[delichon]

This isn't just the oldest recorded transaction, it's nearly the oldest known recognizable sample of human writing. Not a love letter or a sermon or a story, but a receipt. This probably reflects their ubiquity rather than importance. There is one known older writing sample, the Kish Tablet of Jemet Nasr. Since that tablet represents lists and counts of goods (barley, oil, livestock), it may also be a receipt, or perhaps an inventory.

The oldest known non-commercial writing is a set of proverbs from around 2600 BCE, Instructions of Shuruppak.

With my luck my most cringe-worthy diary entries will probably last that long.

[ants_everywhere]

One of the theories of how writing was invented was via transactions and accounting.

You start keeping items in clay jars. You eventually mark the jars with a depiction of what's in it. Those marks begin standing in for the items themselves when communicating across languages or keeping records of how many items and jars you have.

[jeanlucas]

Impossible to truly know. Writing may well have started with doodles, notes, even jokes on materials like leaves or wood that didn’t survive.

What survives are the "important" texts because you would deliberately put them on durable material. That creates a bias where early writing looks purely transactional.

Same reason we think of pyramids when we think of ancient architecture: stone lasts, wood doesn’t.

[ants_everywhere]

That's true we don't know anything about markings that were made on organic materials.

We do know that art and other markings date tens of thousands of years before the first proto-writing. Writing is specifically about markings that form a language. So doodles and visual jokes (e.g. phalluses) wouldn't count. I don't know what you mean by notes, but writing notes without a language would be difficult I suspect.

But there could early languages that were written on organic materials. The main problem is there's a bootstrapping problem where you need to account for how the first one developed at all. After that you can continuously improve over time.

[jeanlucas]

Exactly, it's not a good theory, but it's the best one we have.

We just need to keep in mind that and not word it as if it is a fact that writing stated with accounting

[tycho-newman]

Writing probably arose from reading animal tracks in soft mud.

[maratc]

> Not a love letter or a sermon or a story, but a receipt. This probably reflects their ubiquity rather than importance.

We humans are pretty good at remembering sermons and stories and we can recreate them from memory and pass them down to the next generations. We however suck at remembering numbers, that's why we invented writing so we could write the numbers down and rely on these records, instead of on bad human memory.

[lazide]

Well, we especially suck at remembering numbers when it’s something like ‘how much I owe Bob’ hah. At least for many people.

I expect this writing was a way to help reduce civil unrest/murder by reducing he said/she said arguments about goods, services, money, etc.

[ahmedfromtunis]

That was not by (deliberate) choice.

The earliest writings were actually logographic or semasiographic, meaning they represented ideas, objects, or concepts directly rather than the sounds of a specific spoken language.

We actually don't know what language(s) was/were spoken by the people who recorded the earliest tablets (not sure if that also applies to this particular one, though).

Phonographic writing developed much later and with it came all the forms of textual recordings we're familiar with.

[thaumasiotes]

> Phonographic writing developed much later

Well, the earliest signs are logographic.

But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.

[dotancohen]

  > Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.

The converse is just as true. Not all things you can think, you can say. I remember sometime in my teens realizing that my thoughts are constrained by my language, an epiphany that sparked a life long interest in language. Now some 30 years later, I feel that I can feel ideas that I don't know how to express, but not for lack of language. Rather, some ideas are too complex for our simple speech. Just as a dog would be unable to bark the idea "energy is neither created nor destroyed".

[smj-edison]

Bit of a tangent, but have you followed dynamic land at all? Their whole thing is expressing ideas through a dynamic medium, to convey things we can't explain through speech. You might find it interesting :)

https://dynamicland.org/

[dotancohen]

Never heard of it, thank you!

[deaddodo]

Do you have an example? I can’t possibly think of a single idea that’s completely expressionless. Even drug-fueled hallucinations can eventually be given a description; albeit without being able to actually transfer the feeling/internalization of it.

You might have to be overly verbose and explicit in your language, but ultimately you can describe pretty much anything using “like”, “as”, and “akin to” with qualifiers.

[dotancohen]

I think that any parent holding their baby for the first time will give an example. There is a feeling of existing, of purpose, of continuity. But no "like", "as", or "akin to" suffices.

[cyberax]

> But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop.

But it did. It took around 1500 years from the first writing systems to fully phonetic systems. And we still have Chinese characters even now, or the Tibetan writing system.

For some reason, writing systems tend to stay stuck on mixed logographic and phonetic systems.

[OskarS]

There's always a sliding scale between "proto-writing" and fully developed writing systems, but just using symbols phonetically instead of semantically happens much faster than that. The very archaic forms of proto-cuneiform is from about 3400 BCE (though things like clay tokens are much older). It, like virtually all writing systems in the world, developed into a true writing system by use of the "rebus principle", where symbols came to acquire different meanings based on phonetics in the same way as in a rebus. Like, in English, if you had a symbol for "female sheep" (a "ewe"), you could start to use it to signify the word "you", even though there's no semantic connection.

