I remember reading about writing and words as a technology in a communication strand, ‘Communication Histories and Technologies’. I thought that was incredibly interesting. Unfortunately I didn’t save the reading, so I have nothing to refer to or cite from. Still, that never stopped people on the internet from espousing their opinions, right?

When writing was first developed, only the powerful and rich could read and write, so it was almost like magic. I like that. It also kept rich people separate. If poor people were too busy planting crops, they didn’t have time to learn how to write and read. That is especially pronounced in places with Asiatic languages, that rely on pictorial languages. The only way to learn Chinese is to remember hundreds and thousands of different characters with very little relation to pronunciation (as in Germanic or Romantic languages such as English). From what I remember (in the reading, not from my memory), officials actually fought to stop the language being simplified and being made accessible to more people.

In relation to that I would not be torn up if we had to learn to write hieroglyphics in stone. In fact, I think that would be awesome. Obviously the issue with materials such as stone tablets or vellum or huge scrolls of parchment are that they take a long time to write on and a lot of space to store. Still, it means that they made sure it counted with their art and calligraphy. What the readings are saying about longevity – I wonder, in another few thousand years, what writings will still be around.

But thinking about different languages and how they write is fascinating. For example, Hindi and Arabic make absolutely zero sense to me, whereas in Germanic languages, it’s quite easy to make out different words, and in more Asian languages (excluding Hindi), I can recognise the difference between the characters.

HYPERTEXT sounds awesome. I like the idea of things not being necessarily linear. Kind of like footnotes, but…better. I’ve never really thought of hypertext in relation to blogging, but it is pretty cool if you think about it.