Join me and us on the videoconference. The topîcs are deep and hot since we are dealing with how human beings tanks to language and arts managed to capture the symbolical dimension of reality. This means all mental and spiritual production of human beings from science to religion are symbolical of the mental power of Jomom Sapiens, a mental power in vast expansion for more than 300,000 years. He did not start from scratch but the very first step on this march was the invention of the rotation of vowels and consonants without which nothing was possible
PHYLOGENETIC DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN SYMBOLISM → WRITING
1.
2. PHYLOGENETIC DEVELOPMENT
OF HUMAN SYMBOLISM
WRITING
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Modern writing systems are mostly phonetic, either on sounds (abstracted into phonemes), be they
vowels or consonants, or on syllables associating at least one consonant and one vowel. There can be many
variations on these simple ideas. Semitic languages only write consonants, except for “alep,” “alef,” or
whatever other name it may have, the vocalic sound /a/ when it is the initial sound of a discursive word.
Tamil and other languages of the same type (isolating languages either known as Sino-Tibetan or Tibeto-
Burman) use syllabic writing systems with eventually diacritic signs or modulations for another vocalic sound
than the basic /a/.
Syllabic practices exist all over the world. Music notes in the West are derived from the first syllable
of a hymn, each of these first syllables sung at the proper pitch.
Ut queant laxīs resonāre fibrīs
Mīra gestōrum famulī tuōrum,
Solve pollūtī labiī reātum,
Sancte Iohannēs.
(So that your servants may, / with loosened voices, / Resound the wonders / of your deeds, /
Clean the guilt / from our stained lips, / O St. John.)
We have the same principle in Carnatic music, though not from a hymn but the full names given
to the notes:
1. Sa – Shadjama (Tonic)
2. Ri – Rishabha
3. Ga – Gandhara
4. Ma – Madhyama
5. Pa – Panchama (Perfect Fifth)
6. Da – Dhaivata
7. Ni – Nishada
Those note names are symbolical but meaningful, whereas the use of letters (A to G) in many
European countries, and the world, is symbolical but the letters have no other meaning than the degrees
they refer to by simple convention, A being the LA of the Latin system. Hence the scale is C, D, E, F, G, A, B,
C.
The most standard writing system in the world (which does not mean used by the greatest number of
people, far from it, is the alphabet derived from the Greek Alphabet. The Greeks, working on the Semitic
consonantal Phoenician alphabet, added the vowels necessary in Indo-European languages. But even this
alphabet can have various shapes. The most common ones are the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The Gothic
alphabet remained in use in Germany and German-speaking countries up to 1945. Since then, it is only used
in Germanic countries (speaking German mostly) for various signs or inscriptions. It is no longer in use in
schools though I studied German in France in both Latin and Gothic writing.
Then the particular writing system of a particular language is a cultural, at times historical, choice.
The Latin alphabet vastly extended in some cases is the most common system and all other writing systems
can be transcribed into the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabets in Slav countries that use the Cyrillic alphabet, or in
ex-Soviet republics, or autonomous entities of the Russian Federation, which do not speak a Slav language.
3. In Asia, many writing systems of Indo-Aryan, Turkic, or isolating languages vary from one country to
the next. In Sri Lanka for example, most signs are trilingual as to their languages or writing systems: Sinhala,
Tamil, and the Latin transcription of either Sinhala or Tamil according to the dominant language in the area
or province.
In our modern world, other writing systems can be iconic like the road sign languages, or other signs
in public areas and buildings. These iconic signs may be universal, or nearly universal. I am going to work on
some older writing systems going back to the invention of writing, but also with what came before as
precursors or antecedents of writing per se.
1- Following Marshall McLuhan, writing is an extension of four things:
a- The visual mental capture of the world, which is extended into an oral linguistic
“description.”
b- The language used orally by the people extended into a visual written transcription.
c- The phonetic/phonological analysis of the oral language used by the population.
d- The hand that has to perform the writing.
