SC OF READING

//////////////////SUMERIANS INVENTED WRITING-3000 BCE



//////////////Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there would be no concept of humanity."



/////////////LOGOSYLLABARY-SIMILARLY CONSTRUCTED WRITING-SUMERIAN AND CHINESE



/////////////FROM SUMERIAN-DD BY 1600 BCE TO AKKADIAN LANGG





///////////////////...But if an alphabet is so important, is it the case that humans who do not have an alphabet think differently from those who do? Does an alphabet build a different brain? It is not a trivial question, because one of the world’s main languages, Chinese, does not have an alphabet. Further, neuroscience can now demonstrate that not having an alphabet does indeed cause the brain to organise itself differently. Brain scans show that when someone reads an alphabetical language, such as English, specialised parts of the brain’s left hemisphere are activated. But when a Chinese speaker reads Chinese, quite different parts of the brain are used. They are in both hemispheres, and include frontal areas not used for reading by English readers. Since this proves that the Chinese reader’s brain is connected up differently, it prompts the question whether Chinese thought is different from western thought. Linguists used to argue that there is always a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. This idea fell out of favour under the influence of Chomskyan linguistics and theories of universal grammar. But the advent of the brain scan seems to be reopening the question. What Wolf’s own views are it is impossible to say. Having presented the brain-scan evidence, she refrains from speculating about how the Chinese think. No doubt her failure to grasp this hot potato is a mark of prudence. All the same, it is a bit of a let-down for readers who have followed her excitedly through a couple of hundred pages.




/////////////////AKKADIAN LANGG OF MESOPOTAMIA-GILGAMESH




///////////////MORPHOPHONEMIC NATURE OF ENGLISH




///////////////ALSO EARLY-HEIROGLYPHICS OF EGYPTIANS-3100 BCE



////////////////......In Wolf’s view, the Sumerian cuneiform was a landmark accomplishment in the development of writing. For the first time since the beginning of civilization, “symbols rapidly became less pictographic and more logographic and abstract.” In fact, this change forced a reworking of human brain circuits:
“First, considerably more pathways in the visual and visual association regions would be necessary in order to decode what would eventually become hundreds of cuneiform characters…Second, the conceptual demands of a logosyllabary would inevitable involve more cognitive systems, which, in turn, would require more connections to visual areas in the occipital lobes, to language areas in the temporal lobes, and to the frontal lobes.”






////////////////egyptian alphabet...PROTO-CANAANITE....UGARITIC.....PHOENICIAN.....GREEK ALPHBT