We went from cavemen communicating through crude paintings on rock walls. We evolved complex speech over hundreds of thousands of years; leading to commerce, culture and civilisation itself.
We created great works of literature and began using language to carry our knowledge forward to each new generation, accelerating our growth…
…just to end up right back at fucking cave paintings.
Abraham Lincoln supposedly used an emoticon in one of his speeches from 1862 (though there is debate about whether it was an accident or added by the typesetter), and the guy who is credited with officially inventing the emoticon was a Carnegie Mellon Comp Sci professor. In introducing it, he explained that it could help clarify sarcasm versus serious comments in digital communications.
Tone isn’t conveyed easily through the written word, sometimes an emoji helps to clarify how something is being said. 👍
You phrase all this as a negative but I think it is in fact a very beautiful way to look at it. A true shift going back to our bare roots of human literature.😃
I am not pulling your leg here. I do think it is actually a really interesting thought you put here. I just don’t see it in a negative sense.
In fact, what are words if not deep-rooted human expressions? What would that make emojis in the first place?
We did not invent words to carry knowledge and improve oir culture, we invented writing, and guess what, alphabets and words only came in thousands of years after that. Before it we had cuneiforms and various forms of pictograms, so don’t assume the superiority of strictly alphabetic languages over other forms of communications.
Let’s take english as a language, its capacity to convey emotion is quite limited as it was not born a language for literature. Language evolve, new forms of communication are born and merge with existing ones and together they are more powerful. It’s not like we will switch to emoji only, altough if an emoji only culture existed, they would frown upon our “inexpressive, needlessly verbose weird letters” just like you are doing. Don’t underestimate the scare of cultural changes over convention choices
Cuneiform was a syllabic language. It had words and structure. It wasn’t just “impressions of ideas” like pictographs. (Source: Near Eastern Archaeology was quite literally my university major)
So in no way am I referring only to “alphabetic” languages as you seem to imply. And Cuneiform is included in what I was talking about…language. Whether that’s writing the epic of Gilgamesh or giving someone the worlds first bad yelp review.
Saying words didn’t exist until indo-european alphabets emerged is frankly ridiculous.
Saying that words didn’t exist before we had writing of any kind is risible.
Writing, in the end, is intended to reflect speech, not the other way around. Writing as an invention (even in ur-forms like cave paintings) was intended to provide a way of recording speech in ways that allowed later use of it.
I have a question for you, and it’s a serious one.
What, precisely, do you think cave paintings were used for if it wasn’t to carry knowledge forward to each new generation? Do you think they were just decorative?
If you’re an adult, neither.
Use your words.
We went from cavemen communicating through crude paintings on rock walls. We evolved complex speech over hundreds of thousands of years; leading to commerce, culture and civilisation itself.
We created great works of literature and began using language to carry our knowledge forward to each new generation, accelerating our growth…
…just to end up right back at fucking cave paintings.
🤓☝️
🤓☝️.
Abraham Lincoln supposedly used an emoticon in one of his speeches from 1862 (though there is debate about whether it was an accident or added by the typesetter), and the guy who is credited with officially inventing the emoticon was a Carnegie Mellon Comp Sci professor. In introducing it, he explained that it could help clarify sarcasm versus serious comments in digital communications.
Tone isn’t conveyed easily through the written word, sometimes an emoji helps to clarify how something is being said. 👍
You phrase all this as a negative but I think it is in fact a very beautiful way to look at it. A true shift going back to our bare roots of human literature.😃
I am not pulling your leg here. I do think it is actually a really interesting thought you put here. I just don’t see it in a negative sense.
In fact, what are words if not deep-rooted human expressions? What would that make emojis in the first place?
Wait till he figures out some languages still use pictographs…
Which languages still use pictographs?
(Hint: If you’re about to say “Chinese” or some variant thereof, you’re wrong.)
We did not invent words to carry knowledge and improve oir culture, we invented writing, and guess what, alphabets and words only came in thousands of years after that. Before it we had cuneiforms and various forms of pictograms, so don’t assume the superiority of strictly alphabetic languages over other forms of communications.
Let’s take english as a language, its capacity to convey emotion is quite limited as it was not born a language for literature. Language evolve, new forms of communication are born and merge with existing ones and together they are more powerful. It’s not like we will switch to emoji only, altough if an emoji only culture existed, they would frown upon our “inexpressive, needlessly verbose weird letters” just like you are doing. Don’t underestimate the scare of cultural changes over convention choices
Cuneiform was a syllabic language. It had words and structure. It wasn’t just “impressions of ideas” like pictographs. (Source: Near Eastern Archaeology was quite literally my university major)
So in no way am I referring only to “alphabetic” languages as you seem to imply. And Cuneiform is included in what I was talking about…language. Whether that’s writing the epic of Gilgamesh or giving someone the worlds first bad yelp review.
Saying words didn’t exist until indo-european alphabets emerged is frankly ridiculous.
Saying that words didn’t exist before we had writing of any kind is risible.
Writing, in the end, is intended to reflect speech, not the other way around. Writing as an invention (even in ur-forms like cave paintings) was intended to provide a way of recording speech in ways that allowed later use of it.
I have a question for you, and it’s a serious one.
What, precisely, do you think cave paintings were used for if it wasn’t to carry knowledge forward to each new generation? Do you think they were just decorative?