2- Visual representation is old in humanity, like the crisscrossing hashtag-style marks on ochre
blocks. Then transcribing oral data and messages into images and marks is archaeologically as old as cave-
art, and, in fact, probably a lot older because the archaeological data we have must have been preceded by
a long period of learning how to draw, with tools that had to be discovered or invented, on many different
media and most of these media must have been, for a long time, non-durable. All that is lost, even if it was
wood because wood decays very fast. We only have the inscriptions on horns, bones, and on rock surfaces
in caves or outside with a great loss in some conditions, when not protected or when disrupted by various
material circumstances like floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and many others.
3- In old caves or on rockfaces, inscriptions, paintings, and various representational or non-
representational artifacts go back to at least 50,000 BCE. The oldest cave paintings are not European but
can be found in Indonesia and Melanesia, proving by the way that these people there moved out of Black
Africa long before those who came to Europe. The representational paintings and engravings concern
animals, human beings, or objects. If we consider movable items, then a lot of representations of women and
some men can be found and have to be taken into account.
4- Then, the second type of representational painting is hands that are painted negatively on the
walls or the rock surface by blowing paint over the hand flat on the wall or rock. These have finally been
collected and studied. There are many handprints on all the sites, and they had been neglected for a long
time. The study of these handprints proved that 75% of the hands were female and among the 25% left a fair
proportion were young male children. We do not know what these numerous handprints mean. But there is a
fair chance women were playing a significant role in these caves, an artistic and spiritual role. To use the
word some archaeologists have adopted, the shamans were not men but women. Since the concept of
shaman has been transferred from hunting-gathering societies in Southern Black Africa more than 55,000
years back to Paleontological times, the discovery of the dominance of women among them goes against the
concept itself and it is necessary to come to a different concept. Note this is essential for the passage to
writing. All the rituals in these distant times were oral and if women had the upper hand on the rituals, then
they had the upper hand on oral ritual language. Writing intervened around what some call the beginning of
the Late Holocene Period starting around 3,750 BCE, about 10,000 years after the beginning of the
Magdalenian (15,000-10,000 BCE) when agriculture started developing, and we have all reasons to believe
the dominant spiritual dimension of women was replaced by the dominant land-managing men. So, we
should not be surprised that all the scribes in many traditions, maybe most or even all, are seen as men. It is
the case of Maya scribes, their ancestors being two older twin stepbrothers of the Hero Twins, who were
transformed into monkeys by the Hero Twins themselves to get them out of the way of their mission. Scribes
in the Maya tradition are thus seen as male monkeys. In the same way in the Sumerian tradition, all the
scribes are Akkadians, and they are males. It is the same way in the Prometheus tradition in Germanic lore,
as well as old Greek and Roman traditions. I will ask the provocative questions: where are women scribes in
the Old Testament or New Testament of the Bible? In Courpière, France, an old (12th century) historiated
capital supporting the narthex of the Romanesque church there represent a monkey carrying the book and
climbing on the capital, a sign of learning and elevation, hence of spirituality. If he knew how to read, he must
also have known how to write.
5- The third type of marks are geometrical nonrepresentational signs, many simplified to a set of
lines, and among them many round dots in lines or columns. They probably were iconic and could be “read.”
On portable items, horns or bones, or rocks, we find complex sets of marks Alexander Marshack collected
and analyzed as being moon cycles. In fact, we cannot see the importance of transcribing moon cycles
4. except to plan or foretell eclipses that probably were very frightening or impressive in those old ages (think of
Stonehenge for example, but also of the Maya pyramids and buildings, and what we find about the cycles of
planets, the sun, the moon, Venus and Mars, on the monuments and in the codices), but the artifacts
concerned her are always too short for that since they cover a handful of cycles at most nine or ten. My
suggestion is that it concerns menstrual cycles, and the utility of these reveals procreative cycles with
impregnation, pregnancy, and delivery, all moments and phases sacralized and ritualized. That reveals or
supports the role of women in the spiritual work of the communities.