The earliest evidence for this in cuneiform is from around 3200-3000 BCE. There is a famous tablet where the symbol for "reed" is used to represent the word "reimburse", because they're both pronounced like gi. By a few hundred years later, cuneiform was a fully fledged phonetic writing system.

[thaumasiotes]

The modern Chinese writing system is fully phonetic, just with extremely complex spelling. There is no pretense that characters represent ideas or words. They represent syllables.

Phonetic use of the characters was immediate. The go-to example here is 來, which depicts a stalk of wheat. It is the spelling of the verb "come", and the verb is spelled that way because the character for "wheat" was borrowed with no alterations to represent its own pronunciation, which was shared with the verb.

[cyberax]

I speak Chinese :)

It's a mixed system with about 2 millennia of legacy. It started as logographic, then it got into phono-semantic compounds, with detours into the written-only official language (like Latin), and now it's messy mix of everything. There are true logographs (休，林，森), true phonosemantic compounds, and plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").

[thaumasiotes]

> now it's messy mix of everything. There are true logographs

Don't confuse the origin of the system with what the system is now.

Using your example, what do you see as the difference between the "logographs" 森 and 林?

Neither can be a logograph, because neither one represents a word. But even if that weren't the case, on the assumption that they are simply pictures representing concepts, how would you know which one was which?

What does it mean, to you, that the word "forest" must be written 森林 and not 森?

> and [there are] plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").

...yes. 森 and 林 both belong to that category. But you've specifically contrasted them with it. I can't tell what you're thinking of.

Characters can be classified by origin, so that 森 is "从林从木", 切 is "从刀七声", and 下 is "指事". You seem to be reaching for this, but "bound morpheme" is a classification of the current use of the linguistic element, not of the origin of the way it's spelled.

[prewett]

My understanding of the history of Chinese writing is that it kept trying to go phonetic, but each time they prevented it, because the writing had to be read across an empire with multiple languages. Even so, something like 20% of the characters are quasi-phonetic, with the radical giving the topic and the rest of the character giving the approximate pronunciation, so "the word for {a plant|a thing of metal|a person|etc} that is sounds similar to X".

When the Japanese imported it, they used the characters much more phonetically. They used the whole word when that worked, but the characters got assigned to the Japanese pronunciation of the word, as well as the pronunciation from the pieces of other words where that character appeared, as well as the Chinese pronunciations. Then six hundred years or so later they imported them again, by which point the characters had evolved in Chinese but not in Japanese. So its sort of phonetic, but it's a complete mess.

[kragen]

That's mostly right.

Not 20%, more like 90%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

In Japanese at this point most kanji have an onyomi (the sound of the Chinese word, which has been adopted into Chinese the way Latin words like "adopt" are adopted into English) and at least one kunyomi (the sound of a synonymous Japanese word not derived from Chinese). This does add difficulty but it is somewhat compensated for by the smaller repertoire of characters used in Japanese. A lot of the most common Japanese words, all loanwords from languages like English, and all the inflectional suffixes are normally written with one of two purely phonetic syllabaries.

[thaumasiotes]

I would take issue with

>> When the Japanese imported it, they used the characters much more phonetically.

Japanese kanji are much less phonetic than Chinese hanzi. For hanzi, you can ask "how is this character read?", and it's a simple question with a simple answer, because that question is the basis of the writing system. Kanji are assigned all kinds of different readings on the theory that what really counts is the semantics.

For example...

>> They used the whole word when that worked

Not even in the oldest Chinese writings do you see one character representing a multisyllabic word. Identifying characters with words rather than syllables is an innovation on the part of the Japanese.

Tangentially, you mentioned that the vast majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds. I've been watching some youtube videos in which Japanese people are presented with kanji of varying levels of obscurity and asked to speculate on their pronunciation. Without fail, when they don't know the answer, the interviewees speculate that the two major components of the character both contribute to its meaning.

And that always surprises me because a two-meaningful-components construction is so rare in the character system. Almost all characters aren't constructed from two meaningful elements, and I would have thought the Japanese would be familiar with that fact even though they can't understand the phonetic hints. Do you think this is more of a case of them not knowing how characters are formed ("ignorance"), or more of a case of them speculating on the meaning of each component purely because they don't have the ability to speculate about the phonetics ("searching under the lamppost")?

[Particularly where the obscure kanji are part of an obscure phrase borrowed from Chinese, speculating about the phonetics would be helpful to the problem, but I'm assuming most Japanese just plain don't know what kinds of sounds a Chinese phonetic component might be hinting at.]

[sameermanek]

It was invented by store managers to counter the karens of that time. /s

Oops, im not on reddit, sorry