Archeologists and historians claim that the first Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia invented a number of the earliest sort of writin...
Archeologists
and historians claim that the first Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia invented a
number of the earliest sort of writing using wedged shaped characters into
small clay tablets referred to as "cuneiform" as a sort of
communicating circa 3200 BCE. What they can not completely prove is that if
cuneiform influenced a written sort of communication 100 years later among the
Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese who used pictographs two thousand years later.
While Sumerians were developing their written communication , the Phoenicians
created the primary alphabet made from 22 distinct characters that influenced
the way most other ancient civilizations wrote, albeit other cultures used
sorts of drawing pictures to speak ideas. Roman civilization borrowed a sort of
alphabet that flourished and even today it's become referred to as our alphabet
in most Western countries.
Numerous
cultures within the distant past employed a unusual method of writing called
"scriptio continua", or "scriptura continua". Both terms
are Latin for "continuous script", or writing without spaces between
letters and words in capital letters. Ancient Greeks employed this same script
as did the traditional Romans who wrote altogether capital letters on parchment
or stone monuments. the design also lacked punctuation, accent marks and little
letters - none of which had yet been developed. However, the farther back in
time we go, the oldest Latin and Greek inscriptions used word dividers, which
seemed to be dots called "interpuncta" to separate words in
sentences; however, pure scriptio continua without interpuncta thrived
primarily in Attic (400 to 500 BCE) and classical Latin (100 BCE-300 AD) when
both empires were at the peak of power.
The
Romans adopted this literary genre from the Etruscans - the previous tribe that
inhabited Italy, who lived long before Rome became a dominant major power . In
fact, many ancient people communicated in additional primitive ways like
pictures. Since the Etruscan alphabet was limited, they used fewer letters
which were only capitalized when written. Later, the Romans modified their
alphabet with small letters, punctuation and breaks between words, which the
Western world recognizes today.
An
example In English, written using scriptio continua resembled this:
THEHISTORYOFTHEUNITEDSTATESGOESBACKMORETHANFOURCENTURIES which reads, "The
history of the us goes back quite four centuries." Obviously, this
sentence looks cumbersome and somewhat hard to read, but writing in scriptio
continua had several advantages. Roman scribes saved expensive ink and papyrus,
also because the stone on which they engraved their language. Also it saved
space for more words and increasing ideas. the best requirement for Roman
scribes was to be thoroughly familiar with their alphabet in capital letters,
simplifying the writing process for them.
Eventually,
scribes in Europe who copied ancient Latin manuscripts began spacing between
words while using small or "minuscule" letters emerged in Ireland
within the 7th to 8th centuries A.D. Carolingian period of France within the
9th century A.D. At an equivalent time, German scribes began writing within the
same manner. Of course, today, writing in Western culture followed an
equivalent pattern which may be a much easier method than writing continually.
Also, this new way of copying made reading continuous letter Latin much easier
to know . Europeans were now becoming scholars who read quietly, which is sort
of different from the ancients who never considered reading for information or
pleasure as an kind .
For
quite a millennium, most of the Western world stopped using continuous script
until computers became popular within the 1980's, and within the 1990's the web
, or the planet Wide Web, presented newer and faster ways of communication. But
the characters today incorporate tons quite just capital letters. After all,
language has developed since the Romans and today it's become far more
complicated.
Continual
script is that the common denominator between the Latin language and today's
"machine language" When typing passwords, web addresses, email
addresses, domain names, using the entire scope of obtainable symbols, such as:
big and little roman mixed with Arabic numerals (1,2,3,4 etc.) and symbols
which may be accessed using the Shift key commands and number keys. Spaces
aren't included because in machine language they cause a void or break in
memory. for instance , a password might appear as if this: D5v27WfIO. Emails
shows a user's name. an internet address might look this way:
http://www.amazon.com.
Today,
we are on the brink of being as hooked in to using "scriptio
continua" because the ancient Greeks and therefore the Romans. a day we
visit the web by turning on our computers and mobile devices which are hooked
in to a sort of continuous script language. In today's world nobody can
communicate without continuous script which is employed as codes that permits
computers to receive, store, and execute important digital information. So, it seems
ironic that one among today's greatest technologies has been influenced by one
among the oldest known patterns of writing within the ancient world.
No comments