But such signs are openly leading to storytelling, to predication, to enlightenment with oral language,
more or less majestic according to the occasion, and the ability of the performers, hence it is some
symbolical “writing” if it is some mnemotechnics to remember the story, to tell the story. Writing is the visual
transcription of real language used every day, and the history of writing reveals several key facts.
SLIDE 10
If we consider the oldest writing system known today, the Sumerian system also known as
cuneiforms, we find it is often wrongly attributed to the Akkadians, which is a mistake since the Akkadians
spoke a consonantal Semitic language, whereas this writing system contains many vowels that can actually
be used as words per se. John Halloran in his Sumerian Lexicon, https://www.sumerian.org/sumerlex.htm,
gives one full list of “Sumerian vowel-only (V) words,” https://www.sumerian.org/sumv.htm:
a, e4: n., water; watercourse, canal; seminal fluid; offspring; father; tears; flood. [A archaic
frequency: 519]
interj., alas!
prep., locative suffix - where; in; when - denotes movement towards or in favor of a
person.
def. article, nominalizing suffix for a noun or noun clause, denoting 'the'.
á: (cf., áhi).
a5: (cf., aka).
e: (cf., ég).
é: house, household; temple; plot of land [E2 archaic frequency: 649; concatenates 4 signs].
è: (cf., éd).
e11: (cf., èd).
i: n., cry of pain (derived from ér, ír, 'tears; complaint' ?) [I archaic frequency: 17].
v., to capture, defeat, overcome (cf., éd, è; i)
ì: (cf., ìa).
i7: (cf., ída).
u: (cf., hà).
6. SLIDE 11
Maya is another can of worms.
a- We only have the glyphs carved or painted on buildings that are archaeologically excavated and
dated, plus some glyphs on pottery of diverse types generally recuperated from graves. We do not have the
non-durable media used before, and that probably were the first attempts or trials, a lot easier to perform
than carving in stone or painting on frescos or plates and pots. This writing system does not have an origin
just as much as the Mayas are said to descend from the Olmecs, but once again, the Olmecs do not have a
clear origin. The only thing we know today is that pyramids in Peru, in the Andes, and the Upper Amazonia
are still there and are dated or estimated 3-4,000 years older, and some say at least, than the same in
Mesoamerica. But apparently, there is no writing in these South American older areas. The Incas, later on,
will use knots on strings but we do not know how to decipher them.
b- Apart from these archaeologically dated artifacts, we have four surviving but a lot more recent
codices that escaped the systematic destruction imposed by the Spanish colonizers and Christian Inquisition
who burned all that could be burned and destroyed all that could be destroyed. The buildings had been
vacated, most of them, one or two centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards, so that they were spared,
most of them, because already overgrown in the jungle, and any way out of use, hence not religiously
dangerous. What we know today is that the pyramids and other stone constructions, palaces and various
buildings, platforms, ballgame courts, etc., were built on a very strict pattern that enabled the Mayas to follow
the stars, the sun, the moon, and particularly Venus as the Morning Star or the Evening Star, and Mars.
Their observation of these stars and planets was over prolonged periods and eclipses were fundamental.
The codices contain at times very long and explicit sections on Venus and other planets. Writing in the
traditional glyphs is essential there, and the codices can be dated. The writing system seems to be
homogeneous and more or less agreed upon despite variations in the oral language spoken in the various
areas, dialectical variations like “chaan”/”kaan” (T561), for the “sky,” that cannot be traced in writing when
using glyphs. When the language was transliterated into the Spanish alphabet, the dialectical variations
became obvious.
c- These glyphs are mostly composite, and the more recent, the more composite which also means
the less representational. It is true the famous head glyphs were kept right through but with time they
became phonetic symbols. That was the discovery of Yuri Knorozov in the 1950s-1960s in Leningrad, USSR.
Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson banned this idea as long as he was alive and imposed a purely decorational
approach to these glyphs. But Knorozov had the last word and the last smile. Yet, in his mistaken vision,
Thompson managed to do something fundamental. He collected and numbered the glyphs, though
exclusively as visual graphic patterns. But the T-numbers of the glyphs are still used because they are very
handy. These composite glyphs can be or contain representational elements, even when the
representational dimension is no longer obvious. The glyphs actually tell us a lot more than the words they
7. stand for. For example, the glyphs for the twenty day-names of the Maya calendar all have at the bottom,
under the main representational element a row of three bubbles with a curl in each one. This is a typical
classifying element that tells us the glyph is not a simple isolated word that could be anything, but it is the
name of a day. The ternary pattern of the classifying element is signifying and significant, and this ternary
pattern is found in many places and cases. A systematic study of this ternary pattern has not been made yet.
It definitely has to do with counting and numbers, and it probably is a survival of a trial plural (no curls in the
three bubbles) that contains a dual plural (no curl in the extreme left and right bubbles), and an extracted unit
(no curl only in the middle bubble). I have noticed that such groups of three dots, three drops, three bubbles,
etc., in fact, this ternary pattern itself in any form, are often connected with blood and thus with blood
sacrifice, be it self-sacrifice or human sacrifice.
If we consider the basic glyph for “k’in” meaning both “sun” and “day,” it is a simple four-petalled
flower representing the four cardinal points, hence the sun, hence the day, since a day is from sun-up to sun-
down, or from sun-up to sun-up. Note the three round boxes in which this flower is contained. The next glyph
stands for “k’in-ni” with the addition of the three stripes of some flowing fluid underneath. The flower has a
center which is, of course, the center of the cardinal points where the sacred tree, the “ceiba” grows: The
Ceiba tree (Ceiba pentandra, also known as the kapok or silk-cotton tree) is a tropical tree native to North
and South America and Africa. In Central America, the ceiba had great symbolic importance to the ancient
Mayas, and its name in the Mayan language is Yax Che or Yax Te (“Green Tree” or “First Tree”). The genus
name “pentandra” is essential: it designates a plant whose flowers have five stamens. So, it is normal for this
tree, which can grow up to sixty meters, to be the fifth central cardinal point and thus create what is known as
a quincunx, a pattern very common in Maya writing referring to this stabilized and perfectly centered cosmic
vision of the universe. Such an extension like “-ni” of the word written “k’in-ni” is common in Maya writing to
reinforce the final consonant of a three-letter syllable “C-V-C.” But visually it adds something that goes
beyond phonetic writing.
If we consider “ni” as such we first have a head representation with the flowing stripes, this time four
coming from the nose, or the mouth, of the male head, representing the breathing of the man. But this
flowing breath can be the simplified written element for “ni.” It is interesting to go back to the oldest head
glyph for “k’in.” every visual element has a meaning, and we can find the three dots on the earring of the
man, two black and one white, and this is the representation of the cardinal or ordinal number “one” or “first.”
