Body Language & Banter 89
simplified Chinese. Take a look and normally you will find them to be quite different. Each example in the figure is my best attempt to translate the phrase “Hello Reader” into a script and the corresponding language.
Symbols of the World
English is one of the most irritating script languages of all. It commonly uses etymological elements, showing the history or origin of the word that has nothing to do with the sound of the word. A word like school has the ‘k sound spelt ‘ch, showing its historical derivation from the Greek, but confusing for pronunciation. English has 53 sounds derived from only 26 letters, so there are plenty of letter combinations, many of which are irregular. Because the language favors historical convention over simplicity, sugar is pronounced “shu-gar” whereas sand is strictly phonetic. As for Leicestershire I'll leave that as a test for the American readers amongst you. If you're British, try Mattapoisett, a town in Massachusetts named in Native American.
Yet English is also a ‘lovely’ language. Because of its richness there are often twenty different ways to say something, and a dozen words to choose on any topic. One of my own favorite words is ‘jump% It is phonetic, but also onomatopoeic and even pictographic. Jump both sounds like a jump and looks like a jump.
Two scripts that puzzled scholars for many years are Linear-b and Hieroglyphics. Linear-b — found on clay tablets on the Island of Crete - turned out to be a coded form of ancient Greek with some slight quirks, such as dropping the letter ‘s’ from the ends of words. The ‘s is superfluous in most Greek words, and dropping it saved precious clay space!
Hieroglyphics was a real puzzle. It looks so like a pictographic language that it fooled many people for centuries. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 and became the key to their deciphering. This stone had the same edict written out in 3 languages —- Greek, Egyptian and Demotic. The French adventurer Jean-Francois Champollion decoded hieroglyphics in 1822 and although it Jooks pictographic, it was found to be predominantly phonetic. Linear-a, another script found on the Island of Crete has yet to be decoded and remains one of the world’s great- unsolved mysteries.
All these different ways to code ideas into symbols present the children of the world a great learning challenge. Because written language is so young, in evolutionary terms, our brains have not had enough time to evolve to master it. Instead words co-opt parts of our brains originally
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