The life of people who work with computers is similar to those of ancient scribes. Gradually, this powerful instrument is becoming the convergence point of every non manual activity, and, with the arrival of robotics, there is the risk that even those will be subsumed as well.
Internet offers a fantastic window on the entire world, knowledge becomes incredibly accessible; however, as in the non virtual world, there are places worth visiting and places which you avoid.
It's astonishing if you think to the way human beings started to represent and store knowledge and how the process developed.
I am reading an interesting book by Steven Robert Fischer whose title is "A history of writing". It's very clear, well structured, logically written. From a definition of complete writing and its three distinctive traits follows the story of discovery of writing in Mesopotamy and how from there moved to the rest of the world (the author credits the theory accoding to which writing in China was imported from Europe and from China it probably travelled to the Americas, given the incredible resemblance between chinese and mesoamerican way of modifying and arranging glyphs).
Relationship between phonetics and scripts are explained (e.g. semitic languages have always a consonant at the beginning of a word, at this led greek people to add breathings to an initial vowel when they imported the phoenician alphabet).
It's a good book. Here an excerpt for English readers:
"/θ/ as in thin and /d/ as in this were both written using the single Runic letter /P/, or 'thorn'. Eventually, the letter d was created simply by drawing a line through Latin d - a sophisticated featural distinction. In time, this letter came to be called 'eth'. Scribes still failed to separate the two sounds, however, and so by Middle English a digraph -th- was used for both instead. This we still use today, though graphic th conveys at least two separate phonemes (compare thin and this). Thorn 'p' survives as a cultural remnant in such artificial names as in 'Ye Olde English Inn' in which Y is merely a late mediaeval variant of 'p'"
I am in the process of updating my system (a very time consuming task!), so please do not expect posts this weekend, dear readers.
