What does this child’s game teach us about
the history of writing? Something basic but incredibly inventive. You learned how to write with symbols that
stand for words - logographs. And you saw just how many logographs you need to write
well - logographs for everything under the sun and the moon, including the sun and the
moon. But isn’t this getting impractical? Do we really need a symbol for every word?
Surely the madness can’t go on forever! Say hello to this smart rogue, who’s about
to solve your problem with an innocent mistake. His father has been counting sheep. Literally.
And he just asked his son to record a measly line in his budget: “10 sheep for uncle”.
The son writes the 10, and the logograph for sheep, but uncle? He pauses and scratches
his head. Eager to play with his friends, he writes the character for “ankle”. “10
sheep - ankle”. He hurries away without a second thought, but don’t take his invention
lightly. If you’ve ever played fill-in-the-blank
or guessing games where you have to sound out picture-words, you’ve seen and used
this principle for yourself. But it’s not just for quirky puzzles with funny solutions. The name for this is another “Major Moments
in the History of Writing”. Ahem, the name for this is rebus. This familiar language
game lets you look beyond the meaning of a character and use it simply for its sound.
Sun sounds like son, and, by extension, perhaps soon and sown. Logographs, like the symbol
for “sun”, could already be read as words. Now, with the rebus principle in your pocket,
logographs can also be read as sounds. This isn’t just useful for getting ancient
uncle his ancient sheep. Once Aztec city planners finished building their stunning capital in
the middle of a lake, the Venice of the New World, Tenochtitlán, their scribes needed
a way to write its name. They’ve been using what amounts to basic picture writing. Since
Tenochtitlán has a stone, “te”, and a cactus, “nochtli”, it’s natural to write
it with two fairly obvious glyphs. Then these become not just symbols meaning cactus and
stone, but symbols for the noises “Tenochtitlán”, making them just as much rebus fun as those
puzzles you solved as a kid. And now you know the name for those. You also know why there’s
a cactus on top of a stone in Mexico’s flag. It’s not just for show! How alike does the sound-alike pronunciation
have to be? Which sounds can we chop off? Pit the Egyptians against the Sumerians one
more time. Egyptian hieroglyphs cut off the initial consonant, or, less often, two or
three consonants from the original word. Sumerians, on the other hand, with their cuneiform, take
whole syllables. These two paths don’t just add some local flavor. Rebusing out consonants
doesn’t just impact ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. It leaves a legacy for later spinoffs: the
mentality that these are either read as logographs or they stand for consonants. Cuneiform leaves
a different legacy. Completely unrelated languages will spend thousands of years borrowing and
reborrowing cuneiform to write their own words, but, each time, the symbols are read as logographs
or as syllables. Flexibility is key here. Look at this Egyptian
hieroglyph. It can be read as a logograph for “mouth” (“re”), or as the consonant
“r”. This character could be read as the logograph meaning “house”, or it could
stand for the consonants pr, the two consonants in the Egyptian word. Conveniently, in Egyptian,
the little slashy below lets you know when it’s a pure logograph. The rebus discovery brings up a tension between
meaning and sound. Is writing phonetic or semantic? Is it about encoding the meaning
of words or encoding speech sounds? The old logographs were fundamentally a meaning-writing
system. Sure, this sounds like “re” in Egyptian, but what’s crucial is that this
is the logograph for the word meaning “mouth”. Rebus writing takes a big step towards sound-writing:
this will come to stand for the consonant “r”, regardless of meaning. It may come as a surprise, but, once discovered,
sound writing doesn’t oust meaning writing. Not at all! Indeed, early writers notice that phonetic
writing brings up a problem, a problem you probably missed because of your comfort with
sound-writing, a problem that meaning-writing can solve. Brace yourself, history, because logographs are about to make a comeback!
