A History of Writing by Steven Fischer, Reaktion, £19.95, ISBN
1861891016
ONLY one writing system in the world accurately captures the sounds we humans
make and puts them on the page. If you can read the script, you can speak
Korean.
It all began with the problem of Chinese ideograms being used to represent
Korean words. Korean clumps prefixes with word roots for grammatical sense, but
Chinese isolates these elements. So Korea’s King Seycong set his scholars to
unravel the mess.
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In January 1444, the new script was finished. The King issued an edict called
“The Standard Sounds for the Instruction of the People”, to spread the new
script. Seycong boasted: “It is good for any practical use, and even the sound
of the wind . . . can be exactly described with it.” And that, says Steven
Fischer in his A History of Writing, is still almost true. Anyone who has
struggled through the muddy waters of English will feel envy. Remember
disentangling through from threw and thorough?
As Fischer’s authoritative account shows, we’re at the mercy of technology
with writing. Early engraving on stone is angular and spiky. Stabbing a stylus
into soft clay gave birth to a Sumerian script of demented bird-claw prints. A
whole zoo of flowing and curvy styles sprang up on papyrus, parchment and paper.
Printers chose a few; the rest faded away.
If you’re intrigued by writing’s past, Fischer’s book is well worth a read.
He’s the decipherer of two unknown scripts—Easter Island’s rongorongo and
the Hellenic dialect of the Phaistos Disk. He ends this brilliant book with the
4000-year-old words of an Egyptian scribe who wrote that humans die and turn to
dust, but writing makes us remembered.
