Some time between about 3000 and 2500 BC, Canaanite people working in Egypt adapted Egyptian Hieroglyphs to write their Semitic language, which was the ancestor of Phoenician, Moabite, Ammonite and Hebrew. They used a small number of hieroglyphs to represent the consonant sounds of their language and created what was probably the first alphabetic script. Many of the alphabets we used today are descendants of that first abjad.

According to ScienceDaily, a text written partly in this ancient script has finally been deciphered after confounding scholars for over a century since it was discover on the wall of the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara in Egypt. One reason why it was so difficult to decipher was that everyone had assumed that the text was in Ancient Egyptian. However in 2002, Robert Ritner, professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, realised that part of the text was in another language, and this enabled Prof. Richard Steiner, professor of Semitic languages and literature at Yeshiva University in New York, to figure out that the text contained both Ancient Egyptian and an ancient Semitic language, and to decipher it.

The text is thought to be a spell to protect royal mummies against poisonous snakes and reads “Utterance of rir-rir mother snake, mother snake.” The words “rir-rir” refer to the drivel, the venom of the snake.

I found an interesting article about the ongoing attempts to unravel the mysteries of the Inca Khipu on Wired News yesterday, thanks to Luigi of the Silverhorde. The Inca are thought to have used bundles of knotted strings known as Khipu or quipu for record keeping, though nobody knows for sure how to ‘read’ them.

In 1923, an anthropologist called Leland Locke realised that some of the khipu were like files – each knot represented a different number, arranged in a decimal system, and each bundle probably held census data or listed the contents of storehouses. However, some of the khipu followed different patterns and Locke thought these might have a ceremonial or other function.

In 1990, Gary Urton, an anthropologist at Harvard and one of the world’s leading Inca scholars, spotted several details that convinced him the khipu contained much more than tallies of llama sales. He set up a database of khipu and assembled a team of anthropologists, mathematicians and cryptographers to work on deciphering the knots. They have already spotted quite a few repeated patterns and hope to have some results from their efforts later this year.

If the Khipu turn out to be a method of recording language, which seems quite possible, what will it be called? It isn’t really writing as such. Any suggestions?

In the walls of the Palazzo Bucelli in Montepulciano, Italy, which was built in the 17th century and remodelled in the 18th century by the antiquarian Pietro Bucelli, there are a number of inscriptions. These inscriptions are generally thought to be in Etruscan or Latin, but they look more like Umbrian to me.

Here is an example of one of the inscriptions:

This inscription, which reads from left to right, can be transliterated as something like: “AOTETINA ARNTNI TETINALISA”.

You can see more here.

What do you think?

The thorny subject of apostrophes and their usage came up in the comments on a recent post. There seems to be considerable confusion about when to use the common or garden aspostrophe, which is might be thought of as a comma that’s got above itself.

In English the apostrophe is used to indicate possession, as in the boy’s toys, the girls’ hair and the cat’s pyjamas. It comes after the s if the noun is plural. When a noun ends in an s, the apostrophe can go after that s, or another s can be added, e.g. Mr Jones’ hat or Mr Jones’s hat. Apostrophes show that letters have been omitted, as in don’t, he’ll and they’ve, and can also be used when writing the plurals of individual letters, such as p’s and q’s.

Apostrophical uncertainity arises with the personal pronouns as they don’t follow the behaviour of ordinary nouns. Logically the possessives yours, its, hers, ours and theirs should have apostrophes, but the grammarians who devised the rules for the use of apostrophes, notably Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray, forgot to include them. It’s is a contraction of it is or it has, so the possessive has to be its.

The use of apostrophes to show plurals, as in potato’s and tomato’s is frowned on but understandable – these words are fairly unusual in that they end with vowels. If you’re not sure of the real plurals (potatoes and tomatoes), you might think that adding ‘s would avoid the misleading pronunciations like ‘pot-at-oss’ and ‘tom-at-oss’. Afterall, apostrophes are sometimes used to show the plurals like 1960’s.

One area of apostrophe usage that I’m not sure about is in expressions such as a weeks holiday, or should that be week’s? And a days/day’s wages. As these expressions show possession, I suppose apostrophes should be used, but it feels wrong to me – how can the abstract concept of a week or a day possess anything?

The dictionary definition of a word is:

one of the units of speech or writing that native speakers of a language usually regard as the smallest isolable meaningful element of the language.

In most written languages, words are separated by spaces so it’s easy to see where each word begins and ends. In spoken language however, words are uttered in a more or less continuous stream and we mentally insert the gaps between the words. If you listen to an unfamiliar language, you are probably unable to separate the sounds you hear into individual words. As you learn a language your ability to ‘hear’ to individual words in speech gradually improves.

I think that written language shapes our perceptions of spoken language, at least to some extent. In some languages, such as German and Dutch, words are often glued together to make long compound words, e.g. Donaudamfschifffahrtskapitaen. If you speak on of these languages but can’t read or write it, you may perceive such compounds as separate words. In other languages, such as Chinese and Vietnamese, every syllable is written separately, which gives you the impression that such languages are monosyllabic, when in fact they do have many multi-syllable words.