This mark, as we are going to see beneath, corresponds to “hun” or “jun,” and it means one, but it is also a
mark of precedence, of nobility, and blood is always associated with this precedence or nobility. The second
head glyph is composite. It has to be read from left to right and from top to bottom. Hence on the right of the
head, we have the simplified version of “k’in,” the four-petalled flower with two empty bubbles, one on top
and one under, hence an allusion to once again the number “one” or “first.” Under the head, flowing from this
“k’in” symbol we have the four stripes of the breath we have seen before, but this time it does not come from
the nose or mouth. It comes from the symbol of the “sun” or “day” contained in a symbol alluding to three. If I
am right in interpreting three as a pattern referring to blood sacrifice, the flowing of time has to be punctuated
by the flowing of blood. That is a fundamental concept of Maya cosmology. When we consider those
elements, we understand Thompson’s mistake, yet this final head is supported on the right and underneath
by the “phonetic” elements writing “k’in-ni.” *
d- The case of the name of the Maize God. The picture itself is that of a young man, extremely
handsome. Every single element in the picture is symbolic and it would take a lot of time to identify and
isolate every single symbolic element. I just want to look at the glyph for his name as listed by John
Montgomery in his Dictionary of MAYA hieroglyphs,
http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/dictionary/montgomery/index.html, Vertically on the left we have a
representation of the first syllable “jun” (it could be “hun” in another dialect) meaning “one” or “first” as we
have seen, and we can note the ternary pattern of this glyphic representation of “one”. It is also the first
syllable of the father of the Hero Twins, Hun Hunahpu who was killed by the Death Lords and who managed
to impregnate the daughter of one Death Lord who gave birth to the Hero Twins, the first one of them being
Hunahpu, a slightly shortened version of the name of his father. The Hero Twins will defeat the Death Lords
and will be able to bring back to life their father who will reveal himself as the Maize God.
Then on top of the glyph, you have the syllable “nal” meaning “maize” and representing a grain of
corn. The main element in the glyph corresponds to the syllable “ye” which represents a grain of corn in three
containing boxes. And there we have again the ternary pattern. The whole composite glyph works on this
ternary pattern too. What is important with this older writing system of the Mayas is that most of the meaning
is not orally expressed, which means the transliteration that was imposed by history (the fall of the Maya
civilization around the 13th century, and by colonization, cannot in any way contain all that. It becomes
cultural, and at once it becomes an elite meaning, whereas the representational expression of it all, once
presented by a member of the elite, could be memorized and mentally repeated when necessary.
8. SLIDE 12
This slide is easy. It shows the only vowel of the Phoenician language, a Semitic root-language,
“alep.” Originally it was representational. It was/is the first sound of the word “alep” which means ox. It
represented the head of an ox with its two horns pointing right. This representation was kept by the Greeks
for the capital letter alpha (A) which became the capital letter of the letter /a/ in the Latin alphabet. The
Greeks added an /-a/ at the end of the name “aleph” meaning “ox.” But the Greeks turned the capital letter
ninety degrees down so that the ox’s head stands upright on its horns. The low-case alpha letter in Greek is
a schematic representation of the ox’s head.
SLIDE 13
With this writing system, we enter the Indo-European field and its Germanic branch. These people
and these languages along with the Slav and Celtic languages did not go through Anatolia to Greece but
9. through the Caucasus and into the big plains north of the Black Sea and then the whole of Europe (northern
half or so) as far as Spain and Ireland. Note some researchers in the retrospective reconstruction of Proto-
Indo-European are inflexibly positioning PIE north of the Black Sea, but they never ask where these people
came from and what language or languages they spoke, and of course, they miss the southern migration
from Anatolia along the Northern coast of the Mediterranean, with some extension along the south coast, as
far as Portugal, the territory of the Romance languages with the surprising case of Romanian, not to speak of
Ossetic, Armenian, Kurdish and Farsi.
The principle is that each letter is the first sound of the names of gods, goddesses, qualities, and
objects. The letter actually carries this name as its name. They are mostly geometric. If they were
representational at some time in their history, it has been mostly lost or has become so stylized that we do
not see it anymore. These are runes and these alphabets (there were several) were used by Germanic
tribes, both southern and northern, and even in England for the Anglo-Saxon language. They were still used
when the Normans arrived. This writing is entirely alphabetic, each letter represents one sound, and each
sound has one letter representation.
