of a single stem word as the same )
Almost all writing that we know of started out with pictures, which became pictograms (where there was a standard way of drawing a picture to represent something) then logograms (where the pictures stopped having to be recognisable).
Look into Sumerian cuneiform and the evolution of some of the symbols to see this in action; it's fascinating. This writing system then became partially syllabic, where symbols could also stand for the sound of the thing they originally represented, which is again a common way for writing systems to evolve.
The exceptions are things like Korean, which was invented from scratch: but not independently.
The chinese kinda did just make a character for each word though.
Modern chinese uses plenty of words with multiple characters but Old chinese didn't really. So character = word was much closer to the truth around the time of the oracle bone inscriptions.
OK, but if we're talking about origins then the Latin script ultimately descends from Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were also originally pictographic, hence 1:1 symbol:word (but evolved and so were much more complicated than just pictographs when they stopped being used)
At it's origins, the Latin script was an alphabet, not 1:1 symbol to word.
You have to go back through a chain of different scripts for different languages from different cultures that influenced it to get to heiroglyphs.
Chinese characters were logograms invented for Chinese and are logograms used for Chinese today. At their origin they were pretty much symbol = word and it mostly still is.
Logograms like Chinese characters are not 1:1 symbol to word; they stand for morphemes, not words. Some words are morphemes, but most words consist of more than one.
Chinese script evolved from a pictographic script, just as the Latin script evolved from a pictographic script. You have to go through a chain in either case.
I guess it is easier if you have a simple language and sillable-concept relations and therefore start with what would amount to hideograms. The real genius is the one who comes up with something prepositions and suffixes/prefixes.
And stuff like abstractions
Now you've got me thinking.
Did language evolve from writing, or did writing evolve from language?
There are plenty of oral languages, where the writing only came after contact with missionaries. Māori, and the other Pacific languages, aboriginal etc. And as all other species have some form of oral language, but not written. I'd pretty safe saying that sounds and words long predated the written forms. Unless you know of written only languages that the pronunciation came later?
Writing from language.
A lot of other animals besides humans use vocalisations, and those vocalisations can have quite specific meanings. This makes them a form of communication and demonstrates that encoding meaning in sound is a phenomenon that develops quite readily in nature.
We can also see then that the history of language in humans is those vocalisations becoming increasingly complex and able to represent more numerous concepts and thoughts until they eventually become something we recognise as a full language.
Written language is a mechanism to encode spoken language, but it's spoken language which came first.
guess where the word "prehistoric" comes from ;)
also, non-human animals have language without writing.