SLIDE 14
The case of the Ogham alphabet of the Irish Celts, maybe of other Celts, is very rich.
a- Same principle as in the previous case for the first twenty original letters. The five diphthongs
were rendered with the signs of the two vocalic sounds concerned. The Benedictines when they arrived in
Ireland did not like this way of writing the diphthongs, so they added five new letters to the twenty of the
original alphabet
b- The twenty original letters were the first sound of twenty trees that could only be found all in the
same place around 2-1,000 BCE in the Rhine valley around what is today Stuttgart and Frankfurt. That
means the Celts were all there at that time when they invented their alphabet. Then they moved out, south
as far as Spain and west as far as Ireland.
c- It is quite obvious these letters are not representational but are absolutely symbolic, but they are
one hundred percent geometric, even the Five supplementary diphthongs, though the unity of the first twenty
is broken by patterns that are not integrated into the initial pattern (two variants): one vertical or horizontal
bar, and then one to five bars perpendicular to the first central bar, on one side or the other, then these one-
to-five secondary bars cross the main bar obliquely or perpendicularly.
To conclude I come back to Marshall McLuhan, but to an idea that he never suggested. For him, all
inventions were an extension of a human capacity or capability humans already had. All the representations,
the constructions, probably the stories and mythologies human beings, I mean Homo Sapiens, shared or
10. achieved were done with an intention, a desire, a dream, an objective. All inventions solved a problem and
revealed a teleology. What was the teleology of writing? It was the extension of the teleology of articulated
language. So, what was the teleology of articulated language extended into and by writing?
It had to do with the fundamental existential dimension of humanity. They probably wondered why
they were on this planet, but when alive they just wanted to survive as long as possible. But what was the
destination of this life, and the destination was and still is death, and they identified death as some kind of
extra-natural place. Welcome to Xibalba in Maya civilization and the Death Lords with the representation of
death, named “Kimi,” the generic word for the Twelve Death Lords generally named with the word “came” or
“cham” or “cham-mi” all represented by one or the other of the two glyphs in the next slide. In this approach,
death is the functional teleology of life, and life is the functional tool of death.
ki (ki) (T102) > phonetic sign.
mi/MI (mi) (Tnn) > noun "nothing, zero"; negative marker <> (John Montgomery) Represents a human
head with a hand over the lower jaw.
The prefix is carrying two ternary elements in the dictionary and one in the glyph beneath. The head
is most interesting. Note the three dots on the cheek under the eye. The hand on the lower jaw is an allusion
to one way of putting to death one prisoner or blood-slave in a human sacrifice: the ripping of the lower jaw.
After that, there remains nothing to be said, the absolute loss of language.
SLIDE 15
As McLuhan said, articulated language is the extension of human breathing (laryngeal ability),
articulation (articulatory ability), and Broca’s coordination (mental ability). Writing is an extension of language
(mental ability), eyesight (visual ability), and the hand (manual ability). But, like all human activities, they are
not only the extension of various human capabilities. They also have a teleology, an objective.
The teleology of language is, first, communication and discussion; second, the elaboration,
conservation, and transmission of data in some kind of education; third, the coordination of action, i.e.,
production of goods, management of communal life, migration, or seasonal movements (for resources).
There might be more.
11. The teleology of writing is to leave behind data, knowledge, memory, and history in order to
influence, guide, and command the future and future generations. The future belongs to those who control
the memory, the knowledge, and the communication of humanity, or closer to us as individuals, of a
community, the community we live in.
Writing is a great invention to work on language, produce elaborated texts, to transmit any linguistic
expression of anything to the future generations. What McLuhan had not seen was the present revolution in
communication:
a- social networks and messaging.
b- texts or SMS on telephones.
c- recordings, audio or video, of oral texts and situations, becoming “written” messages
reproducible and broadcastable as much as anyone wants.
They told us these telephones were going to kill communication and the written civilization.
Obviously, there has never been so much communication and it is not in any way more superficial than
before, and a great share of this communication is written not spoken. That develops for many people what
could be called SMS-language and SMILEY-language. The first one is transforming the written – and maybe
oral – form of the language, and the second is purely iconic with real representational smileys (Face
with Medical Mask), but also keyboard-alphanumeric smileys like ლ(´`ڡლ). Don’t ask me what it means.
I don’t speak text emoticons. But the Internet does and this one means “Yummy!”
